CAll for Blog Writers/Contributors to a QA blog

[Phil Leggiere]

Is there anyone out there who wants to help organize a daily blog (which hopefully can grow into a full-fledged news and publishing site related to Civil liberties and anti-authoritarian topics.)?

We're looking for a few serious regular contributor writers, bloggers, researchers who want to make QA a must-read source .

[Phil Leggiere]

A news blog affiliated with QA and tentatively called “Don’t Tase Me Bro” will be launching in the next week. Michael is currently designing it in moveable Type. The goal of the blog will be to monitor news relevant to the state of US civil and personal liberty, the culture and politics of authoritarianism, and forms of dissent against it. The blog is the first experiment in what we hope will develop into a multi-dimensional publishing/media platform including investigative reporting, essays, video, satire and other forms of creative dis-authoritarian (thanking Yodhe for the term) projects.
If you’re interesting in contributing to the blog as a researcher and/or writer please let me know here or at [e-mail].

[RU Sirius]

This is fantasic Phil. Naturally I will be participating and I'm looking forward to seeing who else gets involved...

RU

[Phil Leggiere]

Great. Michael Roberts is working on the Moveable Type set-up now and I expect him to send a link to the blog site in the next couple of days. I'm trying to post the volunteers wanted note a few other places on mondo globo discussions to see if any response, but in any case I can get momentum going to start a decent posting flow (tho I'm working 55-60 hrs week gigs currently), and hopefully once people see it happening some will want get in the game. I think getting some good civil liberties and other bloggers involved to cross-post or guest post is also an option once it's running and I'm drafting a pitch letter to involve some known bloggers or at least getting ours linked to and mentioned by them, but don't want to start sending out until there's a good week or two of steady news flow from the blog.

[Feral!]

I'm happy to help out. Do you want to keep the subject matter pretty focused? Will you be limiting/editing/selecting the posts?

[Phil Leggiere]

Hi Feral- Certainly no limits on amount of posting, we want to develop above all a strong daily news flow. Writers should also have autonomy, and responsibility, over style and copy (the basic screening will be writers will have to be given access as users beforehand to post, which Michael is setting up, so I'll email him today and tell him you're in). As far as subject matter there's latitude but goal at this stage is to focus on becoming the most comprehensive "one-stop shop" for timely info about the state of personal liberties and civil liberties. That means news, exposes about powerful institutions (govts. govt. agencies, schools, police forces,churches, corporations and other entities) encroaching on the letter and spirit of civil liberty and in the govts case the bill of rights. It also means instances of dissent and creative resistance against the politics and culture of authoritarianism. So there should be a lot of room but still a sharp focus.

[RU Sirius]

I would suggest that the entries be very focused. Also, there's nothing wrong with lots of links to other sites (in contradiction to what some people have suggested)... to be the one-stop clearing house for this type of information. It would also be great to get lots of eyes on this... even if you don't have time to blog, everybody has a home town (or home city) newspaper, everybody gets info from somewhere that other people might not... obscure blogs or websites, tv, radio, whatever...

I would suggest a process where more opinionated, ranty types of stuff get submitted for consideration. I would also suggest vetting people before giving them a free voice on the blog (Feral is fine) to maintain quality, etc.

R>

[Phil Leggiere]

Right. Users do need to get log-in clearance before they're set up to do posting, and they will be vetted to at least establish they really understand the overall goals and purposes of this project. And a set of minimal but firm editorial guidelines should be established. I'll try to draft something brief and succinct that covers the distinction between news and information based posts (which may include opinion certainly) and just plain straight-out rants (which may eventually find a place in a seperate section for polemics or opinion but are extraneous to the kind of info-rich blog this is going to need to be to be relevant.

[Feral!]

Yup - that is what I was driving at. I think we all can use some editing, feedback and oversight - and there is plenty of room on the forums for going off on rants or getting in to the weeds. I think it's good for anyone to be able to submit material, but someone (or several someones) should be responsible for at least a quick and dirty vetting of stuff before it goes up.

[Michael]

Only blog authors can submit anything under MT. So basically our anointing of a user as a blog author is what constitutes our vetting process, such as it is. There's no way for an anonymous schmuck to submit anything for approval to the blog, in the MT paradigm.

*That* would require a bubble-up news aggregator function, where the community as a whole votes stories in. DailyKos is run on that basis, with considerable success, but if you don't have a core group of contributors, it can be difficult to get that off the ground, and frankly I'm not sure if it's not a kind of special combination of circumstances that allows it to succeed. We can do something like it with Drupal, should we feel the need (Drupal is installed in the "community" section of the Wiki site).

For this particular effort, I think we're after a traditional-model blog, with a small group of contributors making regular posts. The submission route in this case would simply be a contact, or a comment on an already-existing post that one of the regular contributors would work up into a post. People understand that model well; BoingBoing uses this same software to great effect.

[Michael]

Hey, all -- to participate in the blogging project, go to the blog at http://mondoglobo.wftk.org/blog/qa and register there to comment on the first post. Then drop me a line at [e-mail] and I will enable your authoring privileges (subject, I suppose, to approval by the Supreme Soviet, which in this case would appear to be RU and Phil.)

This way, your name and email and everything are set up exactly the way you like it before I mess with anything. OK?

[Phil Leggiere]

Looking good michael. I've signed up and am waiting for the confirm email from mt. Ready to start some initial posting tomorrow. One question, is there a blogroll function there. i've got a list of 15 websites which would be great to include for starters.

[RU Sirius]

Can we get an icon of some sort next to the title of the site? Somehow the humor of it needs a visual...

R>