Members Blog: A Slightly New Process
After working our way through a couple early submissions, we’ve decided to tweak the Members Blog process a little to make it more streamlined and efficient. We anticipated having to make adjustments, of course -- we’re doing something new and unusual, and in a kind of new and unusual way, so we didn’t expect to hit the nail right on the head. Fortunately it turned out to be pretty simple.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts, a little background: We decided to mount the Members Blog on the Forums for two reasons. The first has to do with simplicity: it was the easiest way we could think of to ensure all submissions came from actual members of the Institute. (We use Discourse for our Forums, and access is restricted to members in good standing.)
Had we chosen to accept submissions, say, via email, we would have had to back-check and vet each author to confirm their membership. And had we created some other standalone process, it would have almost certainly required our members to log into yet another platform with another password and code. It seemed an unnecessary annoyance.
The second reason for relying on the Forums is consistency. It only made sense to put the Members Blog in the very place where we conduct our ongoing conversations on policy, culture, political theory, the Constitution, the administration of the Institute itself and whatever else comes to mind. We realized we had the opportunity, thanks to Discourse’s flexibility, to make the Members Blog an ongoing feature of our internal deliberations as well as our public outreach.
Essentially what we’ve done is give our membership the chance to share their views in a more detailed, structured, comprehensive and personal manner than would likely be possible in a comment thread alone. And we’ve done so that opportunity faces both ways: inward, to the rest of the Institute, and outward to the public.
"Quill Pen" by ROSS HONG KONG is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Now, to process: Discourse works through Categories and Topics. You can think of Categories as channels: each of our five Policy Halls has its own Category, and we’ve added a few more (Courts and Constitution, Political Theory, the Suggestion Box and the Members Blog) as needed. There’s also a private Category for internal communications and one labeled Uncategorized for anything which doesn’t fit in an established Category.
Topics are the individual posts within Categories. Our original thought was to have members post the body of their blog submissions in the Topic itself, but that quickly proved to be unworkable. We also immediately discovered it was too clumsy to handle unfinished drafts in the Forums as well; not only was the editorial process inefficient, but discussion around the blog’s subject could quickly get sidetracked into areas where the thinking and language hadn’t yet been refined.
To correct these deficiencies we’ve made two changes to the Ground Rules. The first is about how we post. From now on blog submissions will either be uploaded from files (any format will do -- Word, Google Docs, PDFs, etc.) or posted via link to an external platform (a personal blog, or some other source, like a publication).
The applicable standards and requirements are included in the Ground Rules Topic pinned to the top of the Members Blog Category, but the basics are simple enough: members post their entries as Topics, with the title in the subject line and a brief summary of the entry in the body. Then either upload the file or include the link.
The second change is to allow only finished blog entries to be posted -- no incomplete drafts or fragments. If someone has an idea for an entry but hasn’t written it yet, they can post their idea with “Request for Submission” in the subject line and we’ll reach out to help with some editorial assistance. Likewise for anyone who has a draft on hand but hasn’t been able to get it into publication-ready shape yet.
Finished entries will be left as-is for consideration by the membership and discussion in the Forums. But because anything published to the Institute’s website will be judged by the same standards as content published by similar organizations, we’ll need to ensure comparable quality in our own output. For that reason, some additional work on an internally-published entry may be necessary before it’s posted to the website or included in one of the other media projects we have under development.
External publication of any member-generated content is at the sole discretion of the Institute.
It’s possible we may have to make further changes to the process. We’re always learning, and finding better ways of doing things lies at the heart of the Whig Way. We’re counting on feedback from our membership to help clarify any additional issues, which we will of course address immediately. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to hearing the unique insights, seeing the clever innovations and benefiting from the original views which are the hallmarks of our community.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org.
___________________________________________________________
The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or its members.
