Collaborative Blogs

WriteFreely
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Hello!

I’m working on starting up (also admin for) a cooperative instance. We are forming the instance as an experiment and testing grounds for one day integrating tools that can enforce the decisions of the cooperative, such as migrating operators (admin) without the permission of the operator. There a quite a few features that are missing for cooperative instance support primarily because of how WriteAs/WriteFreely has been used in the past. The most important of these features is collaborative blogs.

I saw the recent announcement for collaborative blogs for WriteAs. I just wanted to vocalize my interest in bringing this to WriteFreely. Our instance would be willing to beta test collaborative blogs. I can also lend a hand as much as I can on the developer side to get this feature shipped. From what I can tell this would just primarily involve allowing a set of owners for a collection rather than a single owner. I don’t see any issues for collaborative blogs on the work board. Maybe we could create a set of smaller issues that need to be tackled to make this migration possible?

Some other features that would be useful is additional permissioned accounts. Our governance structure allows for users to be moderators or community managers or both. I’d like to give moderators the ability to silence accounts and community managers the ability to invite accounts.

Looking forward to increasing support for cooperative instances :slightly_smiling_face:

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Had this on my list of topics to address, so I just wanted to revisit it now. We absolutely want to bring collaborative blogs to WriteFreely!

For now there are a few major roadblocks to this happening:

  • We’re still testing and building this functionality around customers on Write.as, where we’re able to iterate quickly. But we still need more input from a wider group of people there. (I’m also open to making this affordable to anyone who wants to use it in exchange for giving feedback.)
  • We need to get WriteFreely v1.0 released and officially “launched,” so we can make the wide-sweeping changes that collaboration will need. We’re aiming for the end of the summer with that.

With those out of the way, there are still some design questions that need to be answered – and maybe that’s where we should start the discussion here.

At the top of my mind is the question of scope, and how a mix of multiple users might match with multiple blogs. So a few questions for your use case:

  • Would you say every user on your instance would make up a single “team” / organization? Or would multiple separate organizations live on your instance?
  • Would you only publish to one shared blog, or multiple?
  • Would you want to have sub-groups within your organization, e.g. to limit access to certain blogs?
  • Would you want individuals to each have their own blog / writing space?
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Hi, I would love having collaborative blogs in WriteFreely. Here’s our use case: my org uses public writing as a way of developing and informing strategy. So instead of one supreme leader sending e-mails to everyone, we have different people penning their best arguments on the areas they care and know about and everyone can read it. In this way the best ideas can get into the light, and people that are interested in the org can see what we are on about. For now, this has happened across alot of different platforms: medium, discourse, facebook, wordpress blog etc. wherever people had an account. This is not ideal, since text in those places is not very persistent among many other reasons.

I see WriteFreely with teams as the perfect solution to this need. It would look something like this: we have maybe 200 people reading and 20 people writing. Since it’s not really about the individual person, we would just have everyone in one team. Maybe there would be some sense in having multiple blogs to categorize the posts a bit (eg. press strategy, evaluations, visions) but I don’t think it’s necessary. Maybe there would even be too many posts that wouldn’t fit in any category for it to make sense.

I see some use in having multiple teams on an instance, if we would invite sister organisation working in the same field, so that we could learn from each other. But even then I think they could be in the same team without it being a problem.

For now we will have a WriteFreely instance on writefreely.host where everyone has their own blog and the reader page can work as the “collaborative” blog, but it’s a bit of a roundabout structure as we don’t really have any use in the personal blogs and any one individual will not post very often.

If you are serious about your offer to let someone try out teams in exchange for giving feedback, I would be happy to take it :slight_smile:

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Hello!

Apologies for the very very delayed response!

To directly answer your questions:

Would you say every user on your instance would make up a single “team” / organization? Or would multiple separate organizations live on your instance?

I would say my instance would probably have several “teams”/organizations/groups. The main idea would be that users on the instance wouldn’t necessarily interact/know/collaborate with other users, but they could. I’d imagine there to be many small groups working on different topics/themes which take advantage of the branding/visibility of the instance. I can imagine the instance being like a public forum and within the public forum there exist different groups/stands/walls with posters etc.

Would you only publish to one shared blog, or multiple?

Many shared blogs. I’d imagine any user could create a shared blog and invite any other user or group/team to collaborate. Maybe the creator of the shared blog is an admin for that blog, but they could transfer ownership or grant admin rights to other users.

Would you want to have sub-groups within your organization, e.g. to limit access to certain blogs?

Not sure what sub-groups entails, but permissioning could be nice. Like maybe users could submit a blog post to be published, but an editor needs to give the final approval. Perhaps instead of defining a collabortive ownership via groups, each blog simply has a list of owners (a group could be an owner).

Would you want individuals to each have their own blog / writing space?

Yes. Ideally a reader cannot immediately tell the difference between a shared/individual blog. The collaborative tools should all be behind the scenes.

I’d also like to see admin permissions delegated to users who are not the operator of the instance. For example, I’d like to give certain users the ability to remove content/block users and I’d like to give other users the ability to invite new users.

My vision is that you could use a write freely instance to operate as a decentralized media organization/community. There could exist many different groups/collaborative circles which maintain their own blogs which cover their own interests, but they all benefit from being under the larger branding umbrella of the instance.

I am sure I am underestimating the difficulty in managing such a community/organization in a decentralized fashion, but it certainly seems worth the experimentation.

While individuals maintaing their own blogs is wonderful, I find it is hard for a single individual to be consistent enough to generate a consistent following. If there are 10 individuals maintaining a blog (even part time), a user base is more likely to be established.

The current structure of a single global admin isn’t sustainable for this sort of setup. You can imagine that as the community grows, the opportunity for inappropriate content being posted will also grow, thus the admin will need to delegate responsibilities to other users to help maintain the community

I think this mostly covers what I have in mind. Hope it helps. I think it is also possible to pick apart these ideas on focus on small improvements (like delegating admin permissioning, or multiple owners per blog) as opposed to doing it all at once.

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  • single team per instance
  • multiple. e.g. a shared blog for weeknotes and another one for linknotes
  • no subgroup. this will a mess to manage
  • yes very important to keep multiple blogs for each individual