Introducing Open Book, a pilot event series by Open for Product

I'm working on developing an audience for Open for Product through a few different pilot initiatives.

The testing and experimentation through these pilots will give me some good feedback on whether the framework I'm trying out for Open for Product projects is workable.

My current experiment is testing ideas like incompleteness, and partial contribution: Open for Product is intended to support "unique professionals". This is a phrase I use to denote a person contributing professionally who may not easily fit into a typical commercial enterprise role. I like to say users can "create the work environment that works for them". Part of that is accommodating people who come and go in their project work, and celebrating process as much as—or more than—visible progress or deliverables.

In order to codify ideas like this into Open for Product more broadly, I hope to cement some design patterns that can be applied across different initiatives.

My first pilot, Open Book, is a facilitated event series that I think utilizes these two principles well:

1. incompleteness - the whole point is actually that the book, even when it is publishable, is unfinished. But beyond that, each Open Book event is intended to capture content for just the next part, or a part of the books we'll be working on.
2. flexibility - as of now, the sales page for Open Book tickets states that tickets can be used for any Open Book event! (once they are scheduled)

Here's a more detailed look at an Open Book event (I've also published a more detailed look at the Open Book box set—the intended eventual printable version of the Open Book content here):

Open Book provides a rough scaffold; the community brings their perspective: their words, their art, their ideas, their questions. And we (optionally) share it as a forked version that can be pulled into the canonical book series.

We won't throw out the pieces that get modified; we version it, fork the content with new contexts. And we develop this together.

Eventually, the whole box set will be ready to be published. But not just one. We'll have snippets from communities that contributed together, versions that each reflect their own time and place, and the people that contributed.

Each event in the Open Book series produces a unique set of content that survives, even as subsequent events refine the content that's been produced while they introduce more.

I hope you'll follow along here as I provide updates on how this goes.