IN PROGRESS

Socratica has been such a staple in my life for a really long time. There have been a few things that are certain: death taxes and checking the slack every morning

What is this

TLDR: We assemble kind, nerdy, and ambitious people that are dedicated to consistently creating.

Started off as co-working group in Waterloo, has graced 30+ cities internationally. Holding demo days, enabling X00,000 hours of creative work

My Role In It

Adi and Aman were wonderful friends and mentors that initially had the idea to start gathering weekly to make things. I started attending at the 3rd session ...and have basically been inseparable ever since.

Unfortunately for me, they were both graduating. Luckily, people like Jonathan and Mathurah shared my enthusiasm for keeping this thing going.

Over the span of three years have been propelling the organization.

What it felt like

I was sitting in a car with a dear mutual and just them telling me that it completely changed their life. And meeting people for the first time and having them thank you for the involvement of this organization is very strange. But ultimately I feel like we have done a good thing with a lot of heart and I am slowly starting to phase myself out because I believe that it's in good hands.

I feel lucky that the formative relationships to my personal life also got to be formative relationships in my professional life. this type of compounding context is so rare and beautiful and that defines clusters of ideas that eventually become influential movements. I feel very lucky to have experienced a minuscule part of that.

Why do this

I ultimately did this because it was something that I really wanted for myself.

How We Run

We will never really know what ACTUALLY makes this organization work. In a lot of ways it's like asking why any company that has product market fit words yeah it kind of matters what database and what microservices you use but for the most part what really matters is that in this moment of time people really needed something and we happen to land on something that filled that void.

Organization We run a flat organization. There are technically no positions, everyone is a host, but there two main tracks.

1. Hosts - People actively running sessions on a recurring basis
2. Project leads - People leading task forces.

Functions like a doocracy. Try to keep it so that there aren't people reporting.

We don't run any application processes. Hosts are appointed by looking for people that consistently show up to sessions.

For hosts, it's important that we choose people that are also doing thing themselves. Unfortunately there is a dichotomy between the administrator and the participant. Having hosts that also actively demo set the tone.

Projects are driven by

Whenever we find anyone interesting, we send it in shared channels with the keyword "flag", to search at a later date.

Driving Philosophies

Vibe

State Mandated Silliness

People

Effortgating

Aggressively documenting

Precruiting

Host need to be doers

Project based

Experimentation