Dopp Juice Archive

Genderfork, a community art blog project I started a year and a half ago, has taken off. It’s running three posts a day, each one representing a different face or voice from the community, and has about 5,000 regular readers. From the outside, it seems like this would be an insane amount of work to maintain, but it’s turns out that it’s not, because I’m not doing the blogging — 10 passionate volunteers are. My job at this point is just to take care of them, and to continue making things better.

A bit about how we’ve set this up…

• Everybody who’s helping is doing so because they asked if they could. When I realized I needed help last December, I put out a post asking people to email me if they were interested. Since then, they’ve mostly just come knocking at my inbox without my asking.
• Each volunteer has their own responsibilities, and their commitment can be met with less than two hours of work a week (this usually goes for me, too).
• We separated the tasks of preparing blog posts from deciding when they should be published, so most of the volunteers can blog several weeks’ worth content in one sitting if they choose to.
• Whenever one of us has a question or get stuck, we try to run our ideas past the rest of the volunteers to get feedback on it.  This has helped keep the vision for the site a collective agreement, and it creates a sense of shared responsibility — we’ve really become a team.  (We’ve also started accumulating a stack of silly inside jokes — the inevitable consequence of liking each other.)

Here’s what’s on our technical toolbelt….

• WordPress blogging software
• A Google Groups mailing list so our volunteers can talk to each other
• Several Google Docs set up for sharing submissions between volunteers and keeping them organized
• Tweet Later for managing the content in our daily twitter feed

We’ve souped up our WordPress installation with the following uber-useful plugins:

• Contact Form 7 for our submission forms
• IntenseDebate for better conversations in the comments
• Flickr Blog This to Draft to let photo curation volunteers blog directly from Flickr without it showing up on the site immediately
• Role Manager to let me configure exactly what Contributor accounts have access to (i found this necessary for allowing volunteers to blog photos and videos)

And it’s going well. We know this because our community takes the time to tells us this over and over again, every single day.  Here’s a note we received anonymously last week:

“This blog is wonderful =). Who knows you could be saving peoples lives by doing this.

“I’ve read all the archives, and when i came to the photo of the person with long hair in a brown leather jacket, a strong serious face with a beard and quite obvious breasts, it finally occurred to me, ignore the fact that i am gender queer myself, “this isn’t an exemption to some rule, or people being different – it is people, we’re alive and living, this is who we are”. It is legitimate and beautiful, no different from anything else people do. Thank you because it has taken a long while to be able to feel like that.”

And here’s a handful of the direct messages people have sent us through our twitter account:

“YAY Genderfork! -this site has been one of several things that has enabled me to explore and affirm my gender. Thanks!”

“hi, i’m more than a little forked at the moment, so it’s good to see you around here”

“the tweets are great. Some of them were how I felt when I was 13 so it’s cool that peeps can now share that and not just bottle it up”

“i went clothes shopping yesterday and felt totally confident in both the men’s & women’s sections for the 1st time.”

“Such gorgeous people, such moving words.”

“thank you for existing.”

So that’s what we’re building right now. Neat, huh?

Stick around. There’s a lot more to come.

When I started Genderfork a year and a half ago, I made a deal with myself: I would only attempt to keep it alive if I could keep maintenance work down to an hour or two, once or twice a month.  Even that would be a lot for me, but I figured I could commit to it for a few months and see what happened.

WordPress has a nifty little feature that lets you determine in advance the date and time a blog post should go live.  Flickr has a nifty little feature that lets you blog photos directly from a photographer’s photostream to a WordPress blog (as long as that photographer has given strangers permission to blog their photos).  Some other brilliant creature in the world wrote a script that turns Flickr-to-Wordpress blog posts into drafts instead of live posts.  Between the three of these free gifts from the web, I was able to set up a photo-a-day website where I had legal permission to blog other people’s photos and could maintain it with, literally, 2-4 hours a month of work.  I could ignore the entire project for weeks on end, even though it was still blogging daily.

When I put it that way, it sounds a bit like I didn’t love the project, but the opposite is true.  This was the only possible way the project could have survived.  If it had required more than that from me, it would have gone the way of all my other unrequited time-consuming projects and ended up in a large long tupperware container under my bed.  I’ve learned that once something goes into that bin of lost loves, it never comes out.

The other day, as I was waddling back through San Francisco still carrying luggage from my impulsive trip to Portland, I ended up on a street car next to Emchy, the founder of Queer Open Mic.  I excitedly told her that just this week, I had enlisted some more organizing help for the event, and now the project was much more self-sustaining.  I buzzed about how our new venue, Modern Times Bookstore, has a widely-read email list and calendar, and that they’ve been doing most of our marketing for us without any effort on our part, and packing the show every time.

Still bouncing, I went on to tell her that Genderfork is now run by a team of ten volunteers, and that the team manages the blog content themselves.  All I need to do is some really high-level editing that only takes a few hours a month — I’m back to my original time commitment, only now the website now has four times as much content and an audience of thousands!  

She smiled and said, “You’re good at that.  Making things big and awesome.”

I chuckled.  “No, I’m good at making things that can live without me.  Whenever something needs me, it dies.”

Oh hey, I haven’t blogged here in a month.  Why?  Because I’ve been way too busy with life!  To catch you up, here’s an Executive Summary of Exciting Things that are in my line of sight right now:

Social Media

Genderfork

I recently added a form that lets people tell me whatever’s on their mind about gender anonymously. Dozens of people pounced on it, and my little blog curation brain exploded.   We’ve now got an active talkative community, a constant feed of brilliant thoughts, an influx of new profiles, and a really nifty twitter stream.  I have a thousand things to say about all this — on anonymity and gender consciousness — but I’m still trying to collect my thoughts.

Boffery

We showed up in Forbes.com, the Village Voice, a Fox News late show, and — somehow — Italy. A thousand people are knocking on our doors for beta invites right now, and we’re working our asses off to get the site into shape.  We’re also thrilled about bigger questions that this buzz has brought up in the communities around us: How do we currently talk about sexuality with our trusted friends, and where we want to take that conversation from here?

Ventana

Cerado Ventana is evolving like crazy into something of endless potential.  BlogHer’s using it to make search widgets (so gorgeous!), Social Media Club is passing it around as a member directory, and, yes, we even got Barack Obama on board (well, okay, not him personally, but still). Inside scoop: we’re working on a new major iteration of the system which should be live within a month.  Expect another major influx of useful widgets and customizable iphone apps as soon as I can set that free.

Art

Can I Sit With You, Too?

Hey, guess what? I’m in a book!  And the book happens to be fantastic — it’s full of stories of social awkardness in the grade school social scene… stories that are so absurd you know they have to be true.  Mine’s called “Will you go out me?”  (yep — i’m telling that one).  The proceeds benefit a special needs program that directly takes care of some of my favorite bloggers’ kids, so it’s extra-worth the cover price.  Go buy it. You’ll love it.  Swear.

Mosaics not Mortagages

This one’s not mine, but it’s something I want you to know about.  My good friend, artist John T. Unger, is using the recession as a reason to get more creative.  He’s been designing his dream studio for about a decade and is finally ready to build it, but now can’t get a loan because the banks are too screwed up with the economy.  So instead, he’s selling gorgeous high-end custom mosaics to raise the funds.  If you know anyone who’d be interested in this shinyshiny art, please send them John’s way.

Queer Open Mic

Hey hey hey — Queer Open Mic is THIS FRIDAY! Come play!  We went underground for a little while due to a loss of venue, but now we’re back and better than ever at Modern Times Bookstore (it’s perfect!). This Friday, we’re featuring Aimee Suzara, who rocks my socks. Sign-ups are at 7pm and show’s at 7:30. See you there!

Life

::Stupid Grin::

I accidentally fell in love… but that’s all I’m gonna say about it… unless you get me out for dinner… in which case I’ll tell you everything.