Friday, December 30, 2016

establishing some basic rules/patterns for the Project 52 blog

The basic commitment (ill health or other catastrophe excepted) is to post weekly work that is towards a book m/s or performance or exhibition. There's nothing to stop people posting daily (or hourly, or however often), but by joining we commit to posting weekly.

I propose that Project 52 has no facebook presence at all. I see this as a more or less private activity - a much more intimate community of practice than Project 366 was (and will still be for a while). I do think though that using fb messaging for the group is convenient (though if someone can think of something better that would be good).

I think it's important to reduce the public profile because as work travels towards publication we want to minimise the risk of being told work can't be accepted because it's already published. I think this wasn't much of a risk with 366 because most of what we were doing was pretty drafty. But in Project 52 our aim is to make publishable work, so it's really a different story. The less people who see things at this stage, the better.

There are roughly a dozen of us in Project 52 at this point, with maybe one or two or three more invitations that might be responded to. I think this is quite a practical group size. Remembering that our objective is for all participants to give feedback (as desired) to all the others, it's important to keep the numbers down, so that the work of being a community of practice is actually practical. 

Accordingly, I propose that we only expand the group if we can see a new party who would really benefit from and really contribute to the project. I specifically suggest we not join up people simply on the basis that they think they could manage a poem a week. This is not what Project 52 is about.

Reading everyone's metablog feedback for 366 I think it's fair to say that for those of us who made the whole year (touch wood) it was a much bigger (and more important, more rewarding) part of our lives than we had imagined from the outset. So I'm interested to set Project 52 up with the best opportunity to satisfy and to inspire everyone involved.

We're taking on this commitment (to ourselves and to each other) because there's something we believe in here.

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I note also at the outset, that possibly we need to solve some communication issues, because if anyone's not using fb messaging then that could be an issue for letting people know what's happening or needs to happen.  I've made quite a few of you admins to the blog so people can bring their tech competence to solving problems that may arise and making things nicer, smoother. If anyone else wants to be admin please just let me know


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Note that I'm going to pause a while before starting a conversation in poetry (which I think yr all in, from memory)... so as to not overwhelm and to not confuse people... i.e. let's get 52 going first, orright?


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