We extend the garden metaphor to describe this pod. We set out to explore the space between graceful extensibility and the Dayton experiment expecting the common thread of experiential learning to inform professional software development.
See When Replicators Unite for biological motivation.
Mike Caulfield proposed the use of Rosters to guide attention for more casually formed groups than the classroom. He suggested they be aligned with a charter and called them "pods". This version maybe better called an "ideatone" borrowing from Ecotone.
We liked the notion of a garden of ideas, tended and growing in a way not so familiar in information streams modeled on headline news.
We liked the notion of a nursery where we shelter ideas from criticism that they will eventually face to live or die by confirmation or its absence.
We liked the idea of walls creating an exclusive place where the thoughtful can come to know each other's thinking over time.
But then we cautioned ourselves to speak to a larger audience when we write knowing that some words we define, some distinctions we make with them, will last like clippings from the nursery that then grow elsewhere.
See Confluence for specific ideas informing this effort.