To Contributors

First, thank you for your interest in contributing to The Machuca Elements newsletter. This newsletter is only possible if there are constant contributions to keep it going. I’d like to share the vision of the newsletter and its purpose and then below outline how I think we can get there.

Vision

As mentioned in the first issue:

A weekly-ish newsletter about life, events, culture, spiritual development, education, communities, permaculture and regeneration in the Machuca Valley region of Costa Rica.  Covering communities of Tacotal, La EcoVilla, Allegria, EcoVilla San Mateo, Maderal, Dulce Nombre, Libertad and anyone else living in the area.

Created for the local communities and written by the members of these same communities, this is a space to share news, major project updates, introduction of new initiatives as well as opinion pieces that are relevant to the area.  But we have WhatsApp Groups already - why do we need something else!?  Great question! The Newsletter provides a slightly longer-form format with a bit more editorial input as well a historic record that is openly available to everyone. A shared history of sorts that we can read now and later and celebrate our progress, perhaps even, dare I say it, for our children to read.  Slower pace, longer form, more focused content that is thoughtfully produced and hopefully a pleasure to read!

The vision is that this newsletter will be fully decentralized and will be written, edited and published in it’s entirety by the people living in the area with direct input from the reader’s to ensure relevant topics are elevated.  Yes, that means you are invited to participate and create, edit or review content before it’s published as well as steer the structure, frequency, type of content and anything else about this Newsletter.

Nothing has changed yet, this is still very much the vision. How we get to that vision I outline below, but first some guidelines for potential contributors:

Guidelines

We are interested in topics that meet the following criteria:

1. Relevant - the topic must be relevant to the Machuca Valley communities, either because it’s directly applicable to them such as say a local recycling program or because its relevant to the current experience of communities - say for example “pet issues in communal settings”. The topic could start out more macro such as say “Global Warming”, but it’s important to bring it down to the relevance and applicability to Machuca Valley. Yes, we can talk about how planet is breaking down, but we want to make sure we’re looking at it through the lens of our day-to-day lives here and actions we could be doing here today.

2. Well-Researched - ideally the topic you are writing about is something you are already very familiar with because of your expertise or if its something that is interesting to you, but you are not an expert, you have researched it well using multiple sources with various biases and perhaps local interviews.

3. Hyper-Local - this is a repeat of the “Relevance” point, but worth re-iterating, we are not trying to be a global newsletter with thousands of followers, we are trying to be the most relevant local newsletter for those living in the Machuca Valley area or those who are planning to move here

4. Objective - one can say that in this day and age, nothing is objective anymore, you’re either mainstream or alternative, right or left, rational or conspiracy minded, etc. It’s important to not take a specific side as much as we can, and better yet to cover multiple perspectives to get to as much of an objective view as possible.

5. Actionable - ideally the topics we cover can result in some sort of action from our readers. This could be as simple as bringing awareness to local markets and guiding readers towards shopping in those markets or as big as “building regeneratively” vs “building traditionally”. A call to action is not always necessary, though certainly welcome, but whatever information we present should be directly or indirectly actionable by people residing here.

6. Non-Commercial - we want to avoid promoting commercial endeavors as much as possible. Even if those projects have a regenerative aspect to them, we would include them as part of some larger overview. So for example if we’re covering local farmers, instead of promoting any single one, we can write a piece about “local coffee producers” where we cover all of them. Or we cover all of them in a series of posts.

7. Length - about 1,000 words. This is not hard and fast rule of course, but consider that average reading speed is 200 words-per-minute, we’re going for a 4-7 minute reading time, enough to engage the reader in the topic, but not so long as to deter the reader from actually reading it.

These guidelines themselves are of course open to change as we evolve, this is just a first pass.

Logistics

The process is usually pretty straight forward and seamless. First write your initial draft in google docs and share it with me(antong@gmail.com). Ideally your first draft is submitted by Wednesday before the publication of Sunday that week.

Depending on how much editorial is needed, I may make some suggestions and we’ll go back and forth until you’re happy with the final result. I may pull in Jeff Benson if needed who is a professional editor. You hold the final say on whether you’re satisfied with the story or not.

By Friday or Saturday of that week we should be in good shape with the newsletter finalized. At that point I’ll port it to Substack, make any formatting changes needed and add title art which is usually ChatGPT generated based on the content of the article.

On Sunday morning I hit publish, it does out to all e-mail subscribers(about 200 as of Nov 2024) and share it in the main MV Neighbors chat as well as ESM Chat.

That’s it! Can’t wait to see what you come up with!