This is a rework of some notes I put on the RBC6 WUB today. I mulled on it a bit and changed here and there but the core idea still remains on the urgency to address the making of a community manual for how to run a book club. I suggest the manual as a framework to collect, define what the book club is understood as. What I recommend is to document a history of ideas. History of ideas about reading and taking notes as a result of that reading. To contextualize a history it is of two years in the past, of 2019 through '21. A report of engagements, collect the highlights, who did what. Roam development benchmarks could run as a parallel narrative. Roam brought a conversation on rethinking the practice of note-taking. The club tries to sustain the rethinking mandate. The landscape where roam introduced its gospel has quite drastically changed and the focus that was there even in February is not the same now in October. A club community manual also tries to reflect on the various learnings of the project. My interest is also to test if roam as a community can produce collective knowledge together. The organization of the club sessions even though done as a collective is chaired by a single individual, it is still predominantly a singular agenda. Can collective thinking come together to make a knowledge product together is a question I would like to answer with the proposal. Then there is a summary of the four schools of discussion to drive assembling a tentative model, minimum variable product of what and how a Roam Book Club is organized. My publishing work is creating compilations of writings. This too to complete before Tiago brings out his manual a collection of texts sourced from the six sessions held till now. Linking all the ideas together, there is an introduction, roam development timeline, report of all the sessions with subsequent learnings, and finally a recommended organizing toolkit. An annexure will list all the different contributions in the broader #roamcult network.
2020