1. If you haven’t already, register for The CUNY Academic Commons using your CUNY email address. (You can change your email address for notification purposes later). Log on.
2. Go to https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers. Click the blue “Create New Paper” button in the upper right corner.
3. Begin writing in the editor, or copy and paste a piece of writing — from a class or a paper — into the editor. It doesn’t have to be perfect or complete – your peers will help you think through the process!
4. Click the gear in the bottom left of the screen to open up the paper settings. Choose whether you want to make your paper public, or private except for selected users, or selected Commons groups.
5. Click the blue “Publish” button on the bottom half of the screen. If you want to ask a question about your work, leave a comment on one of your paragraphs. Even better, notify a particular user of your question by mentioning their username preceded by the “@” symbol in the comment (i.e. “@username”). If you want to share your paper with a broader audience, copy and paste the paper link into one of your social media platforms.
6. Navigate back towards the Social Paper hub page by clicking on the link at the top left of the screen, or going to https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers. Select someone else’s paper to read and leave a comment either on a paragraph or at the end of the paper.
7. Tell a Graduate Center peer to repeat steps 1 through 7.