I've created a new group-blog, "The Unemployment Chronicles", over on DK4 as a response to all the heart-wrenching unemployment stories I see on DK. I think we can use DK4 to help our Kossack friends find jobs, or at least keep their spirits and heads up while they're looking for work, and build our community along the way. Want to help?
Who am I?
First, some things about myself. I I live in Oakland, in the Temescal neighborhood to be precise, and I work full-time as a software tester for a good company (that is hiring in Berkeley and Austin and DC, pls see my profile for contact info and email me if you're interested). I've been reading Daily Kos since late 2002, right about when Howard Dean was becoming more prominent and I am definitely part of the Deaniac generation of Democrats. I organized MeetUps in Berkeley and Oakland for a few months for Dean's campaign but ran out of stamina after a few months and then his campaign died anyway. But I met some folks through those Meetups that ended up connecting me with a local software project, that then led to my current job. So you could say it's all Howard Dean's fault. :)
I am doing this because a) I am a goddamn bleeding heart liberal (probably the Irish in me) who gets torn up reading all the unemployment stories; b) I've gone through a bout of unemployment that lasted over two years and came out the other side with a job I love, so I feel like I have a little insight and some practical advice (things like using your sigline which I see hardly anyone doing); c) the German heritage in me says that this many unemployed people who want to work is extremely inefficient and a terrible waste of resources, which is about as tragic as it gets. :)
The goals:
As I see it the goals would be:
- help Kossacks find jobs (or training or some way to bring in income)
- help them keep their heads up high while they're looking for work
- provide a safe warm compassionate place for them to vent
- hook unemployed folks up with employed folks, in either an abstract sense of just providing lots of local unemployment groups, or in a concrete buddy-system sense
- increase the visibility of the unemployment problem for Kossacks and for the world at large
- building the DKos community so we have our own kind of safety net to fall back on
Things we can definitely do
I have a couple of ideas on how we can take advantage of some of the new tools in DK4 to help our unemployed friends. But I can't do this by myself so I'm hoping other folks would like to join me in this project. Some things I am sure we can do with the tools we have and some guidelines for how I would like to see it work:
1) We post a diary every day, or some regularly scheduled day, at about the same time so we are providing a reliable safe warm place for unemployed folks and unemployed-friendly employed folks. This also creates a more prominent "brand" and we start becoming the go-to place for unemployed folks. We set up a posting schedule so that we guarantee we will have that diary at the scheduled time.
2) We offer practical job-searching or income-generating advice and either include these in each diary, or we produce a canonical job-search-income-generating-tips diary that we refer to in every following diary.
3) We respond to every comment in the diaries, and offer sympathy, compassion and encouragement to every single unemployed person who posts a comment to the diaries.
4) We could set up an Unemployment Chronicles group at every geographic level where people are asking for it. That way people could share local tips or news more easily. This could conceivably mean a thousand "child groups". Which would be awesome.
Things we could try but I don't know exactly how the mechanics would work yet
1) We could link up unemployed people with employed people in the same town, maybe even pair them up 1-to-1 like a buddy system. No guarantees on how they would help them but maybe the employed folks could pledge to call them once a week and just be an ear, or take them out for a drink or coffee. Or something.
2) We could set up a DK jobs board to link Kossacks up to jobs directly. This was kinda sorta tried already by the Kossacks Networking site but I found the jobs board there very clunky to use. They couldn't keep administering it so it fell by the wayside and is no longer active.
3) We create and participate political actions. An unemployment convention? Maybe an unemployment rally in 1000 cities all on the same day? Or maybe a sit-in in every single congressperson's local office on the same day? I think we need to go big to get anyone's attention.
To sum up:
I want this to become a big big deal and want other people to bounce ideas off of and make this thing actually work for unemployed folks. If you want to be a group blogger with this group, please post a comment to the blog entry over on DK4 and I'll send you an invite. If you can't get onto DK4 for some reason but would still like to be a group blogger with this group when your access gets squared away, post a comment here and I'll keep you in the pool. And yes, I know all this stuff will get wiped out when DK4 goes live for real. But I think it's worth it to explore how far we can take these DK4 tools and bend them to our will. We can at least get a group together, coordinate a schedule, brainstorm how we want to do this in a way that works for everyone, maybe construct that canonical diary of advice and tips so that's ready to go on day 1, brainstorm other ideas for posting so it's not just the same thing all the time. What do you all think?