I think this forum would be a perfect place to host an asynchronous SourceCred book club! Here’s how I think it could work:
Check the “Book Club” category (todo: create this category) to see if your book already has a topic. If you see it, skip to step 3. If not, continue to step 1.
Create a new topic under the (as-of-yet not created “Book Club” category) with the Book title as the Topic Title.
In the Topic Body explain why you think the book is pertinent to SourceCred. Economics? Futurism? Fantasy? Great! If it has details or themes that are pertinent to this community and/or the project we want to learn about it. Feel free to get creative with the markdown and other formatting tools available here (especially the Spoiler syntax This is a spoiler[spoiler]This is a spoiler[/spoiler] or the details expansions to collapse especially lengthy tangents or subtopics).
If you already see a topic for the book you want to discuss, open it up and add to the discussion! We want to hear your perspective, and would love to hear about any unique insights you’ve gleaned!
Yes! When you say asynchronous, do you just mean that we asynchronously decide on books to discuss syncronously on discord voice chat? Or are we just having async discourse threads?
My thinking was that this would be a kind of meta-reference for all time, so ideally all asynchronous discussion is captured within discord topics. This isn’t to say that synchronous discussion should be discouraged at all. It definitely has it’s own place and can yield insights that async formats can’t. But it’d be awesome if we could capture gems from synchronous discussions in the forums as well somehow. maybe we treat these synchronous discussions as a podcast-like format with Craig, our recording bot?
The reason I proposed async in discourse is because it would very elegantly serve two purposes:
It would allow us to essentially cite the resources that have shaped our practices and goals or at the very least, the minds of the project contributors, while also…
Providing a place to discuss these resources as well.
I think Discourse is a great platform to lay out deeper references and discuss them because it’s more organized than discord, and also easy to search by topic or category, and I want to enable new contributors to get up to speed faster.
If we have the practical and ideological foundations of the project and community laid out for all interested, it’ll help newcomers figure out if this is a good place to spend their time more quickly, and it’s also inline with our “public by default” rule. Additionally, it’ll allow us to quickly link to a post for a book when it comes up in discussion on discord, which is great shorthand since it’ll link to a summary of the book and why it’s important to at least one of us, while also providing a preexisting community discussion which could provide greater context.
Got it. Not really what I think of when I imagine a book club, but could be valuable. Actually, I’ve been meaning to write a post basically doing what you’re describing, laying out some references to books, podcasts, etc. that have shaped my core philosophies around SourceCred (and led me here in the first place).
I do like the idea of chatting synchronously on voice channel too. Perhaps we could record a “podcast” of our conversations and just post the audio to the thread in case anyone wants to hear the convo. We could host the audio on our official podcast if we want, which will be automatically broadcast on Spotify, Apple music, a couple other platforms.
Actually, if you haven’t heard these yet, the last episode we did was an interview with @wchargin, which I imagine would be especially interesting to anyone working on the codebase.
If we can “deep link” to the timestamps for relevant books this would be perfect. For the sake of organization and discoverability (and readers’ time) I’m very into the idea of partitioning each topic by resource
I think it would be really interesting to do the recording … love the idea of displaying the web of thoughts from SourceCred’s contributor & how amazing they (we) are!
