1729 Writers Cohort 1 Recap

We produced over 60 papers in six weeks. Takeaways from 1729 Writers successful first cohort and thoughts for the future

This is essay 6 of 6 for 1729 Writers Cohort #1. Apply to 1729 today at 1729.com

Cohort 1 is completed! And when I peruse our paper.li I can’t help but be very impressed by our collective accomplishment.

We attracted some 22 members and over the last six weeks have produced nearly 70 articles on subjects like Pseudonymity, Luck, Transhumanist Politics, Media Manipulation, The Personal Dashboard, the Environmental Case for Bitcoin, On-chain Credentials Replacing College Degrees, How Video Games will Save the Future, Being a Sovereign Individual among many, many others. Find a full list of our articles on our Paper.li.

Not only did we produced a mountain of material, but we’ve also generated content for the new Newsletter.

Indeed, as Balaji has stepped away temporarily to finish his book, one of the things he told us we can focus on as a community is generating content. And when we step back and look at what the 1729 Writers Cohort 1 accomplished, that is exactly what we’ve done!

In this essay, I seek to take stock of how our cohort did and give some thoughts on where 1729 Writers might go, as well as what we may focus on for Cohort 2 in June. First I’ll review some goals I set at the beginning, compare them to our outcomes, and try to generate some learnings and strategies for improvement.

The goals I set were in a piece called 1729 Writers and the Creation of Culture.

Our hope was that 1729 Writers would help three groups: the Writers themselves, the wider 1729 Community, and the Wider World.

Writers:

We hoped the 1729 Writers would help writers overcome hurdles and publish by providing a schedule, due date, and some social pressure by having us publish in public. This was moderately successful. It definitely helped some people be more productive but many still did not submit regularly. Our submission rate was probably somewhere around 60% of the goal. I think the way to help people write more regularly next time around will be a mix of clearer goal setting at the beginning, personal outreach throughout, fun incentives like NFTs, and maybe even financial incentives (more on those later).

We hoped the group would make us better writers by providing feedback. We came up with a “cohort model” where people were split into one of three groups, each of which had a side chat where in-depth feedback was supposed to be shared. Ultimately, this barely occurred. Some feedback was given but it was sporadic and the breakout threads were’t really utilized. This was probably due to a mix of unclear expectation setting and writer exhaustion. But we want to think long and hard about how to make sure that writers are getting feedback. One way might be asking members of the wider 1729 community to “volunteer” to read 2–3 pieces a week for the duration of the cohort and offer feedback. Perhaps they’ll do it out of the kindness of their heart, or maybe we can offer them something.

Lastly, we hoped that the experience would help members network in the industries of their interest. I’m not sure what everybody’s experience was, but I didn’t get the sense that much of this went on. My feeling is that this is because we didn’t focus nearly as much on our personal distribution as we could have. This was a miss, but we didn’t have a clear intention going in, and there was too much going on once the program was in-flight. Whereas the focus of this cohort beyond writing was finding a place to host our stuff collectively, I think personal and group distribution will be a big focus of the next cohort. People should be heavily encouraged to post their piece in a second location beyond their personal site as well as better utilizing twitter. They should seek to get the work in front of their communities, both personal and professional, and the program should provide a framework that makes that easier. This was suggested, but was never really an expectation. We’re usually pretty exhausted each week after posting, but in many cases we’d be better off with essays that are ¾ the length, and read by 5x the people, which is quite possible if we spend the time.

1729 Community

We had the goal of generating a little culture both among the group and in the wider 1729 community. We definitely made headway with the former through our weekly calls. Our best attended weekly calls took place when we had a presenter. Camellia presented to a dozen Writers on Mastering your personal Monopoly (she starts at 13:20). r4bbit.eth also came by and gave us tips on how he started a publication with tens of thousands of readers. This information from within the community was extremely engaging and useful, and we will definitely focus on calls in the next cohort.

We’d hoped that the writings could also provide a sense of culture to the wider 1729 community. I would say we did so/so on that front. The Paper.li experiment helped community members get a sense of each other, but we didn’t achieve much engagement from the wider community. Near the end, we started to experiment with Reddit as a means of bringing in more interaction, but we decided it was too late in the program to start something new and set it aside. Completing that Reddit experiment will be a focus in the future.

There was a hope that 1729 Writers would provide a place where members could level up. My feeling is that we achieved a basic version of this — i.e. if they came and wrote, read, and provided feedback they did learn and grow somewhat. But I would hope that we’re able to provide more in the way of specific guidance next time around to help writers achieve more specific goals.

Finally, we hoped this would help the 1729 community engage with Network State ideas and build bridges between these ideas and their cultures and fields. Many of the writers did grapple with a broad array of ideas close to 1729, so I would call that a success. But, at the risk of repeating myself, we need to continue to build bridges into the 1729 community and the wider world, possibly through a platform like Reddit.

The Outside World:

A goal of benefit to the outside world was to shine a light on our society’s present situation and offer solutions. My personal feeling is that this is a complete and total homerun. Looking through the Paper.li is like browsing a section of a bookstore called “a looking glass into the future,” full of topics like Web3, DAOs, Transhumanism, Digital Nomadism, Sovereign Individualism, Bitcoin, and on and on. As a challenge, we should send the paper.li to our “normie” friends and see what they think. I imagine that they will see it as a place to demystify a lot of buzzwords and concepts that they’ve heard about, and I consider that a great victory.

The Future:

Our next cohort isn’t until June, so we’re stepping into a new period. The truth is, we don’t know exactly what the 1729 Writers is going to look like in the interim. But we have some cool ideas.

We know Jon wants to experiment with NFTs which will open up a whole new chapter for the group. At first it might just be POAPs like we get for lectures, but could eventually lead to monetization of our work and profit sharing. Although the economic impact of this might be small at the beginning, it will be a super interesting learning experience and I’m sure will lay the groundwork for some very exciting endeavors in the future.

We’ll be supporting the Newsletter with Network State related content, and will be receiving guidance from Jon and Balaji on what kind of content they’d like to see. These two factors should provide some nice focus for the group.

I would love to see us start to play with rewards for good content, whether that’s funded by 1729, or even crowdfunded by us. Neodaoist and I had a deep conversation in a small group last week about a scheme where we get 1 ETH together at the beginning of the cohort and split a fraction every week between the winning author, active cohort members and a little admin fee (for marketing, perhaps). All of these details are up in the air at present, but rewards could provide a fun and rewarding mechanism to incentivize quality and participation.

Lastly, we should make collective support easier — specifically in the form of Twitter engagement. This might seem paltry, but there are >20 of us (and many more 1729ers). If we could find an easy way for each of our papers to start out w/ a dozen likes, that could make a pretty huge difference. This could probably be accomplished with just a simple group and / or a hash tag.

Now it’s the off season, so let’s celebrate a job well done. Congratulations to everyone who participated! See you in #Writers.

Shout out to all members of Cohort #1:

@grant_nissly, @linggih_ngurah, @Matt_Harder, @colemanfoley, @jim_nomad_, @0x_aeon, @slothman0330, @_AbhisekBasu, @BerkeleyWanner, @mordred2300, @adithyarowi, @neodaoist, @null_space, @ADssx, @jwadejeremy, @edsgoode, @giuachino, @nptacek, @mitrajoydeep, @Camelliayang, @hackerm0m, @Schemer1729, @Clavisishere

Special Thanks to Grant Nissly, who provided a ton of infrastructure from his Tech Progressive writing program, co-lead and kept the community on pace and on task throughout. It would have been impossible without him. Looking forward to cohort 2, brotha!

Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he guides cities in re-building their civic infrastructure by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government collaborate to build public projects. He is a passionate Bitcoiner. Follow him on Twitter.