End of Book Club and What's Next?

The first Obsidian Book Club I hosted, on Graeber and Wengrow’s recent book, The Dawn of Everything, is about over. We’ve concluded our six weeks of discussion of the book. Will have one more meeting next week to talk about the Obsidian vault and how that worked for people.

My initial thought about that is I think I demonstrated that Obsidian can be used as a shared space for people to collaborate and share ideas. We did spend a bit of time at the beginning negotiating over what the vault would look like, how it would be structured, and what types of content we would discuss. I tried to let that develop a bit organically, which had its benefits and costs. On the benefit side, people like Maggie Delano added features like the change log that everybody, myself included, found super useful. So the vault was better because people with more experience or different experience from mine were able to contribute. OTOH, There was a lot of initial monkeying around with the look and feel of the vault, which a lot of people felt was a bit off-putting. It was occasionally confusing to open the vault and find oneself in a different place. I think in the future I’ll say that the vault format is relatively set, as far as aesthetics goes, but if people have enhancements they want to suggest, they should suggest them (just not unilaterally change the settings).

There was also some confusion about the scope of the club’s activities. This was my fault for not specifying things in more detail on the front end. At least a few of people really wanted to talk about note-taking quite a bit more than we ended up doing. Some tried to add content related to their study of note-taking and knowledge management. In one case, a user began adding so much content that it was almost as if he was trying to insert a note-taking course into the vault. I challenged him on the relevance of some of his posts to the themes we were discussing in the book. He took down a bunch of posts (I did not ask him to do that) and then I think sort-of quit the club. Again, as I said, I think this is mostly my fault for not saying something much more definitive at the start about what folks should focus on. Or, to put it more democratically, get consensus on what we were doing. If we had already gotten into the habit of folks contributing content into personal folders within the vault, that might have gone better.

I suspect that a bunch of people who came expecting much more focus on notes and obsidian maybe didn’t participate in the Zoom meetings because we focused A LOT on the book. I’m not sure how much time the people who did not attend the meetings may have spent in the vault. Some folks seem to have added pages there, others may have just looked at what was being done.

The vault and notes focus is one of the reasons I’m thinking about doing a February book club that looks at Ahrens and Luhmann. A couple of people have said they’re interested in this. Not enough yet to make a go of it. So I’ll wait a bit longer and see, I guess. One of the things that would be different about this February thing is it would be a bit more about me showing my own workflow, people doing workflows in their personal folders, and then discussing those in the meetings. The texts would lend themselves to that, since the topic would be the same, rather than the note-taking being totally separate as it was in the case of the Dawn.

But, since this would not be a club in which I’d be reading a NEW book on my reading list, I’ve also been thinking of it a bit as a course. Something I would be providing more structure to, leading discussions rather than just participating in them. Trying to meet some goals about the content we discussed, the points I highlighted from the text, the techniques I demonstrated, etc. So when I announced it I said I was planning to get my own version of Zoom and asked people to kick in a bit ($25) toward that.

It’s possible there aren’t that many people that are interested in that to the point they’re willing to contribute (subscribe, pay for it, whatever). That’s okay. I’d also be happy to do another more “peer to peer” style of book club like the previous one, where we read another book on my list. I don’t necessarily want to pigeon-hole myself as being ONLY interested in Graeber, but I really wouldn’t mind taking a look at The Utopia of Rules, or even another pass through Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I read a year or so ago but haven’t really processed yet. Reading these with a group would be something I’d be willing to do, and I wouldn’t feel so much like I’d need to buy an instance of zoom to do this as I would if I was “facilitating a course” outside my regular job.

So if people could give me some feedback about which they were more interested in doing, that would help me decide. My preference, I think, is to do something that’s a bit more like a “course”. Where the vault is a little more structured and preset, based on some of the practices that seem to have worked this time. And where the reading, discussion, and even some presentations by me would be more oriented around the note-taking process. If people want to join the next group, there’s a link in the video at 9:36 that will take you to another video with the details.