In 2024 we hosted a reading group around one reading:
There was interest in making this a regular thing: Future Reading Group
Below find steps and ideas for how you can set-up, plan, and facilitate the call for a reading group:
1. Gauge interest, collect reading suggestions and find a time
- Post about it here in the member discourse on General Discussions and on the fediverse with the hashtag #CoSocialReads
- Once a few other people have said they are interested and/or you have a general sense of the text
2. Schedule and make a reading plan
- We have a availability scheduler you can use to help you find a time. You can create a poll (or use your own preferred service) and ask others to pick the times that work best for them
- Once you have a time, create an event on luma and submit it to our shared calendar: https://lu.ma/cosocial ask @dawn or one of our Luma admins if you don’t have an account or need support
- Considerations for scheduling:
- You may want to break it into multiple sessions if the reading is a whole book
- The first call is a good time to check-in on how much people can read and how frequently to meet
- Good length is usually 60-90 minutes depending on the type of book, size and energy of the group
- Typical frequencies range from every 2-4 weeks
3. Facilitate the calls
Here are some tips to facilitate the call:
- Before the session:
- Have read and thought about the texts
- Identify and write out 3-5 “themes” or questions you are interested in from the readings
- Prepare a place to take notes (it could be a separate document that you share a link for, or just setting up an agenda / thread on this discouse)
- During the session:
- Arrive on time
- Ask for someone to take notes
- Can start with an open round to see what people thought, use the themes you prepared or ask people about themes/questions they have
- Keep time and gently wrap us up
- (If rotating facilitators) ask for someone to volunteer to lead the next one
- After the session:
- Copy the notes to the members discourse
Note: @dawn amended and modified notes from a previous online reading group, Reading Data Together for this section which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.