Update on Tiny House Survey / Online Summit Project

[For those who have been interested in what I've been doing in the tiny house world!]

This is a report back on the progress we’re making toward holding an online tiny house “summit,” and a chance to share with you some of the responses from the survey we sent out this summer.

1. Survey Results. We received an incredible 102 detailed responses to our survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/tinyhousesummit). It would be an understatement to say that collating and digesting this information has been a huge task--but it’s been a task that we’ve been super-grateful to have, and we have so appreciated the willingness to help us identify topics and people that will be key to creating an event that will make a difference. A huge thank to all that have replied (and you can still do so if you haven’t already).

A detailed outline of the topic categories that were identified in the survey can be found at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/topics-survey-results. You can comment at the bottom of that page, or you can email Sera (sera@learningrevolution.com) directly.

2. Community Website. As you will have seen if you went to the above link to the survey results, we’ve created a community website at http://www.TinyIsBeautiful.com that will also be home base for the online summit. The survey questions have been posted there, as well, for any responses directly in that venue. Other features of the site include:

• An events listing at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/events that we will try and keep updated, and that you can add to, with local tiny house events, festivals, gatherings, Webinars, etc. We’ve put in the events we are currently aware of, please do add any others you know of (or run!).
• A groups feature that lets you create or join topic-, affiliation-, or location-based groups, with forum discussion capability for each group. We’ve seeded this with some to get started: DIY Builders, Commercial Builders, Facebook Group Organizers, Skoolies, etc. We encourage you to add your own. http://tinyisbeautiful.com/groups.
• General forum discussion capability. We are anxious to support all the places on the Web where there is discussion about tiny houses, and as this site will become the main landing place for our online summit, we assume there will be a desire to talk and connect here as well. http://tinyisbeautiful.com/forum.
• A “highlighted” blog posts page at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/highlighted-blogs.
• A tiny house books list at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/books.

We welcome any ideas or suggestions for the site.

3. Webinars. We’re working on a series of weekly, free Webinars as a means of building connection with the tiny house audience, and in some ways, to prove our intentions to the community. While my projects are well-known and appreciated in the education arena, we recognize that we’re going to need to build trust with those who’ve put in lots of time and hard work related to tiny houses. We’re working on the following topics:

• Tiny houses as student/school projects;
• Running successful Facebook and Meetup groups;
• The DIY aspect of the tiny house movement;
• Homelessness projects based on tiny houses;
• Tiny houses and alternative building materials;
• Skoolies - converting school buses for tiny living;

4. Summit plans. We’re currently planning to hold our online summit in January (credit to Andrew Odom for this suggestin, and much smarter than our original and over-ambitious October/November time-frame). As we’ve described before, we’re following a model for week-long online “summits” where the keynote talks are free to view daily, but as each new set of keynote talks comes up, the previous ones go away and become part of a package that can be purchased with all of the event recordings and special bonus features. There will be a way for those who would like to advertise the summit to become an “affiliate” and make a commission (50%) on the summit recording package sales. We’ll also have a community day where anyone willing to learn the online platform can propose and then hold their own session--kind of an “unconference” day--which I’ve done with great success at my other events. We’ll be figuring out and inviting keynote and workshop speakers in the coming weeks, and will also be working to figure out compensation for them in case the affiliate model isn’t attractive to them.

5. An apology. The fall is my busiest season--I hold a large “Future of Libraries” conference in October, and then a massive “Global Education Conference” in November. If you’ve emailed me and I haven’t responded, or there’s been any other way in which you expected to hear from me and didn’t, it hasn’t been intentional. I will catch up, I promise! In the meantime, Sera (sera@learningrevolution.com) is dedicated to the tiny house summit and she will be a great point of contact for you.