SoMEπ

This year's more community driven Summer of Math Exposition

tl;dr There will likely be a community-driven version of the Summer of Math Exposition this year, stay tuned on this discord channel.

Background

After the third Summer of Math Exposition last year (SoME3), James and I were originally planning to give SoME something of a gap year.

There have been rumblings on the SoME discord about doing a more casual community-driven version this summer, which they’ve delightfully named SoMEπ. There would be no prizes, no winner selection, just mutual encouragement from community members to make math explainers they feel proud of this summer.

I'm all for this! Most of the event's benefit comes from having 1) a shared deadline, and 2) a period when everyone's work gets reviewed by peers. The prizes and winner-announcement video are just the icing on top.

In past years, point 2 was accomplished with the peer review process we ran to get an initial rough ordering of the entries. In the past announcement videos, I discussed how counterintuitively effective this process was at spurring exposure for entries, far beyond anything an announcement video from me could do.

The peer review process required active management to keep running smoothly, which James heroically handled each year, and last year we made a custom system for the event, thanks to Frédéric Crozatier, which better allowed participants to share written feedback.

James, Fred, and I talked about it, and we'd be happy to facilitate a handoff of that system to the community. This requires added development to fix issues from last year, which Fred is available for, and assuming enough community members are comfortable taking responsibility for overseeing the process, you should be able to get most of the benefit from past years.

How would it differ from past years?

The biggest difference would be its decentralization. I won't pick top entries for prizes, questions about policies are ultimately up to the community, and with any luck, the perception of what makes an entry successful will have less to do with any final placement, and more to do with the internal sense of pride and growth from you, the author.

You would submit an entry, say a video or written math explainer, and afterward, you join the peer review system to have a few other entries delivered to you for feedback. This system produces an ordered list of entries, but this time there are no stakes associated with who is where in the list. I’ll likely do something to signal-boost the list, and other creators could optionally choose and feature their favorite entries.

How to participate

If you have any itch to make a piece of math exposition, join this discord to stay in touch. Also, ping the @organizer role with specific questions.

The deadline is August 18th at 11:59 PM (UTC-12). In the weeks before then, the site https://some.3b1b.co will have a place where you can submit entries.