Hiya, I just read this new newsletter from Ink'n'Switch: https://www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/dispatch-001/ And it says:

Solo independent researchers we know often discuss the challenge of working alone. Being part of a research group can create community, social accountability, provide feedback, and just give you someone to talk to when you’re feeling stuck or bored. This is why we started our Researchers-in-Residence program.

Which made me think "this could be something we set up in FoC!" And then I came right here to say that, without thinking it through any further...

I have no idea if this would work out in practice, but we have little to lose in trying out the idea!

Timezones in display name has slight problem: punctuation is not allowed (ie +1 does not compute here).

Oh, I thought just the names without the numbers; anyway, "-" works, so just wrap around! 🤣

Really....amazing isn't it. So just the full name then...

Not sure if it helps, but you can see someone's local time by looking at their profile

> Not sure if it helps, but you can see someone's local time by looking at their profile Aha! Well spotted! Can't believe I didn't spot that! It is kinda tucked away, in my defence! Although now I know about it, it looks HUGE! 😄

hah, basically never anything crunchy. but it did occur to me too that a mic picking up eating noises might be bit of an issue

OK, well pending @Ivan Reese’s input I think we may have enough interest to at least try something here.

As someone currently working at I&S, let me add some detail about how the researcher-in-residence program works. They invited 3 researchers. One of them dropped out from the program when they joined a research lab. (Hey wait — that was me!) The other two researchers work highly independently. But, when they write a new note, or record a demo video, they share it in a private I&S discord channel so that other folks at the lab can offer feedback. These researchers also sometimes join the weekly Monday+Friday staff calls so they can briefly share what they're up to, just to keep the rest of the lab up to date. The residence is not paid, and the primary benefit (so far) is that you get to use the lab staff as "study buddies" so to speak. In short, it's basically like a smaller, less casual version of what we already do with #devlog-together, #two-minute-week, and #share-your-work. There's no always-on video calls that people drop in and out of. There's no obligation for anyone at the lab to give feedback. Quite the opposite — it's an opportunity for these researchers to write a regular series of short notes, and record short demos, and share them with a small group of other people who have enough context to be able to offer valuable feedback if they have any. It entirely depends on the researchers putting in the extra effort to make their work legible, interesting, and quickly digestible (which is good practice). It depends on the researchers having the free (unpaid) time to do all this work. All that being said, if a small group of you would like to commit to each other that you'll regularly communicate your work in a way that makes it legible and quickly digestible, I'd be happy to spin up a channel for it. It'd be a dedicated space where you'd share and discuss your work with each other, and the rest of the community could sort of observe at a remove and perhaps toss in a bit of feedback if they ever had any.

All I said was, quoting: > Solo independent researchers we know often discuss the challenge of working alone. Being part of a research group can create community, social accountability, provide feedback, and just give you someone to talk to when you’re feeling stuck or bored. This is why we started our Researchers-in-Residence program. And: > We could set up a #researchers-in-residence channel and drop by to chat, but primarily we'd need a regular video thing either all of us or 121. So I'm a bit confused about your very long comment - I was just asking if you thought my idea was a runner! I'm picking up that it wouldn't be all that welcome overall.

You can find a description of all the channels in our handbook: https://futureofcoding.org/member-handbook#channels

Again, your reply is confusing to me. I wasn't asking for a description of the three channels, I was pointing out the fact that they seem (as a fairly regular visitor to the site who has some experience of their actual content and find the names quite familiar now) conceptually close to the point of overlap. (And I doubt there are many handbook surfers here - it's like reading the instruction book or agreeing to the Ts&Cs, most just wing it.) So I was arguing down my own suggestion of yet another channel and throwing out the opposite idea, to consolidate them, (not that I actually thought that was a particularly good idea). So my posts are capitulation to the resistance. I don't think there's much more to say on the topic, now.

Can we take a look at how their effort is going now? I love this idea, but I have also struggled to implement something like it that could be self sustaining in anyway

Happy to answer questions, though @Lu Wilson might also want to weigh in, since they're now also doing a research residency at I&S.

hey it's going great for me. the main appeal for me is that I get feedback on my work from people in the field with massive amounts of experience and credibility. Normally I just get "it's amazing" or "it sucks" so it's helpful to get something more fine-grained from the experts. it's also been excellent practice for giving talks and demos. I've done four internal ones so far and learned a lot from it. It's a "tough crowd" compared to what I'm used to, and it's a valuable challenge for my work and career It's an additive thing - not a replacement for other communities. I've shared my 'ink & switch' work here in this slack, on mastodon, on twitter, on discord communities, on hackernews (a vile website), in DMs, and on video calls with other people who work in this space. I gain different things from each place Hope that helps shed some light on it, let me know if you have any questions