Happy first week birthday, Kossacks! By now, I hope, you’ve put more than a toe in the DK4 waters and are feeling increasingly at home here. It’s certainly a home that seems to have many more rooms than our old place at DK3!
Our room is the group, Readers & Book Lovers , which has to be known specifically as “Readers and Book Lovers" in the Groups List. Something about the servers choking on symbols like ampersand, I guess. Our nickname is R&BLers. It’s probably a perfect time to request that if you ever write a diary for the group, or a diary from your own blog that you think might be pertinent to our purpose that the two tags you want to be sure to include are “Readers & Book Lovers," “R&BLers.” I think that writing diaries is the best way to enjoy the full DK4 experience.
About which, more.
Your experience in a group begins when you discover it among the list of all DK4 groups here. You’ll notice that the list is sortable in a variety of ways. Click on “Most Followed” and you’ll see R&BLers is the #2 most followed group on DK4 with over 300 followers as of this writing.
Now it’s time to select the group(s) with which you want to have the familiar (though minimum) DK3 experience. Click on the group name, which takes you to its profile page where you’ll see a heart symbol by the name. Click the heart and you’ve just become a Follower. That puts all the diaries that are republished within that group into “My Stream” that you access from your personal profile page. Now you can read, comment, rec, and rate just like in the old days. It’s important to become a follower to get all your favorite diary series about books, reading, and writing that you looked for each week on DK3.
After you’ve been a Follower for awhile, and now enjoy that familiarized feeling, you may want to be more than a commenting conversationalist and become a Contributor. That is, you may want to write the occasional diary for the group that will be read by all of us. In that case, send me a message requesting to join, or you can think of it as becoming a member; however, the invitation I’ll issue you, will invite you to become a Contributor.
Once you’re a Contributor, you can write a diary from your personal profile page and REPUBLISH it to R&BLers. That places your diary in the group queue where I, or another Administrator, will see it and schedule your work to appear on the blog. At the time you republish, you can include a note in the pop-up menu with the day and time when you can babysit or be around to reply to commenters’ questions and remarks – that is, keep the discussion going. We’ll do our best to publish your diary for all to see at that time.
Please keep in mind that for the present, I try to keep diary’s separated by a 2 hour interval. This allows your diary sufficient “stage time” and doesn’t allow it to “step on the toes” of another diary. You want to avoid requests for days and times that series installments occur; those won’t be available.
Now let’s suppose you notice that there’s no series on “The Private Lives of Contemporary Authors,” a subject you’re keenly interested in because you happen to live next door to an author (say J.D. Salinger before he died) whose life you find fascinating. So fascinating that you think we’ll find it fascinating, too. But there’s far too much to tell in a single diary. It’s going to take at least three, maybe more. Then it’s time you became a serial contributor to R&BLers, and that means it’s time to request an upgrade in your status to Editor.
Again, message me with your request, and include an outline of your proposal for your series. Such things as estimated number of diaries, working titles for each, a brief synopsis of your series, and a desired day and time you wish it to appear need to be included. Additionally, if you have lined up someone else to write diaries about their aunt, the well-know writer or sci-fi/fantasy novels, Ursula K. LeGuin, include their name(s). You are now co-hosting a series and both of you will be made Editors as long as you’ve first been Followers and joined with Contributor status.
When you are an Editor, you write diaries just like before, but when you republish them to R&BLers, you will select the third option from the menu under Publication Management – publish to R&BLers first, then, at a later time, to your own personal blog. This will you save you unnecessary work because your diary is directed automatically to two places at slightly different times with only one command from you.
As before, your diary enters the R&BLers queue. The difference is, as Editor, you can schedule its appearance (as previously agreed) without the need for an Administrator to do it for you. Each co-host, because of his/her Editor status, has the same privilege. You can queue, schedule, edit queued diaries, and read private messages sent to the group.
There’s only one step up in the hierarchy of group management and that’s upgrading status to an Administrator. Currently, R&BLers has two active Admins, me and cfk. plf515 has Admin status but is not active. Consequently, we’re looking for 1 or 2 additional Admins.
If you’d like to become an R&BLer Admin, here’s what you’ll have to do:
1) Write a series, or be a regularly featured diarist on unrelated but pertinent subjects;
2) Have been a Kossack long enough so that you have a body of work that can be reviewed;
3) Consult with me and cfk in order to keep the lines of communication open and to keep all of us on the same page;
4) Cull the Diaries List for pertinent work appropriate for the group by following tags that you think will help you “catch” them, and republish them to the group;
4) Scope out the wider DK4 world for candidate Followers/Contributors who may not have found us yet, or who may be non-diarists that you think need to become diarists because you believe they have a p.o.v. that will enrich R&BLers;
5) Know your commitments elsewhere so that you can confidently meet the commitment of time to be an Admin here.
The job is not onerous – it was at the beginning of the week, but I’ve noticed it’s much easier now.
My goal for R&BLers is to broaden the participation, increase the number of voices, and provide richer content in order to keep it vibrant, dynamic, and growing. I think I can better achieve that by looking for a couple more Admins. Truthfully, having additional Admins helps guarantee seamless function of the group in the absence of one or more of us for whatever reason. All organizations need a head. Fortunately, we can make them interchangeable if several Admins function as one.
If you’re interested in the job, or if you’d like to nominate someone from the group, please message me. Thanks, everyone. Let’s go forward and make this the most welcoming group on DK4.
I’d like to hear your ideas for diary topics/series you’d like to see at R&BLers. Here are a few to get you started. All they need is for a contributor, or team of contributors to take on the mantle of Editor to “make them so.” Of course, remember that you can write the “occasional” diary on any topic pertinent to the R&BLer mission without the need to become an editor.
Sc-fi/Fantasy
Political non-fiction
Critical Essays
E-Readers & Kindle Korner (I see this as a co-hosted, on-going regular series)
Movies from Books
The Play’s the Thing
Poet’s Place
Supporting Literacy: Programs, Libraries, & Book Stores
Please message me if you want to take on any of these babies in a regular fashion. I look forward to hearing from you!