A summary looking back
It’s now been several months since I first put up topics (here and in Fever Bee) to find some people to join me in a mastermind group. I’m a huge fan of “closing loops,” so I thought I dump some disjointed thoughts and observations…
@coppbacp @osioke @nolo and I formed a mastermind and arranged to meet 10 times, on specific dates.
take-away — having specific dates, times and a set number of meetings, decided by us before we started was a key in our success. “Can I commit to this mastermind at 3pm every Tuesday? Forever? …no way.” But I can commit to a set number. It was a little bit of a bummer to have our last meeting, but overall this made it possible for me to commit.
The Discourse mothership spun up an instance for us, and we used this for coordinating our group. https://cmmastermind.discourse.group We created a topic for each of our meetings at the beginning so we always knew where to discuss.
take away — having a clear place [a Discourse topic in our case] to dicuss the specific meeting was useful. We generally had some ongoing/continued followup from each week, in parallel with the preparation and discussion for the coming week. Without ending up with one enormous topic with everything mixed.
At least one other group (shout out to @skmurphy :) got created. They’re [i think] communicating directly via email, so I’m not sure how they made out.
Each of us (Nolo, Tina, Osioke and myself) had several “aha!” moments during our mastermind. For example, I received invaluable feedback when I presented something I was working on—insightful, first-reactions are priceless. In other places, I made significant changes to how my two communities are set up. So for me at least, I got exactly what I had hoped out of the mastermind.
We also ended up discussing and doing a little work around how to make something more like a game [more like, but not actually, a game] out of the setup. We four were all curious about what’s the minimum structure that has to exist to make it easier for masterminds to spontaneous spring up.
We’ve discussed that we will try [no promises] to continue tinkering on the https://cmmastermind.discourse.group instance in the future. We’d love to see other mastermind groups popping off on their own energy and initiative.
…that’s all I have top of mind. 
