The idea of brevity, giving weekly assignments, and discussing them at the next meeting makes me think of "Agile software development" practices in general. The goals of rational self-improvement and agile software development seem to align fairly neatly, too.

It has the added advantage that it scales very well: You can use these techniques to manage a group, or just yourself. The ability to "go it solo" if needed seems important to this crowd.

I'm going to set a goal of having a post on this by May 22nd, to try and motivate myself to think about it more and see if I can't come up with some applied thoughts :)