Some valuable diaries pub'd & repub'd the past 10 days or so - scroll down after this UpSched.
We
MEET Sundays 4pm leftkost time, 7pm east.
UPCOMING SCHEDULES (a.k.a. "
UpScheds") post between Wednesday & Friday weekly. See our
recent & past diaries HERE. See our logobox below for more about Sundays. Click on
♥ FOLLOW at the top of our page to receive our posts in your stream. Diaries can be 1 paragraph, 2, or 20 — on whatever health-medical or related
[even
distantly related
;-)
] concerns that you
our members & friends have in mind to talk and write about.
Revisions/ additions to
UpScheds are shown in
bold as they're added across the week. A sentence or 2 to summarize or introduce diaries in advance can also be commented by scheduled authors, for inclusion at their dates.
June 7 - Open Thread Night & Potluck: "Bring" your favorite summer food, and possibly the recipe for it - moderated by Besame.
June 14 - "A KosAbility Editor's Welcome to New Admin & Editor Crew... & Other Kosaks Interested in Being Them" by mettle fatigue who is (tentatively) also moderating.
This will include some history of KosAbility methods found reasonably successful as tried by postmod and me between about August 2013 and roughly now, give or take a few wrinkles, bells, whistles, and typos. h/t to G. Burgess from Goops and How To Be Them ©1900
June 21 - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AVAILABLE for a diary and a moderator to volunteer.
June 28 - working title/tentative topic "Hearing Loss" by Gwennedd, moderator To be announced when s/he volunteers! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
July 5 - OPEN THREAD NIGHT & POTLUCK: Bring your "once a-PUN a time and your PUN scum!" moderated by moviemeister76
July 12 - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .moderator TBAWSHV
July 19 - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .moderator TBAWSHV
July 26 - "When Stress Pushes You to Burnout" by michelewln and self-moderated.
I'll be talking about feeling under attack when life keeps throwing you more than you think can handle and doesn't ease up. It will be a personal story based on my experiences and how and where I looked for the strength to carry on
August 2 - OPEN THREAD NIGHT & POTLUCK: . . . . . . topic & moderator TBAWSHV |
TENTATIVE INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW-TO-DO-UPSCHEDS ARE BELOW THE ORANGE-PEEL
following
TENTATIVE INSTRUCTIONS & GUIDELINES FOR MODERATORS
DIARIES IN PLANNING PHASE: ❃ wilderness voice hopes to write on 1. vegan gluten free baked goodies & 2. parkinson's. ❃
KosAbility is a 4pm leftkost/7pm east Sunday volunteer diarist community of, by & for people living with disabilities, who love someone with a disability, or who want to know more about the issues. By disability we mean temporary and permanent health/medical conditions — from small, gnawing problems to major, life-threatening ones. Our use of love someone extends to cherished members of other species. ❃ Our discussions are open threads in the context of this community. Feel free to comment on diary topics, ask questions, share something you've learned, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about your situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered.
Members interested in contributing a diary, please post a comment at a Sunday or mid-week UpSched diary saying the date you'd like and a general idea of your topic or working-title. Visitors & friends please send a message to the group so our Admins can contact you.
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TENTATIVE INSTRUCTIONS & GUIDEINES FOR MODERATORS
QUOTED FROM MESSAGES-TO-GROUP THREAD ORIGINALLY TITLED:
"new KosAbility admins & editors please come by today's diary..." (because
"postmod is in some difficulties of the real-life kind, so any
way that you can lend a hand will be valuable")
...moderating may be mostly you come to the diary and comment to the commenters encouragingly, especially newcomers so they feel comfortable with us, and rally the troops if any trolls try to pull any crap.
i don't know if there are any diaries that explain moderating. does anyone know? --mettle fatigue Mon Jun 01, 2015 at 05:51 PM PDT
Chit-chat, conversation, and sometimes (thankfully infrequently) keeping the discussion on track; like 'I know that theoretically, unicorns could fart fairy dust that worsens global warming, but for the purpose of this discussion, we need to limit our selves to this particular aspect....'
One other thing that has happened, again rarely, are some technical glitches that once made a whole diary disappear, a different problem caused by the spambots mistaking a legitimate member for a spammer. In those cases, we [published] a [stand-in] diary to keep people informed what was happening and redirecting them when the diaries reappeared.
Dropping a notice and a link at the Kitchen Table Kibitzing tip jar [after they post at 5pm] that KA is up is something we try to do every week. --postmodernista Mon Jun 01, 2015 at 09:47 PM PDT
I like how this is developing with different people offering to host/mod/write on different Sundays. Signing up for writing or moderating at the weekly UpScheds is easier than dealing with the DK message system. ...we need to be sure someone does a [current] schedule [comment]. [Maybe] each week's moderator could have that responsibility and perhaps...copy/paste [it in]--Besame Tue Jun 02, 2015 at 12:13 PM PDT
Eds&Admins who have volunteered for the moderator "committee" to date:
❃ wilderness voice ❃ Gwennedd ❃ Besame ❃ chicating ❃ moviemeister76 ❃
THANK YOU! :)
Our experienced diarists are often editors and admins highly skilled at self-moderating, putting the logobox into their diaries, and tagging their diaries, of course. So,this buddy-system we're evolving —of pairing up a moderator with each diarist on the schedule&mdas; is purely to offer help and facilitation if the given diarist actually needs help of any of those kinds, or would like other assistance a moderator might provide. We've had a fairly steady trickle of new writers over the past 15 months, so our moderator buddy system is a way to make them welcome and well-supported by the group.
HOW A MODERATOR CAN POST THE SCHEDULE COMMENT DURING SUNDAY DISCUSSION
Early during Sunday discussions, copy the scheduling shown in the first outlined box of the most current UpSched —this can be done from the face of the UpSched: no real need to get into its revision mode— and paste it into a comment, edit/shift the text as needed for readable spacing and to blockquote any individual diary's summary/advance-intro, click Preview to proofread the comment, make any changes or repairs necessary, click Preview to make sure it came out well (you can repeat the Preview and repair process as many times as necessary for a good appearance) and when done click Post.
The schedule comment serves as a first-time schedule announcement for newcomers to KosAbility discussions, and as an opportunity for regulars to post at it their preferred dates and titles or topics for diaries they would like added to the schedule.
The schedule comment can be a little difficult and time-consuming for a writer whose formatting skills aren't fast, so it may be better for someone other than the Moderator-of-the-Day to do it, because it can need pretty focused attention away from the discussion, and the Moderator's number-one job is to facilitate the discussion. So, usually, postmodernista has been Moderator, and mettle fatigue has been doing the schedule comment because being the UpSched-Admin creates reasonable familiarity with the data and coding. Eds and admins who don't have fair experience with DK code probably can help most by moderating, and more code-practiced eds and admins volunteer for the schedule comment if mettle fatigue isn't available. (See also the diary's final paragraph — about the New Diarists group.)
Note: many DK groups use the tipjar as their schedule comment; in those cases the schedule comment is nearly always done by the diarist — not sure if anyone except the diarist can even do a tipjar comment.
TENTATIVE GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW-TO-DO-UPSCHEDS
THIS MID-WEEKLY DIARY AND ITS TAGS ARE THE DATA AND MECHANISM THAT NOTIFY, REMIND, AND ATTRACT HEALTH-INTERESTED AND DISABLED DAILYKOS READERS & WRITERS, their families and friends. DailyKos is replete with diaries by writers who aren't aware of the existence of any of the DK Health-Med & Related Groups (nor of the vast majority of all the DK groups that exist, there just isn't any way to index more than a few of them). But many kosaks and others DO electronically "follow" the tags that serve like library catalog subject headings for all the topics that matter to them. Here's how we connect with them.
KosAbility members and friends post comments at the current Upcoming Schedule diary saying what topics/titles they are offering for which days. (Hopefully, any two who find themselves requesting the same day can reply/comment back'n'forth to each other to work out which of them will instead write on a different day.) As that new data arrives, the designated UpSched-Admin-of-Record (mostly mettle fatigue so far) adds it into the most-recent published UpSched diary as a revision, to keep it current until the next UpSched is published.
The UpSched-Admin also adds Capitalized tags reflecting the new content. A quick, effective way to devise tags without browsing the whole list is to simply copy and capitalize each significant noun in the diary title and, if advisable, each likely associated term. (E.g., if the diary is on Alzheimer's Disease, useful tags are ■ Alzheimer's ■ Memory ■ Cognition ■ Aging ■ plus the group's standard tags: ■ KosAbility ■ Community ■ Disabilities ■ Teaching ■ Chronic Health Conditions ■ (the standard tags also go on all KosAbility's Sunday diaries. mettle fatigue also likes to include Public Health).
On Monday or Tuesday, the UpSchedAdmin copypastes everything from the most-recently published UpSched into a new draft, titled the new draft "KosAbility Upcoming Schedule" with whatever added words (if any) that may be needed, incorporates data from replies posted to the just-done Sunday discussion's schedule comment, and deletes all data relating to that just-done diary/discussion. Tags are copied over from the most-recently published(-and-probably-revised) UpSched, more tags typed for new diary data just added, and the tags relating to the just-done Sunday diary are deleted. (Alternatively, tags for the entire new UpSched can be retyped from scratch — sometimes it's just easier that way.)
The UpSchedAdmin puts this new draft into KosAbility's queue, sets the automatic publishing settings for whenever between Wednesday and Friday seems best, and sends a message-to-the-group that it's in the queue, so any eds or admins with data to add can kosmail that material to the UpSchedAdmin in time for inclusion before publication. (But don't panic: all diaries are infinitely revisable to correct mistakes, change info, whatever.)
The UpSchedAdmin sends individual kosmails to each person with a diary or a moderating day in the new UpSched, letting them know it's published and asking if they need any changes (coding their contact links IN the UpSched makes communications with them easy, compared to...otherwise) and the UpSchedAdmin then sends a kosmail to the group "This week's UpSched is posted. n/t" Daily or so from publication date until Sunday noon, the UpSchedAdmin or other admins check KosAbility's mainpage and click on "Move To Top" (it's at the end of the diary before the comments and alongside "Republish", "Edit", "Update", "Delete") if republished diaries have topped the page instead of the UpSched. (The first line in the UpSched directs readers to scroll down to see repubs, so they will not be overlooked.)
This is a more elaborate schedule routine than most groups do. Our need for it is because [1] we disabled folk have a lot of physically and mentally exhausting daily struggles, so we can use all the help we can get, including a mid-week reminder of a Sunday get-together to look forward to; and [2] judging by the results — there's rarely been an "empty" Sunday since starting this routine and we have a steady trickle of new discussions participants as well as an increased number of active writers, editors, admins, and KosAbility-tag followers— our UpSched routine works.
As valuable as it is, though, composing an UpSched is no walk in the park. But mettle fatigue will soon be 68 years of age and would like to "retire" sometime in the still-alive future. So, New Diarists is THE place for admins, editors and contributors who want to have a good time learning more skills to bring back and use here and for their DK diaries anywhere. That's also the group whose admins and eds tend to know LOTS about how DK is changing, what with the switch to Amazon's server-cloud and DK Version 5.0 close upon the horizon. I encourage everyone who writes, edits or admins (verb, verb, verb) to follow the New Diarists tag, participate there when you can, and read past instructional&practice diaries for the gems of how-to info published there. After all (h/t S.Colbert), if I am DailyKos and KosAbility, so can you.