It’s six months since I wrote here that I wanted “to start a university”.

Go around talking like this and you quickly discover how much hunger there is for something which people have looked for and found too rarely within the university as we know it.

You also get asked what, exactly, you mean. It seems to me now that one reason for making such a wild statement is to find that out: to discover what it means, through the conversations it leads you into.

“Of course, you won’t be allowed to call it a university,” several people pointed out. And I found myself saying that I was less interested in what name we could legally use for whatever form this eventually took, than in staking a claim to the legacy of the university. This was the wager: that the spirit of enquiry and community of learning which make up the idea of the university might find a more convivial home today in new and seemingly marginal places, than in those institutions which bear its name. (This is not to deny that wonderful things go on in places within those institutions.)

“What makes the thing you’re talking about a university?” others asked. And that question opened directly into a larger enquiry: “What makes anything a university?”

That’s part of what we’ll be exploring at the Universities: Past & Future weekend which a group of us are hosting at the new Hub Westminster in London, 14-16 October. This is the first public event to come out of the University Project (as my co-conspirator Ben Vickers named the group of old and new friends that gathered around that blog post).

I’ll post more shortly about the project itself. Meanwhile, for anyone who’s been following this blog — and wondering about the rest of those seven requests for help — here’s a little more context on what’s been going on over the past six months.

Where this came from

There’s a more personal level at which I’ve been trying to make sense of what I mean by all this. Why am I even talking about such an epic project, when I already have responsibilities as director of Space Makers Agency and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project — not to mention trying to find time for writing, and maybe even a personal life?

It goes back to that epic post I wrote last New Year. Reflecting on what I’d learned in the eight years since I ditched my career at the BBC, I found myself looking the same distance ahead, which takes me to the other side of 40. What could I start working on in 2011, that I could imagine still having at the heart of my life then?

The answer came from the pattern I saw when I looked back: one way and another, I’d kept returning to the attempt to create a home for a certain kind of learning, led by curiosity, grounded in friendship, engaged with the world, but resisting its pressures, open to surprise, and never simply a means to an end. What if I could place that more consciously at the centre of my work in the years ahead?

And no sooner had that question formed, than a series of serendipitous invitations and interconnections began to open up, the momentum of which led to that declaration about starting a university.

What happened next

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog since then. I never did post the remaining five of those requests for help; they related to the future of the other projects I’m involved in, and how these coexist with the new focus of the university. I had second thoughts about sharing those questions with the world, and instead I’ve been working through them more quietly, with friends and collaborators.

Along the way, I’ve become clearer about the connections — the extent to which the University Project grows out of the other things I’ve been working on. Not least, as I talked about at last week’s TEDx London, the contribution of the “space hacking” culture to the emergence of new homes for the spirit of the university.

There’s another reason why I haven’t posted much since that original blog. I’ve been struggling to define the University Project with any consistency. Every time I gave a talk about it or tried to explain it to someone, different elements came into focus, while others seemed to disappear from view.

I had a breakthrough with this a few days ago, when I saw that there are actually a whole set of distinct elements which I’d been grouping together under the heading of the project. So in my next post, I’ll explain how these break down — hopefully resulting in a clearer picture of what we’re working on.

Meanwhile, there’s more information about the Universities: Past & Future event (London, 14-16 October) on our wiki — please add yourself to the People section, and add links to the Projects and Reading sections. You can also follow @UnivProject on Twitter.