I come from a background with a strong culture of "thinking in public". This means openly sharing learning experiences and insights - working with the garage door up. I believe this practice is crucial for promoting growth and making knowledge more accessible to newcomers. In contrast, the West Coast Swing community largely lacks this culture of collaborative inquiry. I believe that adopting aspects of “Thinking in Public” would greatly benefit our community. Photo by Ahmad Odeh What would "thinking in public" look like in the context of WCS? Learn in Public   The aspect of thinking in public that I believe would be most immediately relevant for the majority of readers is "Learning in Public". You can think of it as tracing the trail of learning. After you've learned or understood something - share your understanding - in a format that your past self would have found the most helpful. Use media and words/concepts that make sense to you. Create something that you of 3 months ago wish existed! * write blogs (and post them here!); * ask and answer questions here, on Reddit, etc. Prefer public spaces over walled gardens for this; * make explainer YouTube videos; * draw illustrations; * etc. As far as I can tell this is basically not a thing in WCS community 😿 Why does learning in public benefit community? It's great to have different explanations of concepts - using a variety of mediums and models, as more people can find the explanation that works well for them. Also, there is generally a lack of publicly available well-structured explanatory WCS material out there. Why does learning in public benefit you? Teaching is a great way to learn When I wrote about Lead Projection - it made me clarify the concept in my mind and to expand my understanding of it. I expect to understand it even better as I get feedback from people, who will read through my explanation and point out the ways it's incomplete or confused 🙃. Refining your understanding thro

I collected stats on how long it takes for dancers to move between WSDC divisions in their primary role. The shortest time between someone's first novice point and first all-star point is 8 months (Jesse Vos). The next fastest is 12 months (Melissa Rutz, Samir Zutshi, JT Anderson). (There's actually someone with 5 months, but it looks like a clerical error—before and after their supposed all-star points, they compete in several novice competitions.) Below is a plot of the distribution of times between first novice point and first all-star point. The dashed line is the median time, and the dotted lines are the 5th, 25th, 75th, and 95th percentile times. Below is a table of summary statistics for the plot, where "25%" means "25th percentile". StatMeanStd. dev.1%5%10%25%50%75%90%95%99%Time (years)5.162.641.331.932.423.254.676.448.5010.2514.03 Though the median time between first novice point and first all-star point is 4.67 years, this does not mean that the typical person can expect to reach all-star 4.67 years after their first novice point: * People who reach all-star are a self-selected group of people who probably devote a lot of energy into dance and who progressed through earlier ranks faster, e.g., their median time between first novice point and first intermediate point is 50% faster than among all people who have reached at least intermediate. * Most people never reach all-star, which isn't captured in the above plot. * People who will reach all-star in the future aren't captured in the plot, which skews the stats downwards (e.g., suppose person A and person B both received their first novice point in 2019 and person A got their first all-star point in 2023 whereas person B will get their first all-star point in 2030—then person A shows up in the above plot but person B does not). * There have been and will continue to be WSDC rule changes (e.g., modifications of the qualifications for each division) and changes in the competition scene—historical d