No previous training or education is required. Our only assumption is that you have at least some ideas or some sense of a project that you want to develop. There are teenagers running successful philosophy Youtube channels and there are PhDs who have never published a blog post. Some participants will have an academic background, but on the internet frontier we're all still freshmen.

The course is medium-agnostic. The frameworks and assignments will work for bloggers, Youtubers, podcasters, newsletter authors, indie book authors, and even visual artists. We don't teach you how to write or make art, we teach you how to port your perspective and content into an internet-based production system.

We do have people who use the IndieScholars program to support work they are doing for a degree elsewhere. These members may or may not be interested in building a serious independent project on the internet right now, but they find IndieScholars worth the price usually for one of the following reasons: To maintain regular exposure to outside thinkers and creators in the wild west; to learn about their options for building a parallel path on the internet (in case their institutional trajectory doesn't pan out how they'd like it to); or they just want the co-working sessions to make sure they're putting in the hours on their degree work.

We do a lot of sessions in total, so we certainly don't expect that every single participant will make it to every single session—people have different circumstances, jobs, time zones, etc. It's ultimately up to you to decide whether the sessions you can make are worth the price for you, in your own circumstances (this calculation will be totally different for different people). We do try to create a culture of hard work and consistency and discipline, and you'll probably get better results if you take it as an opportunity to really buckle down and reduce your other obligations/distractions, but we're never going to be angry or upset if you can't make any number of the sessions.

Currently, I'm capping new enrollments at 30 for each new cohort. Of course, lifetime members will accumulate over time, and some fraction of those will join each cohort, but statistically it will only ever be so many.

If I had to guess, I would expect most cohorts to fluctuate roughly around the 50-person mark for each cohort in 2022. Not sure the confidence intervals around that, but out of thin air I might guess the 95% confidence interval is between 30 and 70 active participants per cohort in 2022.

If things ever feel overly packed, it is straightforward for me to use the Zoom breakout rooms and manually put people in the most productive subgroups. I use my judgment depending on how things feel. Also, participants often form their own smaller specialist groups, so there's always that to balance against the larger group.

I can't say for sure over the long-term, but I will say I guarantee at least a total of 3 cohorts in 2022. Likely more, and hopefully for years into the future (IndieScholars started in Nov. 2019, so we're doing pretty well), but I'd prefer to be conservative and not over-promise.

If demand is high this year, I will probably elect to do more than 3 in 2022. But yea, we'll do 3 in 2022 at the very least, guaranteed.

The opening conference is for everyone to introduce themselves and the current state of their work.

Variance will be high. Some may prepare slides, some will shoot from the hip. Some people will only have some vague ideas, some will be in the middle of advanced projects. Some will be Humanities, some will be STEM. Some will be hobbyists, some will be commercial. The only common denominator is the indie thinker ethos (independent intellectual or creative work, using the internet to bypass or supplement the limitations of institutional pathways).

For the closing conference, everyone presents their work from the previous 6-weeks. People will have different goals so it's hard to impose a precise structure for what is expected of participants, but everyone will be asked to give an overview of what they produced, what kind of results they got, anything interesting they learned, and next steps.

The "next steps" part is a major aspect of the closing conference because the real goal is to push everyone out of the cohort with focus, clarity on their vision, a writing habit, and the real momentum of steady work over 6 weeks. One can only get so much done in 6 weeks, but ideally the cohort provides the structure and activation energy that participants will continue to use on their own for many weeks thereafter—possibly for life.

Each work session is composed of 4 "work cycles." I provide participants a spreadsheet they can use to track every cycle of every session (if they wish to). A cycle is composed of a 45-minute work sprint, followed by a 10-minute break.

In the 45-minute sprint, everyone has their mics off; everyone promises to work only on original writing. There is some wiggle room in the definition of "writing," in the case of engineers or visual artists, for instance, but you get the point: The primary form of original thinking and creation germane to your primary intellectual or creative project. No email, no social media, etc.

In the 10-minute breaks, people can do whatever—bathroom, get a drink, and everyone chats. Sometimes people ask each other substantive questions related to what they're working on, but with a water-cooler vibe.

After 4 cycles, everyone has done a ton of work, some possible friendships have been seeded, and that's that!

In some cases, yep. Some of our members have been reimbursed by employers, some have paid using their university research budgets. We'll even give you a form letter you can send to your boss or university HR department.

If you enroll, attend the first two sessions, and decide it's not what you were expecting, we're happy to give a full refund anytime in the first week—no questions asked.

Not a problem. All lectures are recorded and replays are made available. There are many work sessions; even if you can only do one per week, this alone will be worth the price for many participants. And the community discussion is asynchronous, so you can participate whenever works for you.

Sure. Just send a payment and then email me a link to the transaction record (justin{at}otherlife.co[dot]org).

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