Thinking: How To Write About Tuttle?

You may have seen my post last week celebrating ten years since I first wrote about a thing that became The Tuttle Club.

How do you write about a ten-year long project that is both a project and not a project, is an event but is also much more, has become an integral part of my identity? (yes, people still call me "Mr Tuttle" occasionally) I want to write something new about the last ten years, but i don't want it to be "this happened, and then that happened, and then something else happened and then wow!" because apart from that being a really boring story to tell and probably boring to read, it really isn't anything more than an annotation and index for all the blog posts, tweets, podcasts and photographs that have emerged over the years.

That's not the story - that's the data, the reference material from which you can tell the story. And in a good, decentralised way, for the last ten years, I've been letting other people tell the story for themselves with reference to some of the stuff you can find online. But I think it's also good to have something definitive, that explains the story behind the story. What was this all about, really? What was it for? What was the inner soul of Tuttle? What was (and is) it's life purpose? Why did it first appear? Why is it still here? Why am I still asking all these questions ten years later?

There's a lot of reference material that isn't currently online too - for a start there's linkrot. Some videos for example went on blip.tv and blog posts on posterous.com and then there's the writing I've always been doing, journaling, drawing pictures, that have had an effect on what's happened at Tuttle, but have never been pulled together and put into a coherent frame.

The frame is all. About 18 months after we started I wrote our first Annual Report. It was slightly satirical, lampooning the kinds of corporate reporting that I've had to do previously in my career, but it also gave a good frame to the story of the first few months, what we were finding out about ourselves in the process and what our best guess was about purpose and the future. I need another frame now, maybe something a bit gonzo, something a bit investigative, some of those questions above might be a starting point.

I'm glad to have a blogging space again that helps me focus on these things as part of my everyday work. For too long this has been filed under "do when you've got some time and money" and so it hasn't happened at all... yet!

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