Please make sure to recommend this diary. See below why.
We are entering into the final full month before an important election. Very many of you have been very active, canvassing, volunteering, donating, phone banking, etc. We are all grateful for your efforts. But now is not a time to get our eyes off the ball. On the contrary.
This diary is the first hopefully in a successful series of diaries meant to help the whole DKos community get focussed on actionable items that may help secure the November elections. See below for details on
- how this series of motherships will operate, and
- what exactly needs to be done during the last weeks before the election.
- Recommend this diary.
- Keep this diary fast loading: do not post unnecessary images or videos
- Before you post a comment, be aware that replies to the first few comments are reserved for specific uses. Post other comments further below.
- Use the first comment to promote other action diaries.
- Be ready to recommend the next Action Diary Mothership. Volunteer to host one. See below for details.
- Take action. Every little bit helps. There are many of us. Together, we can achieve a lot even if we do only a little bit each.
A mothership for action diaries
All the diaries on the recommended list are interesting and worth reading. Unfortunately, many, many diaries calling for action, diaries were our help is needed go unnoticed as they fly too quickly off the recent diary list.
This mothership and all Action Diary Motherships that will follow are a way to rescue the various action diaries.
The series of action diary motherships will focus on actionable items. These diaries are meant to help with the coordination of activists efforts within the DKos community, and to rescue other related action diaries.
Also, a lot of good information is posted within diaries, but is then lost or forgotten. An important secondary item is to encourage the community to contribute the information back into wiki articles.
The first article to get completed is the 2008 Election Action page.
The plan is to constantly have an Action Diary Mothership on the recommended list starting today up to the Nov. 4th elections. The plan is to have a morning and an evening mothership to that there is always one on the rec. list 24/24. If you are interested in hosting such a diary, please sign up on the Action Diary Motheships page.
Post 2008 Elections: Barack Obama has always told that he would still need us after his election and inauguration. He cannot change the country alone, and there will still be need for action after November and after January 2009.
After the elections, there may not be a need to have an Action Diary Mothership on the rec. list all the time. The initial plan is to have one such diary every 6 days starting Nov. 5th, so that we have at least one recommended diary weekly to help the community focus on taking action. The 6 days turnover will ensure that every day of the week is covered in rotation, for the benefit of people who can/cannot visit Daily Kos only on certain days.
The duty of the next Action Diary Mothership diarist (and every subsequent diary in the series) is to summarize the whole discussion in the previous (this) mothership diary into the new diary.
Nothing is won, yet
The elections are fast approaching, but we really cannot take the result for granted. One thing that is of particular concern to me is that the polls, although they now favour Obama, do not and cannot reflect the percentage of voters who will be disenfranchised one way or another. People honestly reply to the pollsters that they will vote for Obama, but neither those people nor the pollsters have a way to tell how many of those votes will actually count. See all the excellent diaries giving examples of shenanigans used by the Republicans to suppress the votes. For this reason, we cannot rely too much on the polls but must work until the finish line has been crossed.
Information is being lost
A lot of information passes through the diary list every day. Some excellent diaries provided original ways to take action. The links to the donation page has been posted many times and those who want to donate already know where to do so. But what about other information which may not be so obvious. I remember a very good diary encouraging us all to spend some time commenting on national and regional blogs, forums and media web sites.
I just created a new wiki page at dkosopedia to list all 2008 Election Action items. There is so much more that can be done beside donating, even if you don't want to canvass or phone strangers.
Let's make this page a comprehensive, organized list of how best to spend our time and energy between now and November.
Rescuing Dkosopedia
Really, in all the years I have been reading diaries here, I have never seen Daily Kos' very own wiki ( http://www.dkosopedia.com/ ) being advertised or promoted. For all the activity in the comment section of the hundreds of diaries every day, very little of the useful information finds its way into the wiki, where a nice summary would be useful on each topic.
Reading the 2008 Election page today at dkposopedia, one wouldn't know that Joe Biden is the vice-presidential candidate, and Sarah Palin is not mentioned at all on that page, either. Palin's own page is surprisingly very little documented, although a couple of people have tried to post some relevant information that we learned during the last month.
There already was an Action page, but it has last been updated in 2005.
The proper use of the wiki.
The first thing to do, if you don't already have an account there, is to register at dkosopedia. It's even easier than registering at dailykos.com itself!
However, if you are a wiki newbie, make sure you follow some simple guidelines before editing. Do not post controversial, unverified information. It will be promptly deleted by another editor and you'd be wasting both your time and their time. If in doubt, use your common sense.
Let's do it
Let's see how much organized we can get. Let's make a certain community organiser proud of our organized community!
Replies to the first few comments are restricted for special uses:
- List of Child diaries.
- The proper use of DKosopedia.
- 2008 Elections Action.
- Other discussion starts here..