(Re)Positioning ourselves
There are a lot of interesting learning through the experience of trying to start a magazine. Question started from what is a magazine and what should be the scope? While there are benefit of making it periodic to ensure we keep making progress on collecting cases and its experience so that we will be able to build up database for lessons and to distill principles for future projects, the downside is that the magazine itself requires significant effort to maintain and to promote.
A question about the concept of pipeline has been brought up in weekend meetups with writers: "In publications we call it pipeline, how a reader who never heard of this magazine get to know it and becomes a reader?"
The goal for having Community Story was a hook and supporting the pipeline, but no the hypothesis has been proved in theory it is wrong. The value of Community Story heavily overlap with social media and directories, and Community Story does not motivate readers to share the magazine with their project coordinator, the target audience.
Do we really need community story? It does not build pipeline and occupy efforts. While we have communities where project happens and organizations that facilitate projects which is precisely our consumers. We should cut down the Community Story and concentrate our effort in Field Trip articles that is really valuable to our target audiences and the consumers of the knowledge we collected.
We should make the contribution in Field Trip adding case studies become an activity more fun like a football game, and make the platform more open. We should have more people contribute and consume it as our first priority. And to enable more people to share valuable knowledge and observing people are happy to be mentoring without de-identifying themselves, we are enabling new format for case study by allowing people to submit contact point and the knowledge and experience it provides to our readership besides of static case studies.
The Community Story will be removed within 6 months after finishing the pending list and replacing the submission form with a form for people to request posting content on our social media page as an alternative.
To gamify the contribution experience under existing demand of the magazine, we are going to run a campaign "Occupy the Blueprint" inviting people to write and submit to the magazine, making their experience publicly and freely accessible in their own language with our structure. Fighting against the editorial team "why the grassroots experience should be coded into Encyclopaedia by some people called themselves editor and hide those valuable information under a paywall?"
With this campaign we can focus in extracting lessons to compose our database, writing comparative analysis, and helping our partners to mine practical principles for their workshops. This also make lessons centralized collection to search for relative cases and experiences.
