Blogging with question.club
As part of a new experiment after the death of my dad, my brother Ben and I got together to nerd humbly on tech governance and public ethics. It was a hard day, so I texted in advance to say I hadn’t pre-read and would likely be in gentle dummy mode. He’d had similar concerns. Quickly we decided to keep the meeting but convene it under the warm vibes of a “kind dummies club,” approaching hard things even when brains and bodies were challenged and sore.
While our first club meeting didn’t stick exactly to plan, we ended up flowing with it and starting to exchange and interlink our language sets and existing webs of knowledge to begin building shared maps around the terrain. (At least one of our partners has affably rolled their eyes at this type of behavior, muttering “Here they go: The Goerings are Braining again.”
One of our common lifelong questions is how Kansans (like the kids we grew up as, or members of our families) can bring the heartland values sets we care about to breakneck modern tech development dialogs, like future of AI, or blockchain and decentralized computing. We’ve both become activated on ethics and tech in different ways, but Ben’s interests tend more toward the technical side of sociotechnical systems complexity and mine more toward the socio.
On this gentle, beginner, explorer, body-accepting wavelength, we found it flowed quite easily! We’d started with a vague background notion of Discourse Graphs as a modern citizen science and collaborative, persistent version of mind maps, but the front end of the models Ben had shared looked more to me like the messy systems mapping tools than an Excalidraw in terms of ease.
So we didn’t force a capture medium.
But as we mapped verbally, Ben shared an idea he’d implemented to start getting more good conversations into writing. His site has a blog, and he chatted the link to a blog entry freshly-created that was blank so far, except for the title, which asked simply, “What is ethics?”
My brow furrowed, but then peaked. The skeptic flipped into delight as I found a sense of simple, low-friction brilliance in it. Who cares on the open web anymore if some articles have just a title and no content?
The point, he said, is to start and specify a place where an answer can develop once you’ve found it. First you set the question and the place, then the answer flows in later.
We’ve spent years now playing around with the Zeigarnik effect, so I was gleeful realizing I could put this into motion and decrease the barriers to development of a body of work, just by listing questions with a blank.
All it would cost is the predictive social toll labeled, “Someone might hate me if they click on a question and realize there’s no answer there.” But my inner designer and prototyper quickly wondered, “Hate me — or help me?”
Texting again today, Ben and I found ourselves pointing back and forth at each other’s messages, saying “Oh, that’s a question blog!” Or “There - start a page.”
I typed out a disclaimer to go on new question blogs, and saved it to iPhone Keyboard Text Replacement phrases (one of my favorite tools):
“This page is a placeholder for a forthcoming article, inspired by http://bengo.is. The idea is that by creating a question or short title as an initial placeholder, we can reduce friction for the task of sharing ideas through the open web, and signal easily where conversations with others can help us complete work we intend to develop. If this topic interests you, reach out and let me know the title! Maybe we can each write on our sites to move it forward.”
This blog is my first real “question blog” creation - a short answer to explain question blogs, and potentially inspire or invite more from other folks we know who we love to converse with and would love to codevelop more freely accessible written ideas with. Ben noted that maybe KDC could just become a Question.club where we all get to start empty blogs with interesting questions, and see what fills in later.
Can you imagine? To me it’s such a more simple and generative way of writing.
Grieving our dad, there are so many notes and files we’ve flipped through in the last few months.
But something I wouldn’t mind at all is leaving (or finding) a trail of great questions from someone I loved to get together and learn, ponder or Brain with.
