Blog Post Club

Have you ever tried to start a book club at work? Did it lose steam around chapter 3 of the second book (if you even got that far)? Mine did.

But how should we learn things from our co-workers? How should we keep in touch with what is going on in the industry? How can we apply ideas to our own company?

Our blog post club format evolved as much as was designed, but has worked for us. Throughout the period between the meetings, people propose blog posts for discussion (a public slack channel works well but I could imagine a wiki page, shared public document, or anything which makes it easy to add items). At the meeting (once every two weeks for us), the facilitator asks everyone to vote on which blog post they'd like to discuss and puts the posts in order roughly from most votes to fewest. Someone presents the blog post (most often the person who posted it). The presentation is a summary of what is in the post plus discussion (roughly 5 to 15 minutes per blog post), and we typically get to about three to five blog posts per meeting.

As with any discussion oriented meeting, facilitating it can be harder than it looks, but the focus on blog posts organizes the meeting. Agenda? Based on the posts we have and the votes. Digression onto a tangent? Often handled by saying "that's a great topic, why don't you find a blog post on that subject and post it in the channel for the next meeting". Disagreement between meeting participants? Sometimes can be handled by turning the focus to "the author of this post apparently would have said X". People didn't prepare for the meeting? We don't expect people to prepare and one thing that keeps this manageable is that the ideal blog post isn't too long to read/skim during the meeting itself.

Have you tried this at work? How did it go? Any tips which might help other people start a blog post club at their job?