“Becoming a Data Scientist” Learning Club?

I have been thinking about doing a “Becoming a Data Scientist” podcast for a long time, at least since April. The podcast would include interviews focused on how people working in various data-science-related jobs got to where they are today (how did they “become a data scientist”?). I’m getting closer to taking the dive and getting it started.

I had an idea today that would take it a step further. Imagine how book clubs work where you pick a book, go off and read it, then gather occasionally to discuss and record your thoughts. Except instead of a book club, it’s a data science learning club!

I’m imagining picking a topic/project, finding resources showing how to do it, and introducing it to the club at the end of a podcast episode. Then, everyone that wants to participate in learning how to do that particular thing will go off for maybe 2 weeks, work on it and learn what they can, ask questions to each other in a common area like a blog post comment thread, create things and post them to a shared space, then at the end of the period post comments about what they learned and how it went. People could write blog posts about their projects and I would collect those and link to all of them from the original post. Anyone that already knows how to do it could help answer questions if they wanted to participate, too. I might invite some of the participants to talk about their learning experience on a follow-up episode, then the notes and results would be posted for future learners to find.

I think learning together would be fun and valuable, and this type of experience would fall somewhere between learning on your own and taking a class. It would include the pros of learning on your own and exploring, while offsetting some of the cons of going at it alone. It would be a significant time commitment on my part, so I want to make sure other people would join in before I commit. What do you think? Would you join a “data science learning club” and participate in something like this and find it valuable? It’s kind of like the Summer of Data Science, but we’d be learning the same things simultaneously and sharing our results. No one would be “teaching” the group necessarily, but we’d share resources and answer each other’s questions based on what we did individually.

Let me know in the comments or on twitter if you would find this valuable and if you want me to lead it!