Idea - Start an online book reading club on the subject of Humane Technology

Focus Education program
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I’m in the middle of reading his new book, released yesterday: Jaron Lanier’s new book “Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”,

And I’m finding it excellent. Are others reading it? Thoughts?

I’m also wondering if we might want to create some sort of online book group to read these kinds of books together? All ideas welcome.

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Love this idea of creating an online book group.

Another book we could discuss: Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath.

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Data and Goliath looks great - i’ve just reserved a copy at the library.

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All Jaron Lanier’s books are great and insightful. I like Who Owns the Future? best.

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I am always interested in what Jaron Lanier has to say on things. Had no idea he had a new book coming out, but I will definitely look into it.

I would be in for joining a book club focused on humane tech topics. Let me know how I can join if you manage to get one started!

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Love that idea of a “humane tech” online book club, @khkey!

One useful part about in-person book clubs is that the meeting serves as a deadline to actually finish reading the book… and then there is a real-time synchronous conversation that happens.

Has anyone participated in an effective online book club? How might this forum facilitate it?

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Bringing this thread back to life – still curious about this idea of a humane tech online book club.

Anyone else interested in that idea?

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I think it is a great idea :slight_smile:

We have a ton of great book references on this forum, but - while a forum topic is a good way to have general discussion on book contents - the forum is not the best suited for a well-oiled online book review club.
While a dedicated web application would work best, we have to “row with the oars we have” (a Dutch saying) and - for now - use the tools that are available to us.

How to make this work? My 2 cts:

First the goal of the book club:

Review books on humane tech topics, summarize them, rate them, extract valuable ideas and insigths from them, and finally promote them accordingly to the broader public

The tools we have to our disposal: this forum, Github projects, the CHT wiki, Meetup and both CHT and members’ social media channels…

  • Discuss - Using the forum and Meetup.com
    • Forum with topics named ‘Book review - [title], [author]’ and label ‘book-review’
    • Forum topics in their own (sub)category, or under appropriate subcategory under ‘Awareness’
    • Organize Meetups to meet face-to-face, if there is enough interest (or agenda item in existing meetups)
  • Plan & Review - Use a Github ‘book-reviews’ repository
    • Use the issue list for a backlog of books and books-under-review (review in progress)
    • Use a planboard to schedule book reviews, assign work and track progress
    • Collect results of review, compile/improve review text, prepare follow-up (e.g. blog post, social media)
  • Publish - Use the CHT wiki
    • Add the review to appropriate review section, update book review ToC
    • Closes the review activity on Github. Further edits/discussion/improvements occur on wiki + forum (additional discussion)
  • Promote - Use CHT and personal social media channels
    • Promote yourself (e.g. write blog post), promote CHT (mentioning), promote book authors (reward for review, attract attention)
    • Prepare promotion on github after as part of after-review work
      PS. I have edited the topic title and the post by @khkey to better present the idea to the community…
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To give an example of how the project in Github may look like, I have done the following:

Created the CHT github organization (long overdue):

Created the repository for the project:

Created the issue for the book that started this thread: https://github.com/humanetech/humanetech-book-reviews/issues/1

Created a project board with this book issue in the first column: https://github.com/humanetech/humanetech-book-reviews/projects/1

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This is a great idea and a great way to educate ourselves on the topic of humane tech! Count me in…hopefully we can figure out the logistics of it all.

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Happy to assist with whatever organizational or administrative work is required.

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Love that plan @aschrijver! So first we need to decide on the reading list and which books to tackle first?

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Oh! And do we all want to read the same book at the same time and discuss? Or do we want to “divide and conquer” and each choose different books and report back to each other?

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The Humane Technology reading lists thread contains a number of good candidates. We can go from books with most likes, create a list on the forum, or issues in github.
Then whenever there is a large enough group for one book to do a review, we can plan and start it up.
Can be multiple books in parallel, I think, as long as there are people willing to participate on each.

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