On August 5, 2020 I received an email that started like this:
Welcome to [[**Roam Book Club**]] If you are receiving this email, it means you have already been given editor access to the Roam Book Club graph. You can start to add your notes on this week's book, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas already.
Today is 8 months since I joined the Roam Book Club, and I would like to write a few things about what makes this community special.
Community, community, community.
Charles Vogl introduces the term "community" as a "a group of individuals who share mutual concern for one another's welfare" and encourages leaders to build communities that "make people (including you) stronger, happier, and full of well-being".
I meet my fellow book club members every weekend. Every meeting gives me a boost of energy and ideas for the following week, I do my best to support the community with what it needs, and I feel that other members do the same.
We learn from each other not just during the weekly calls, but in between the meetings by reading and writing in a shared Roam Research graph.
Multiplayer Roam
This is going to take a moment to explain. There is a new application called Roam Research, a note-taking app for networked thought. I will write about why and how I use it some other time.
Roam Research has databases of notes, each of those databases is called a graph. If a graph is used by one person, it is used in a "single-player mode", if a graph is used by multiple people, it is used in a "multiplayer mode".
The team behind Roam Research started the Roam Book Club as an experiment for the multiplayer use of Roam. The first book club RBC1 was a success, and then the experiment continued in RBC2, and then RBC3. Each book club pushes the capabilities of the platform to it limits. E.g. at the start of RBC2 more than 1700 people signed up, and 200 joined the kick off call and edited the same graph at the same time. Performance was not good. It got better a few weeks later.
We read and we write
At some point between RBC2 and RBC3 someone said that Roam Book Club is a "book club for writers". There is a lot of writing that happens between the meetings:
At some point between RBC2 and RBC3 someone said that Roam Book Club is a "book club for writers". There is a lot of writing that happens between the meetings:
- Daily prompts in the graph
- Your own notes
- "Book map" summaries
- Commenting on other member's writing in the graph.
I love that RBC pushes me to write more and get better in writing.
RBC4 is coming
The next iteration of the Book Club is coming this week. There will be two groups: one for new members reading "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens and learning how to do Zettlekasten in Roam Research. And then the other group reading "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I will be in that group.
If you would like to join, let me know and I will send you an invite link.
Thanks for reading,
Alex
Alex
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