This was originally an email to Manuel Kostka. I’ve since made some edits to make it relevant to a wider audience.
Today —well, in fact it was last Thursday, but I always start these worklogs with Today— I had a very interesting conversation with Manuel Kostka— a community designer specialized in Discourse (also known as Nolo.
He shared some of the most interesting and challenging feedback I've received about blank.page, the concept of Cuadernos and how a community around writing could fit in the project. A few days later, I've now processed his feedback and have a better idea of what I want to achieve with a community (or lack of).
First off, I've decided to rename "Cuadernos" to "Collections", as in simply collections of writing prompts. The first concept had a lot of identity in itself, and it was one of the reasons why it felt detached from the Editor (a big weakness of the project, as noted by Nolo).
That means that in terms of brand, there's only one player now: blank.page. And it has two parts:
- Editor: a free text editor on the browser.
- Collections: a series of interactive writing prompts created by various authors to be written in our Editor.
In terms of aesthetics, Collections will no longer look like physical notebooks. I'll also try to communicate more clearly what they are: emails with a context and instruction to write in blank.page. That's it.
A sneak peak of the soon-to-be-killed home page.
My mission with blank.page has always been to encourage and inspire people to write more. This can be achieved, as Manuel suggested, with a community-driven approach, where people connect and support each other around writing prompts. The community is the place where the experience both starts and ends.
I can certainly see the potential there, especially as an acquisition model to convert "free" members into paid customers. But I'm also aware that building and maintaining a community requires a massive effort. And, for various reasons, I'm not as attracted to that as I am to building tools around writing.
I want the Collections experience to be focused on the Editor, and the interactive prompts that are only made possible with our very own Page Builder. That's our secret sauce.
So, where does the community fit here?
I even want to stop calling it a "Community" altogether (more of a "Social Publication" for the time being). It's primarily a place to read what others wrote with the same prompt you did. And then —secondary and optionally— provide feedback and comments to each other.
Could Discourse be configured in a way that it feels more of a (social) blog than a community? Structurally, it would still be a forum, but concept-wise, it doesn't need to feel as active as what people expect from an online “community”. The hierarchy could look like something like this:
- Category: Collection name (Contra la página en blanco)
- Sub-category: Prompt name (Escribe lo que ves — try it)
- Topic: User submission (Rene's submission — read it)
- Replies: regular Discourse replies
- Topic: User submission (Rene's submission — read it)
- Sub-category: Prompt name (Escribe lo que ves — try it)
We could even embed Discourse comments into our own submission page (we call it Reader), so users can share their post in a link and give a glimpse of the social aspect.
The new flow I’m envisioning looks like this:
Anyways, I really want to hear his thoughts about this. I see a lot of potential working with him to put this thing together. If you’re looking for someone to design and set up your online community, I strongly recommend to reach out to Manuel.
Next up: Back to the drawing board. I want to sketch some wireframes of the new Collections website.