Outreach Sprint

Ninety minutes, three messages, three named people who have each made something you have actually read. The drafting is compulsory. Sending is not.

Settle that second point before you read any further, because it changes how the room works. Nothing this week obliges you to contact a stranger. The Outreach Log records what you drafted, what you sent, what you deliberately chose not to send, and why — and it is graded identically either way. A well-reasoned decision not to send is worth exactly what a send is worth.

Coming in from the break#

You have had a fortnight. It was for building, not for polishing, and the question your convenor opens with is which of the two you did. Bring Dossier §7 in whatever state the break left it, plus the three names and the reading you did on each. Names without reading are not usable here.

The sprint#

Three rounds, twenty-five minutes each: draft, swap, score. Your peer scores your draft on one test — could this person answer it in one line without doing any work. Not “is it polite”. Not “is it well written”. Answerable in one line, by a busy person, on a phone.

Most first drafts fail on the same three things, which the scoring sheet names: no evidence you know which specific thing they made, no actual question inside the message, and a request whose real size exceeds its stated size. “Could I pick your brain” is a forty-five-minute ask in a five-minute costume, and the recipient prices it correctly.

A pre-warmed stranger is not a warm contact. It is a stranger with one specific reason to reply, and that reason is a sentence proving you read the thing. Everything else is overhead.

By stream#

• Technical Practice — maintainers, engineering-blog authors, meetup organisers. Your warming sentence is usually a specific commit, decision or paragraph you can name.
• Creative and Communications Practice — practitioners whose particular piece you can speak about with a judgement in it. Admiration is not a warming sentence; a reading of the piece is.
• Commercial and Public Practice — alumni, industry-body contacts, graduate-program liaisons. The path in is the shared institution plus one concrete question about the work, never a request for general advice.

The honesty constraint#

Stated in the lecture and enforced here: never misrepresent who you are or why you are writing. You are a third-year student doing this for a course and also for yourself, and both of those are fine to say. Fabricating a connection, a mutual acquaintance or a reason is not a technique this course teaches — see policies.

Silence#

Assume it. Most messages get none, including good ones. Silence is the standard reply and carries no information about you, which is why the log grades the drafting and the reasoning rather than the response rate. Pursuing a non-reply past one short follow-up is where outreach becomes pressure.

Leaving with#

Dossier §8, the Outreach Log: three drafts, each with its warming sentence marked, the send-or-hold decision, the reason, and any reply. Plus a reflection entry on which of the three you would be willing to send and which you would not. Week 8 attacks the materials, not the messages, but the same plausibility budget governs both.