A Meta question is generally a good way to run things, that's how we select things on Gaming for example. We select a handful of options and present it with a Meta question.
OK - I thought I read somewhere that there was a limit, but until Literature I haven't really paid much attention to how SE works overall - I've just asked and answered questions without much concern for the 'how' :)
I'm wondering how many people even saw the meta notice
Most of my own reading these days is pretty dry technical stuff
I'm pretty sure I single-handedly paid for Tim O'Reilly's cabin
Although I did come across something interesting last night - Of Dice and Men, a script "about a group of 30-something D&D players, and what happens when one of them enlists to go to Iraq"
I've only read about the first 20 pages, but it seems interesting.
The characters definitely have characteristics recognizable in my social group :)
I grabbed Connie Willis' "Blackout/All Clear" last night, but haven't started them yet. Ah, for that period of my life when I could read every single Hugo nominee every year. :)
Should we focus on a particular genre? Have a series of different genres and vote on a title for each? Or just ignore genre completely and leave it open to whatever?
I've always kind of liked the second approach, as it gets me out of my SF/Fantasy "rut".
I think we should start with a currently popular title to draw interest. For example: the Hunger Games or some such. The upside for me is that I haven't read them. ;)
Wouldn't posting a question be more inclined to indicate interest? You might find a lot of people have already read many of the "currently popular titles."
That could be a way to go - I'm not familiar with it, but the model seems simple enough. Another way to go would be to just post the question "Which book(s) should the book club read?", and take all the submissions that get enough votes (something like 6? 25% of the 18 +1's on the book club question?), then organize them into an order based on popularity.
We also need to decide how often we would meet, and when - for my part, the middle of the US business day like this isn't my favorite :)
I'll do whatever I can to participate regardless, and I understand there are people in all different timezones
So, unless anyone disagrees, I think the next action would be to post the following questions to meta: 1) What books should we read? 2) How often should we meet? 3) When should we meet? 4) Who is "Book Club President"?
Well, that was ideally the intent of the chat meeting but since we only have 3-4 actual Book Peops here, that kinda makes it difficult to properly work on, heh. So aye, I think that covers the Meta post you'll need.
You should have someone who is more vested in the community partake. Outside of Jury Duty wait, I haven't read a book of any sort or cadre for 6 years now.
I think, before we nominate a president, the least we could do for them would be to clearly define their responsibilities. Unless we already have and I've missed it.
The main responsibility is organizing the first 3 points - help run the process to determne the books to read, determine the frequency of the events, and consequently run said events.
@TimN It's not so much an elected position as you just need someone in a sort of leadership role to take charge of the initiative.
Far too many community efforts peter out into nothingness because no one is taking the helm and everyone is waiting on everyone else. Having a guiding leader helps spur things into action.
We are planning on featuring every week the "Top Question" of Super User in the Super User blog. Please post any question that you feel is of worth and the reason why. Try not to promote your own questions or answers for publicity sake. We are looking for questions that are of similar par to t...
So, one of the common ways to deal with a type of question that comes up that isn't appropriate for the site, but is on topic, is to do a chat. I'm curious, is there any interest to do a periodic chat for recommendations? I think it would be quite interesting, maybe to do once a month or so. Thou...
I'm not sure if what you guys are planning is like QotW unless you plan to blog about it, scifi.SE holds chat events to discuss scifi&fantasy material.
@TML well you guys are really fresh, but I got one for Fitness too, so if you have a clear format, it should be possible to arrange
however, I would write the blog post as a digest of whatever you do here in chat. So you first talk about a book or hold something like a recommendation chat for a certain genre, then you summarize things in a blog post
So, one of the common ways to deal with a type of question that comes up that isn't appropriate for the site, but is on topic, is to do a chat. I'm curious, is there any interest to do a periodic chat for recommendations? I think it would be quite interesting, maybe to do once a month or so. Thou...
That might be a good idea, have the meta question decide on the book and schedule a chat for the "book club meeting" part of the club, then post a summary with highlights and quotes on our blog about the club meeting. We could even have a different meeting for each chapter each week.
@IvoFlipse Oh, we do. But then it's only a few regulars. We've had visitors turn up just for the rec chat; most of them were SE employees or moderators from other sites.
@Kalamane Simply have experienced readers play Jeopardy on 'popular' books. They already know the answer, but they simply ask them to point out how awesome the book is. Masked behind content you actually want to see on the site
@Gilles This is a room dedicated to lists/recommendations. Someone proposes a theme, and anyone can suggest works on that theme. After a day or two, we move on to the next theme.
We only started last week, so it's too early to tell if it'll work
@IvoFlipse The intent is to keep people coming regularly or semi-regularly
And also that no matter what time you turn up, you will find something potentially interesting going on. You don't have to be there at the same time as other people.
@IvoFlipse Yeah, I started to do that, but I have trouble with the idea of a "good subjective" question - I guess, to put it another way, the "content [I] actually want to see on the site" doesn't appear to agree with what SE wants on the site; which is fair, it's THEIR SITE. But it's hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm around what someone else wants you to post. :)
The SE people are closing questions that are "duplicates", despite them being on the other site. Note that the question was not cross-posted, it's two different users with slightly different (but effectively identical) questions.
If this site isn't meant to stand alone, is there any good reason...
@IvoFlipse I'm struggling with that. "Expert" readers tend towards discussion, rather than questions. Some of these discussions can be crammed into questions, but not all. And then we have the simple recommendations and such ... it's hard to find a subset here that consists of really good questions.
Proposal: Movies
I'm not saying this proposal should be shut down, I'm just wondering what the purpose of this proposal is. Perhaps I'm just missing something.
When looking at the exemplary questions:
How does the MPAA rate movies? --> regulations/laws
How does 3D work? --> technical questio...
@IvoFlipse We've gotten a couple questions so far that were along the lines of "You can interpret X to be Y, or to be Z. What's right?" Fortunately I think they were better than that -- references to analyses and that sort of thing -- but I can just see the answers tending towards "well I felt like it was X when I read it"
@MatthewRead Well I can live with that (to an extent) but then the answer should be a detailed analysis and not just: because I say so
I'd imagine the best questions would be an advanced type of those you had to answer in school, where the answer is implied by the text, but you won't find a direct answer anywhere
And when you start thinking about why you liked a certain book so much, there's always a plot twist, the way the writer described things or something like that, which probably could be phrased as a Jeopardy question. That way you're effectively 'recommending' others to read the book, if they also like those kind of things
You might also enjoy his "I Am a Strange Loop", reviewed by Scientific American here. I don't think it's particularly "similar in style", but it's trying to address the same underlying theme: what is sentience?
@TML when answering a question like this it would be helpful to summarize the book or something. Now I first have to read a review or Google it to figure out if its any good.
The SE people are closing questions that are "duplicates", despite them being on the other site. Note that the question was not cross-posted, it's two different users with slightly different (but effectively identical) questions.
If this site isn't meant to stand alone, is there any good reason...
Proposal: Movies
I'm not saying this proposal should be shut down, I'm just wondering what the purpose of this proposal is. Perhaps I'm just missing something.
When looking at the exemplary questions:
How does the MPAA rate movies? --> regulations/laws
How does 3D work? --> technical questio...
You might also enjoy his "I Am a Strange Loop", reviewed by Scientific American here. I don't think it's particularly "similar in style", but it's trying to address the same underlying theme: what is sentience?
