We had a fun panel last Friday at NN10. Hosted by Sara R, the panel also included TexDem, Meteor Blades, Sandy on Signal, and yours truly, all talking about Community Building on the Netroots.
After it was over, Sara R asked me to post my remarks in a diary this week. Because I'm scared of her I'd do anything for Sara, you'll find my speech below the fold.
I have the distinction of being the newest blogger – by far – on this panel. For our purposes today, that may be the most interesting thing about me. I had never even READ a blog until two summers ago, when I first heard the name Sarah Palin. That Twilight Zone moment sent me searching for information about the mystery woman, first on Keith’s Countdown page and from there to Daily Kos.
I read other blogs, but Daily Kos became my home community very quickly. I posted my first diary just last summer, and it was a mere nine months ago that I started posting under the tag Nurse Kelley Sez.
Who would guess that a broken down old nurse would have a knack for blogging? If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be standing here at Netroots, talking about community building, I’d have said, "Darlin, that dog won’t hunt." Yet here I am, charged with pulling wisdom out of my ass while I tell you my story. More than 40% of my diaries have been on the recommended list, and that’s pretty astonishing when you consider I’ve written about such earth-shattering topics as constipation. I held a fart joke contest for Netroots for the Troops. I’ve written about Colorado politics a few times, and about healthcare reform many times. I’ve been known to rant when the mood strikes me, but mostly I write what I call nursing diaries.
And therein lies the brilliance behind the success of the blog called Daily Kos. It is, first and foremost, a site dedicated to electing more and better Democrats. As of a few weeks ago the site had registered more than a quarter of a million users. How did THAT happen? And why are so many of the early users still around?
I blame Markos.
When Markos was running the place in the early days he let people get away with just about anything. My friend Frankie started blogging about gardening – gardening! On a political site! – every Saturday morning. Well, it turns out Democrats care about more than politics; a lot of users liked talking about their yards and gardens on a Saturday morning, and Markos let it go. Sheer laziness on his part, I’m guessing. You can still find Frankie’s garden blog on Daily Kos, every Saturday morning. On the rec list.
Another nice lady called phillygal had a cat. Her cat’s name was Pootie. She wrote a diary one night about Pootie, and guess what? Democrats love their pets! Once again that lazy Markos didn’t put his foot down when he had the chance, and now – years later – you’ll find a pootie diary on his pretty political site every single day of the year.
What do garden blogs and pootie diaries have to do with community building? To use the popular parlance, they’re social networking sites. My first friends at Daily Kos were made in the pootie diaries. During that crazy 2008 campaign I usually took an hour in the afternoon to visit with the pootie people. One of the friends I made there introduced me to NFTT. I found I Got the News Today and, while it’s not a social community per se, I saw the same names over and over again in the comments, so I’d read their diaries when they wrote them. I got drawn into a long-running Saturday night series called WYFP – does everyone know what that stands for? No? [audience shouts out "What's your fucking problem?!] – and I met more people there. There are a lot of gay and lesbian and transgender Democrats, and THEY all love their yards and their pets, and they care about dead soldiers, and most of them have a few fucking problems, so I started talking to them when they wrote diaries.
What else? Oh! A lot of community building goes on around bad diaries and comments. Users come together and close ranks against the most trollish users while sharing recipes, pootie pictures, and more than a little foul language. I attribute some of my popularity to my ability to morph from the loving goddess Nurse Kelley into a purse-lipped shrew shouting "shame, shame" and using language the Anglo Saxons understood.
As a first-time blogger I didn’t know if there was an accepted way to act, so I was just myself. I came for the politics, the saying goes, but I stayed for the community.* That lazy Markos hadn’t put his thumb down when he had the chance years ago, so one night last fall it never occurred to me that he’d mind if I told his readers how to avoid the flu. Nursing is what I know, after all, and if the community didn’t want to read my ramblings, I’d find out soon enough.
As it turns out, Democrats worry about getting the flu, and they have dry skin in the winter, and they suffer from back pain and depression and, yes, even constipation. The people I’d met in other places, some of whom already overlapped quite a bit, were the first supporters of Nurse Kelley Sez. A new community built around my diaries, a hybrid community that now also included the elderly and people with health concerns and, quite honestly, people who came around because I’m liable to talk about ANYTHING and they’re hoping to see a train wreck.
Somewhere along the way I began hearing from folks who are facing severe, often life-threatening problems. Sara and I first got to know each other when I emailed her about a pootie person with cancer. She made a quilt for her and she made a quilt for a friend with early onset dementia. One of my guys, who’d already lost an arm to cancer and was facing treatment for a brand new cancer, got a quilt from Sara in, like, a week or ten days, and she’s working on one for a sweet man whose companion of over 30 years just died. Sara’s community and mine became intertwined.
This growing community of pootie people, veterans, healthcare workers, quilters, whiners, gays and lesbians, gimps, oddballs, old farts, hospice patients, and a stray jotterbot or two – not to mention a certain beloved Front Pager – made my next project possible. Five months ago, some of us got to talking in a diary about disabilities, and we decided to start a new diary series, a place for people with disabilities to gather and share their experiences. It turns out that 20% of the population has a physical or mental problem of some kind, and that number is even higher on the blogs. Probably much higher. KosAbility has been a success from the get-go, finding bloggers of huge talent who often hadn’t written before, beyond a random comment or two. I still write as Nurse Kelley Sez from time to time, but my greatest joy now comes from encouraging new writers and activists. We helped create a community that was out there all the time, waiting for an invitation – and that feels damn good.
I'm sure glad Markos is lazy!