I am in the process of creating two big new projects. Both are well underway, with lots of things you can check out right now.
One is a Social Justice, Minus Dogma Online Course & Community, which lives at www.sjmd.space.
This was the result of asking people on IPM if it was something they’d want, and having (now) thousands of people reply “Yes!” I’m creating the project in the spirit of a MOOC, but with a lot of twists and turns in response to the delicate – and potentially nuclear – nature of our subject.
I’m designing/coding the whole thing using a lot of open source software and elbow grease. I’m building the course infrastructure with Wordpress, the community will live on a custom Discourse server, and the portal to find the thing is built with Hugo (like this site). I’m writing the curriculum with the help of input from several lovely humans.
My goal is to create a space where we can talk through issues of social justice dogma, and plot a path forward toward equity.
The second project is called Facilitator Cards, which lives at www.facilitator.cards.
These are a collaboration with Meg Bolger (like a lot of the work I’m most proud of), and they’ll be a physical deck of cards for facilitators (not their participants). They’re cards we’ve been using for a few years now for facilitation planning, improvising, and responding to the needs of our group. This project will be releasing them publicly, and making them fancier (and more sustainable).
For that, most of the work I’ve been doing is design (of the cards themselves, as well as the website and collateral), coding (the site is also built on Hugo), and sourcing the manufacturer and full production chain. The cards themselves are written by Meg and me collaboratively, and we have lots of hopes for the community we might create.
While these two projects might, on their face, seem like they couldn’t be more different, there’s actually a lot of overlap.
Both projects will be:
- Open source,
- Uncopyrighted, and
- Offered as a gift from me in the hopes of helping to improve the world, and people’s experiences in it.
I’ve also been using the Facilitator Cards to help create the SJMD course, and will be using what I learn from the SJMD community to co-create the FC community with Meg.
SJMD should be ready for the public by the end of this month (April 2019). And Facilitator Cards will be open for pre-order sometime in the next few months.
All of that makes this /now update more of a then & now update, but I didn’t want to say too much too soon and spoil my progress.
Beyond those two big updates, I’ve been writing and publishing several times a week (on my blog, It’s Pronounced Metrosexual, and other places), and my plan is to keep that up for the next few months at least.
And I’m still getting bossed around.
<3 sK