TL;DR
We’re going to be doing more reading groups! In this post, we explain why and take some steps to organize our next one.
Thank you to @zube.paul, @Ines_Santos_Silva, @Yesh, and @eleventh for putting this reading group together.
Why?
The last reading group organized by @eleventh was a huge success! Over 15 people participated in live discussion and the author came by our community call to talk about the book. (We’re having more discussions on the same book and registration is still open!)
More generally, these reading groups provide a synchronous way for the SCRF community to learn and discuss together. The reading groups should select books or topics that are pertinent to the work we are doing and can help us improve.
These types of discussions often help participants gain a deeper understanding of the material, consider new perspectives, and feel rewarded. They can also provide a way to grow our community by being an inviting space for newcomers to mingle with long-time SCRFers.
Next Steps
- Vote on a book
- Pick the first discussion date (early September)
- Solidify discussion format, facilitator, and forum outputs
Vote!
Three books were selected that should be informative and engaging. Any of these books are excellent resources for gaining a lot of Ethereum ecosystem context quickly.
-
The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum
- This 320 page book tells the story of Ethereum’s founding, with a focus on characters and narrative. It also inspired a movie of the same name. The author, Camila Russo, is a former Bloomberg reporter and founder of DeFi-journalism platform The Defiant.
-
The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
- This 496 page history of Ethereum is a blow-by-blow accounting of key events, including the DAO hack. It’s written by Laura Shin, formerly a Senior Editor at Forbers, and host of the Unchained Podcast.
-
Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts
- This 352 page anthology recounts, learns from, and predicts explorations of DAOs as a channel for creative and social energy. The editors are Ruth Catlow, Director of Furtherfield, and Penny Rafferty, founder of Black Swan DAO. The book includes writings by Nathan Schneider, Kei Kreutler, and many more.
This poll allows voting for multiple books and will be open for 10 days until August 16th. 2022-08-06T04:00:00Z→2022-08-16T04:00:00Z
Which book should we read next?
- The Infinite Machine
- The Cryptopians
- Radical Friends
0 voters
Thank you!
Additional Considerations
Runtime
We’ll need to pick the date of our first session. We want to get started in early September and then run regular sessions to read sections of the book until we have finished it.
For example, we could read a third of the book and meet to discuss every two weeks. Depending on the book, we could do more or less sessions and depending on the group, we could meet weekly or monthly.
An example timeline could be like the below:
- September 6th: Book Part 1
- September 20th: Book Part 2
- October 4th: Book Part 3 and overall thoughts
Format
Each session will have
- A facilitator who is responsible for taking and sharing notes on the reading prior to the session. They should also prepare discussion questions. Example by @eleventh here
- A note-taker who will summarize discussion and post it to the forum. Example by @Muhammad here
As a bonus, we could also have a synthesizer who after book completion summarizes discussion across all sessions and provides some thoughts on lessons SCRF can apply.
Please DM me if you’re interested in taking on any of these roles, would love to hear from you! (ufkhan97#4345 on discord)
Output
All notes should live somewhere on the forum. Each book should have it’s own thread where pre-session and post-session notes can be found.
