Medium Writing Cooperative
The Value of Helping Each Other
The Concept
Recently, a few of us began editing each others’ writing here on Medium. We immediately realized the potency and efficiency of this kind of community. Now we want to share this experience with other Medium writers who lack editing support.
We want to build a community of editors and writers so no one has to write alone.
The founders of this community agree that it should be native to Medium. Publishing at Medium is mandatory for all submitted articles.
Our Challenges
These principles presented us with a set of problems:
- How do we keep track of our community?
- How do writers communicate with each other and share their drafts publicly or privately?
- What procedures do we use for admission into the community?
The Publication
We have devised a way to solve these problems and to make our editing procedure open source within the community using a Medium publication.
We created one for our community named The Writing Cooperative. Within the publication we created an editing pipeline called the Draft List.
The Cooperative
Our members share the link to their draft in a note on the Draft List. One of the editors then publishes the link publicly. The list essentially acts as a public “BETA test” for your writing. Since every member is both a writer and an editor, everyone is collaborating.
The Profiles
To allow for private collaboration, we created member profiles. We communicate with each other with private notes on our profile pages. New members are asked to create a profile to gain access to the community.
Your profile will be published in The Writing Cooperative publication so other members can contact you privately.
The Community
Once your profile is complete you will become a writer for our publication and gain access to the Draft List. You can then share links to your drafts both publicly and privately.
Remember, DO NOT submit your draft to our publication. We are not an actual publication; we are a community.
Instead, link your draft in a note. The community will then help with the editing process with notes on your draft. Once your article is published or two months have passed we will remove it from the Draft List.
This community will depend on its members for value through editing. Regardless of your experience or skill, you can contribute by reading drafts and noting errors or even concepts that are unclear. These notes help authors expound on ideas. We believe everyone can help edit.
As writers, we appreciate the quality that editing brings and see tremendous value in building such a community.
Join The Writing Cooperative
If the idea of crowd editing your work before you publish is appealing,
you are welcome to join us!
We ask you to introduce yourself by creating a Medium post that acts as your community profile. Your name should be the title of your post, and the body should be a brief introduction. Please include a photograph, links to your best work, and a short biography that gives us a glimpse of who you are. Please click here to see examples from all of our members.
Your profile will become an article in our publication. We use these profile pages to communicate with each other privately through notes, to endorse each other publicly through testimonials, and keep an eye on our community metrics.
Once your profile is complete, please write a note somewhere on the side of your profile with the following text (copy/paste):
@manfraiya @sandfarnia @justincox @writingsolo @julie
This note will notify our editors of your profile. We will then make you a writer of The Writing Cooperative publication, which grants you access to the community.
Welcome to The Writing Cooperative.
