Thusday Co-lab: Penny University Reboot

​This Thursday's Penny University will be a very different kind of meeting because we are directly hacking on the community itself.

Penny University's weekly AI meetings are rapidly evolving. In the first week we had a 30 minute check-in followed by mostly heads-down co-working. But, understandably, people wanted to trade ideas and learn from one another.

So we have since moved to an unconference-like format: meet for 30 minutes to figure out what's new and interesting in AI and then move into discussions and demos around those topics. But that format has its own problems – people that don't want the up-front chit chat are coming in late, but at that point they are unable to inform the topic and it's awkward to get plugging into the ongoing discussions.

Therefore, we are going to work on the format itself.

As soon as the meeting starts we're going to jump into brainstorming about what our weekly AI Co-lab sessions should really be, and how we can build a platform that self-organizes to optimize our impact and make sure that we're making good on our promise: Learn AI. With Humans.

​I'll explain some the background of Penny University, explain some basic goals we have in mind, and then turn it over to the group. What is a good format? Do we need software to support it? What is that software like? What is the MVP? – After that, as time provides, we can hack on different ideas as a group or individually.

Now, for you hard-core AI folks, you might think "I don't care about community building. I want to learn AI." We've still got something for you. You can watch as other people build software using AI - you can chip in with your own ideas and approaches - and you can learn the approaches of others. How often do you get to do that in normal life? This is what Penny University is all about!