On my quest to learn as much as possible about the IndieWeb I stumbled across the concept of a “Homebrew Website Club” (HWC for short). Back in the 2000s there were meet-ups called “Webmontage” pretty much wherever I went in Austria where mostly bloggers and early social-media folks came to talk about the latest topics related to the web, blogging, or social media.
HWCs sound somehow similar to this but with more focus on working on your personal website as part of the IndieWeb:
Homebrew Website Club is a bi-weekly meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, designing their own website, in the same structure as the classic Homebrew Computer Club meetings. — IndieWeb.org
Looks like quite a few groups also don’t just exchange ideas - as is common with other meet-ups I’ve been to in the past - but also actively collaborate on projects during the bi-weekly/monthly/insert-your-interval-here meetings! That part sounds quite similar to CryptoParties to me which is great!
The HWC page on indieweb.org also gives some recommendations for how to setup your own club and how to structure meetings. A meeting could, for instance, consist of two main blocks more or less consistent with the unconference format:
- Broadcast: Introduce what you want to do about your personal website or that you would like to ask others about.
- Group up depending on the projects and topics that were introduced during the broadcast phase
I’m not quite sure how this format will work for smaller groups but for me the most important aspect of a HWC would be that we actually work on things and not “just” exchange ideas. Looking through the list of existing clubs I noticed that there isn’t one in Austria right now. I think I might just ask around a bit in the next couple of days if some folks in and around Graz would be interested in something like that 🙂
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂