Experiments with Internet Clubs and Community Digests

If you love creative side projects, working in public, or learning clubs (a la Hyperlink v1!) — we're trying some experiments you'll find interesting.

We're using new and improved Hyperlink Studios to play with internet clubs, where people each work on projects around a given theme, and the group shares regular updates by email.

We want to experiment with combining individual project workspaces with regular rhythms for sharing your work socially.

The social context here is an intimate group of peers — not the internet at large, but others working on similar things — so we can feel comfortable sharing, and stay motivated, at least for a few weeks or months!

We want these clubs to foster feedback and conversation: to be places where we talk about the things we're making & exploring, share inspiration, and hype each other up.

Internet Clubs from Hyperlink

By way of example, we're running three clubs of our own:

• Internet Homesteading: a workshop and garden for people working on personal website projects
• Pedagogical Parents: a reading studio for parents exploring learning and pedagogy, sharing book notes together
• March Handmade Party: a creative challenge where we make something by hand each day in March — sketches, handwritten poems, and more

Please reach out you'd like to join one of these! Handmade Party is open invite — you can join from the "About" page ✨ The others we'd like to keep small and hear from prospective participants first.

The basic format for all of these clubs:

• You make a Hyperlink Space to work on your project
• You update that Space at least weekly
• We send a weekly email digest summarizing what everyone's been up to

Read the descriptions for more detail; they're each a little different in structure, duration, and type of project.

Clubs you'd like to run…?

We'd love to hear if you're interested in running an internet club like this. For this experiment, we'd expect you as a facilitator to:

• Invite people to participate (as many as you like)
• Set up the Studio (description + example Spaces as needed)
• Send a weekly email digest of the club's activity

We're open to ideas / variations on this theme, or related ways you'd like to use Studios for clubs, cohorts, or communal gatherings.

Propose a club idea here & we can chat more!

Studios are ready to use now, but if you're interested in an internet club experiment, we'd like to talk further to learn more about what you need, help get you set up, and better prioritize what we build next.

How it Works

Here's more detail on the internet club format we have in mind. This is an experiment, and will evolve, but we think it's a good starting point.

1. Studios: homes for a group to collect activity across many projects; places for parallel play where we each work on our own projects in a shared environment
2. Spaces: where each participant keeps notes, updates, and anything related to what they're exploring
3. Participants: are active in their Space, sharing updates on a regular cadence, e.g. daily or weekly (no lurkers!)
4. Facilitators: set up the club, invite members, and send email updates on the chosen cadence, summarizing everyone's activity

These email digests should serve as reminder both to check out what others have been working on & share your own updates. For example:

We'll start by sending these emails manually. If it works well we'll explore how to build this into the app to work automatically.

We think it's worth experimenting with some variations here, including different cadences and update formats. Clubs will likely work best with some defined scope (e.g. lasting a month, not forever) but some might be good as, say, seasonal sprints. Ours range from a month to a quarter.

If this seems fun to try, here's the link again to propose a club:

Propose an idea for an internet club!

Look forward to your ideas :)