The two immediate ideas I have are: some loose photo challenges over the next few months, possibly leading up to a group effort to work on a more holistic photo challenge that would include more people (that I'm already talking with) and probably a site and a lot more work than I would want to do alone; and a prompt challenge for writing, the first being an AMA type of challenge.

Photo challenges

The monthly challenge

This is a fairly common and fun type of challenge. The standard operating procedure goes something like: solicit daily prompts, everyone who wants to participate posts a photo for each prompt, daily for a month, ideally somewhere public with the hashtag. This was a big draw for me personally on Micro.blog, I loved the photo challenge. It was what drew me to the service to begin with, when I was already blogging on my own weblog (here) and participating "remotely" on social.lol. I discovered I had actually already created a Micro.blog account and decided to resurrect it for the photo challenges and then expanded my usage.

A photo club

Discussions with some other omg.lol members have seen an expansion and diversion from this standard method. It would create its own community around ongoing photo challenges. I really love this idea, it is an attempt for one of the people to get back to an older project and give it new life with others involved. This is something that will take more time and effort and planning, and I'm onboard seeing to that in the future, we're still in talks. For the rest of this year, at least, I don't see that happening in time for the remaining months.

An omg.lol challenge

With that in mind, I thought: "what could I do on a small scale fairly soon that would include just omg.lol members?" An omg.lol membership includes a photo sharing service called some.pics. All photos are public and each user has their own page that displays all their photos in a grid. I was thinking that hashtags are all that is missing to make this a very usable feature for a photo challenge, where each hashtag would also have its own page. I decided to ask Adam if this is already part of the service, having not used it much myself, and it was not. But Adam being Adam whipped it out yesterday.

With that in place I want to come up with some prompts for the next few months. They won't be month-long daily posting challenges unless someone wants to make them that. My rough idea at this point, using October as the example with only three weeks left, is to choose a general category for the month and leave it up to everyone to post what they want for that when they want to using the prompt hashtag. I think this could be really loose and fun, and maybe I will be the only one posting, but I hope not! Look for more info on this soon if you are interested. I'm toying with calling it WeblogPhoMo...🤔

AMA challenge

Finally, the writing prompt challenge came to me as an idea for NaBloPoMo this year if I was going to participate. I'm still not entirely sure I will, unless I make it my own by combining it with some other work I want to get done on my blogs. Lou Plummer has a current challenge to contact other bloggers and pay respects for their work. I want to try to do something similar (and I need to participate in his!) with a type of AMA—the idea here being: people blog openly about a question they have that other bloggers could answer; other bloggers answer the questions in a post on their own blogs using the Indieweb tool in-reply-to (or not if they don't want to, but it doesn't hurt to include that if you're already using microformats).

What I still need to come up with is a list of the AMAs out there and how I would aggregate that. Perhaps it doesn't matter to do that, since one of the lovely parts of our community of bloggers is that we find each other in the natural ways of linking to other blogs and following those links. It is the amazing power of the web put to work by the humble link tag. Again, I will have more information on this to come and when I decide to time it.

Let me know what you think!

This reply is not an argument, a disagreement, or even a consensus. It's a conversation and an expansion of thoughts provided by the initial post written by another.