Drawing The (Guide)lines: Part 1

As Part of my new role as Utopian's Chief Content Officer, I am responsible for our new guidelines. This is going to be a pretty big change. Up until now, we've had a fairly comprehensive set of guidelines for contributors, whereas moderators relied on the questionnaire for the most part.

We're kinda flipping that.

The new guidelines for contributors will be much more flexible. We want our contributors to create a variety of posts in a variety of formats. We know that many of the most significant posts related to open source use our tags as an afterthought, and we love that. We want to provide incentives for you to do your thing, not to be the sole reason you're posting.

The new guidelines for moderators, on the other hand, are about to become much more robust. We're going to ask them to use their judgement a lot more, and we want to give them the tools to do so. You may have seen the #iamutopian series of posts by @rosatravels, in which she shares the work she's been doing researching to help her formulate the Translations category guidelines. That's the sort of thinking we want to encourage community managers to engage in. We plan to make the moderation guidelines public, but that's mostly for transparency, and for contributors who actively want to know. If all you want to do is write your post about whatever contribution you're making, we want to stay out of your way.

My plan is to use this platform to help formulate my own thoughts on the guidelines, both for the Blog category - which I am writing - and for all other categories, where I'll be editing and providing assistance and guidance as needed.

What's a blog post?

The first thing I have to tackle, as I write the guidelines for the categorym is this very basic question. I've had multiple blogs, been blogging for nearly 20 years. But the definition of "blog post" has changed a lot over time. Theoretically, any post to Steem could be considered a blog post. So we have to narrow the scope.

Image credit: Firmbee on Pixabay
I wrote a fairly simple guide on how to write a Utopian blog post a few weeks ago, which people have found useful. So that's a pretty good starting point. I'm going to quote myself, here, in the hopes that y'all forgive me:

We are not interested in duplicated content. If all of the information you're presenting in a post about an open source project is available at their website or Steemit account, you aren't bringing the kind of value we want to see, unless it's your project. What do we want to see? Your views, and how your experience has informed them. We want opinions. We want personal stories of your use of the project. We want to know how it affected your life. You think it's awesome? Great! Now... why do you think it's awesome? That's what we want to know!

You might think "but people want to know about the project! They don't care about me!" And you'd be wrong. We can find out about the project from its creators, we can google. We're on a blogging system built on a blockchain. The human, personal, element is what will make your post truly shine.

Here's another way of thinking about it: A blog post is a story. The author has something to tell the readers, and they're telling it in this format. It needs to have a point of view, which all stories have. And it needs to be the poster's point of view, because blog posts are about self expression. And, yes, this is all true when the story is about an open source project. It's can be the story of the project's creator(s), or that of one of its users. It needs to be more factual than fanciful. And it needs to be yours.

Image credit: Trixieliko in Pixabay
The tricky part is going to be formulating these thoughts into a list of guidelines that is useful to moderators and then formulating those guidelines into metrics that can be used to score posts. Because our questionnaire, right now, is only useful for some posts. And we want a more comprehensive solution.

Your Thoughts

I also want to hear from the community on this. While work on the guidelines is an internal process, we are as much of a community as we are a company. Specifically, I'd like to know how you would define a "proper" blog post. Not necessarily a great blog post. That's for later. Right now, I just want to know what you think should, and should not, be included in the category. This is particularly important to me, as some folks seem to think that "blog" is a category for "none of the other things," and I strongly disagree with that.