Ok I am taking the liberty on putting some thoughts & rules for the 'Book club' idea that appreared in Kent Tegels post yesterday and this was my dream project for a long time. To have anything like this going for a long time and to make is successful there have to be some simple and basic rules. I am just putting these thoughts as they come in my mind and is my perception on the topic. Any suggestions are most welcome. Here is what I think:-
- All these thoughts are based on the fact that we are going to use a blog to manage and maintain the “book club“
The concept of 'Book Club':- The whole idea of 'Book Club' or a 'Usergroup' is where people come together, to gain and share knowledge and to share their point of views on a given subject. People do this by coming together, selecting a topic and then finding the best book to which most people agree and then going away for a certain pre decided period to read the come.After the period is over people come back together, share their notes, knowledge,opinions and any other resources they might have found useful while reading on the topic.
Benefits:-
- People get the chance to meet/chat with like minded people, who are interested in the same topic
- People get to share and gain knowledge from other people participating
- Different people read and interprete the same thing differently, so people can share that information
- A pool of information is created
- There is a peer force, which motivates to get a thing done in this case, finish reading a book which otherwise might take months or years to finish off
- The notes, opinions and knowledge shared can become a knowledgebase and can be referred by others in the future
Idea on how a book club can work on a blog system:- OK this is purely a simple idea. We start up a blog.We create a list of categories like .NET, Windows 2003, Perl, Security, Certification etc. Under a given category for a given month people start recommending different books on different topics that they want to read in that month (may be a limit should be set on how many concurrent books should be allowed or some other rule to manage it better). After giving the options of books available on a given topic, people collectively decide which book to read. People then select a start and a finish date based on lenght and content of the book and a blog entry is to be created for this.Now people can go and start reading the book and from time to time come and make comments on how they are going with the book and if they found something interesting. At the end of the time allocated , people reading a selected book come together, share their notes, opinions and whatever. Once that's over, they go and decide anothe topic, another book and start over the whole process again.
I know it is fairly vague, but if more interest is there we can refine the whole process and create a good document on this.Waiting for some feedback.
Tejas Patel