Event #1: Book Group

It took us some time to get our first event organized. We struggled to find a way to launch ourselves into the DJN and what the best approach would be to get started. Eventually, we started reviewing what other nodes and working groups were doing and saw that many began engagement through a book club. We decided to move in this direction. This provided us our first moment where we faltered. Several nodes had created a shared Google document for their book club and although we reached out to borrow the formatting, we realized we had agitated one of the nodes by not explicitly asking for permission. This was our first realization of the power of sharing and communication. We right the wrong by apologizing and creating a new version of the book club documentation, then sharing it with others as a Creative Commons work.

Growing our group was another question we discussed quite a bit. We knew we wanted to build slowly and intentionally, but also that we wanted to grow! Being members of the DJN, we had access to their Slack workspace. That allowed us to have our own channel. People began to find us and within the first few month, we had our first outside member join our core group. Ariel Harlap joined us to help organize the book club and has stayed on as a dedicated group member, helping to plan, organize and support the team in a variety of ways. His work can be seen in the Miro board for the Visioning Session #2 and has been instrumental in the collaborative journal writing piece.

Rubina Singh joined us in the book club and stayed on as a core member as well. She has been a thoughtful partner in the work around the book club, visioning session and now collaborative journal piece.