Blogging

As a member of Enspiral you are encouraged to share your experiences through our publishing platforms:

🎙 Here's a conversation about blogging for Enspiral and writing online with Rich Bartlett.

Context

During the original Catalyst experiment, Gina started Enspiral Tales - a Medium collection for blog stories written by Enspiral people.

Rich followed up with the “Fairy Blog Mother”. This was a bucket of money that anyone in the network can contribute to. Rich arbitrarily handed out money to people for writing, editing and illustrating blog posts. Creating Enspiral Content has been also funded in October '22 Cobudget Round.

Content

The content is diverse. We don’t need to have a strong editorial opinion about what kind of content to publish, as the internet decides what is interesting. Here’s some of the kinds of posts that seem to do well.

Decentralised Leadership

Between us we’re learning a lot about decentralised leadership. Alanna Krause writes about it, Jessy Kate Schingler writes about it, Richard D. Bartlett writes about it, and so does Susan Basterfield. These pieces are really valuable to people trying to follow in Enspiral’s footsteps.

Vision conjuring

Some people do big epic visionary change-the-world pieces like Joshua Vial’s Hacking Capitalism with Capped Returns and Edward West’s piece announcing the Collaborative Technology Alliance. These are the kind of pieces a community can grow around.

Experience sharing

Some people share their experience of being in Enspiral, which is really helpful context for new folk. See Pete Jacobsen’s Baffling Journey Into Enspiral or Hailey Cooperider’s reflections from her first Enspiral retreat, Vivien Askey’s interview with Jack Tolley, Chloe Waretini’s reflection on the first Catalyst experiment,

Practical lessons

Then again some people share more practical lessons like Mix Irving’s Teaching in the Spiral: Less Lecturing, More Co-creating, Chelsea Robinsons’s Feedback Feast, Theodore Taptiklis’ on Capturing a compelling story and James Kiesel’s piece on remote working and Sam Rye on the essential tools in your Startup Stack. The internet loves practical guides like this!

Reflecting on events

Blogging is a great way to digest events, e.g. Richard D. Bartlett’s epic summary of the Democratic Cities conference in Madrid, Silvia Zuur’s review of Bioneers, Tracey Ambrose’s review of OuiShare Fest, Alina Seigfried’s piece about Michel Bauwens’ visit to Wellington, and Derek Razo’s schemes after POC21 as the event morphed into a community.

Events are easy to write about, and they tend to get a good level of attention because you can share them on the event hashtag. Event participants are often eager to read the reflections of other attendees.

Editing

There’s no formal editorial system in place.

Anyone can write a piece on Medium and submit it to the publication for review. Technically, Rich, Alanna, Chloe, Derek, Seb and Gina have “editor” permissions so can approve or edit any submitted post. If you want your name on this list, talk to Rich.

Practically, Rich has the strongest editorial oversight - chat with him if you’re thinking of a post but not sure if it fits, or want any kind of encouragement. If you don’t know where to start, this short story about writing the minimum viable post might help. He’s currently operating on the principle that more contributors is good: let’s all get in the habit of sharing our lessons in public! Right now he's particularly interested in sharing stories about the challenges and tensions of working in this way, but you might be interested in something completely different and that is cool too.

Licensing and syndication

Licensing is up to you. Medium allows you to choose a license, whether you want to reserve all, some, or no rights. This article might help you choose. If you don't actively choose a license, you're effectively giving up all your rights to Medium.

If you choose a license that allows people to share your work, it can get reposted elsewhere. This is great to expand the reach of our stories. E.g. Shareable and P2P Foundation both reposted Rich’s Bossless Organisations piece.

If you want to make it easier on the editors of those publications, it’s helpful to publish a raw Markdown or Html version of your post somewhere. For example, see how Rich did that at the very end of this post.

Impact on the original experiment

The results have been great: about 40 people have written stories, growing the publication to 2800 followers, getting about 5-10k hits in a month. Here's a summary of our all-time views:

And our most popular stories to date (updated Jan '19):

Resources

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