Welcome to the 15th edition of Smartspaces!

End of the Year Edition ❄️

Year in Review

Welcome to our (hopefully much anticipated 🙂 ) year-end post. While, we are still at the beginning of our journey, we think this is a good and natural time to pause and reflect on our progress over the last few months.

We want to share our gratitude for all the support and feedback from all of our curious readers. Thank you all.

This is our 15th post since we began 15 weeks ago. Since our start, we’ve gained hundreds of weekly readers, started a website with thousands of views, and pivoted more times than you can imagine 😅 (as anyone following this newsletter for even a few weeks, will surely have noticed)

We’ve tried lots of things, let us take you through our year and touch on our aspirations, challenges and the (exciting!) road ahead.

Why Smartspaces?

We are passionate about, and are advocates for open (and sometimes unconventional) education as a great source for change. While this can look different for different people, we’ve seen the effects a course, bootcamp, or self-study can have on someone’s life, career and impact.

We believe for some, this journey will be triggered by something they heard in a talk they spontaneously tuned in to (instead of rewatching Friends for the umpteenth time 😅).

Or maybe it’s just as simple as, we’re curious people. And we like other curious people.

What did we achieve?

We’ve curated ~500 live events across dozens of different scientific & technological fields and topics, searching for what makes the ‘best’ virtual events.

Our goals, although only loosely defined at the beginning of this newsletter, have changed quite significantly over the last few months, but overall, haven’t yet been met (so there’s work to do!)

We didn’t even start smrtspace.xyz until our 7th week writing this newsletter!

Since then, we’ve gotten thousands of views on our site and tried out a bunch of new features! (to varying degrees of success - see below). We’ve enhanced our offering almost each week, including things like:

• SmartSnippets - an overview of the broader topic or field of the event

• Recordings - over 100 recordings of past events

• Spaces - social curation of resources on specific topics

• Abstracts - information dense 3-5 minute recaps of past events

We’ve also met so many amazing people, from speakers and event organisers to You, our readers, who are all looking for community, education and inspiration.

What didn’t go well?

Of course, not everything has gone as well as we’ve hoped - no one said it was going to be easy!

The one ‘experiment’ that is top of my mind is Spaces. Spaces was (and is) one of the most exciting and ambitious (we think) things we tried and well, it has so far been a big failure. Looking at it with some distance now, we failed to truly understand our users problems & needs. (basic mistake we know but we’re learning 🙂 )

Overall, we’ve luckily managed to turn the vast majority of ‘mistakes’ (if you can even call them that) into lots of learnings, ideas and plans for the (near) future.

What’s next?

Our top priority for the first weeks of the new year is to speak with as many of You as possible to deeply understand how we can build the best platform to explore new topics, engage with curious minds and further yourself, your career and your aspirations. Reply to this email if you’re up for a chat!

As such, in 2024, we will continue to experiment (of course!) but will probably settle (eventually) on a more standard format for this newsletter, we appreciate your patience.

What’s New at smrtspace.xyz