New York needs a kick ass political blog full of Kossacks and as Blog is my witness, I will make that happen ... with your help.
The domains have been bought. The nameservers have been switched. The new site will be at
http://www.dailygotham.com
I am in the middle of installing CivicSpace, the community platform that will power this new blog ... all I am waiting now is for your help.
I cannot do this alone. During our first NYC Kossack meeting, coordinated by the lovely Jane Knowles, I brought the issue up : Is there a community blog about New York City politics that you know about? Nobody really could name one. So I asked if people would be interested in participating but we'd need more than some. Lipris, Jane Knowles, David Alpert have gladly offered to work on this project but we need a whole community actively participating in the site.
We need at least two more admins to:
--MANAGE TECH & DEVELOPMENT ISSUES with the site (knowledge of or willingness to learn Drupal/CivicSpace will be most welcomed)
--MODERATE THE USERS FORUM and Handle any user/member issues
We need writers and diarists:
--For Albany alone
--For NYC and its 5 boroughs
--For each region of the state
We need editors :
MANAGING EDITOR : For front of the page articles
NEWS AGGREGATOR : pumping in the site with news and blog sources dealing with NY politics
EVENTS : managing all events that users add to the community calendar of events
We would hope for :
--Designer contributions of logo and/or CSS work
--User handbook (technical manual) development
Why am I not setting up the site with Scoop? I've never set a site with it. It's the one of the few blog/community platforms I haven't used. I like CivicSpace. It's what Democracy for American is running on (it was developed for the Howard Dean campaign after all). I can install it in a cinch and I like the fact it has a whole host of modules (think of them as plug-ins) that will allow us to coordinate volunteers for all sorts of events; manage projects and community publishing, comment RSS, mass mailing of petitions, etc. Also, the people at CivicSpace are working hard at integrating a GOTV toolkit for it, as well as other netroot goodies.
So I'm going to keep up with the diaries here until the site is up and running. Please post your comments, concerns and questions. I'm looking forward to comments from the community.
I especially would like to hear from Kos or Armando or any of the other grand poobahs. Any words of wisdom, warnings, whatever. All comments will be most welcomed.
NY kossacks in da houze!