🚀 go-pugleaf

You have a book or a document - a work of fiction like Alice in
Wonderland, a movie, the U.S. Constitution and the Federalist Papers,
some Shakespeare - which is available as an etext via project
Gutenberg, Open Book Initiative or some other way; ie, you and
everyone with a network connection can get the work.  You are willing
to read the book but feel that you would benefit from having others to
discuss it with, but none of your local friends are interested and
none of the Usenet newsgroups exactly fit the topic - also, with a
newsgroup you think you would have a problem of people being on
different levels and not committed to reading and discussing the work.
Here are some ideas on how to make UU help you.

1. Calling other interested people

Announce your plan on the UU newsgroups (for example alt.uu.future and
alt.uu.comp.misc) and ask if other people share some of your goals and
are willing and able to use UU and get the work in question.  Gather a
group of people willing to commit to reading it - or at least
refraining from confusing others if they get behind.

2. Negotiating the guidelines

Plan how to discuss and what the "charter" of the discussion will be -
ie. what will be the procedure to accept latecomers, whether there are
specific deadlines, whether there's a specific goal and so on.  There
needn't be lots of red tape and it doesn't matter if the guidelines
change in the process, but some commonly-accepted guidelines will help
to keep the discussion together.

This negiotiation can be done on one of the UU groups - new
participants might come in at this time, some might decide to not go
with the group.  Plan how to use the group - if keywords are used on
subject lines, etc.  Decide whether any requirements are set for each
to do or if it's just free-form discussion, and so on.

3. Proceeding with the study

Proceed as planned, probably changing plans when doing so.  As this is
Usenet (or more exactly altnet), there probably will be some noise -
just ignore the noise or email to people adding to the noise, there's
no point in adding more noise to the group.

4. Make a report on the effort

Write a summary on how the project went.  Descibe weaknesses, what
went wrong, what went well, what would be useful to do in a similar
project laters, what pitfalls to avoid.

//Jyrki