group blog advice, also, "name my group blog"
March 12, 2019 10:04 AM Subscribe
For some 20 years I've been organizing various events, usually working with volunteers on a tiny activist-sized budget, and this brings up a very interesting interplay of motivations, traps, fallacies, euphoric successes and heartbreaking failures. I'd like to write about it. In the past it's been activism. Lately it's been interactive art, of the "weird San Francisco" variety. I have collaborators in the latest effort and I'd like to do a group blog. Looking for suggestions on how to structure that blog (and what to name it)
Background about the project, because I am stumped on a name:
For the last couple of years I've been helping organize a portion of Ephemerisle, (previous years video here and here), which is an incredibly difficult all-volunteer event without a central organizer and thus with no budget. We do serious heroics to pull this off. I want to do a group blog about both our event prep/build this year, and more generally about planning fallacies, about working with volunteers, about motivations, the weird political dynamics within the event, and other interesting group dynamics.
Within my own group, I tend to document our build/meetings/trainings prodigiously on Google Photos as one way to pay back fellow volunteers- people like having pictures and comments about themselves, plus what we do is somewhat amazing and weird and makes for interesting visuals. The event itself has an extremely outdated web presence that doesn't reflect it's current makeup and people often come to us thinking we are doing something extremely different.
I know we've learned so much which I'd like to document for future builders of stuff for the event. I'm inspired by oral history type stories about similar scenarios, such as the Voices From The Farm book and the People's River History build blog.
I am also trying to synthesize my general organizing experience into more of a series of writeups about what I've learned from all-volunteer projects, about the flaws of the "burning man model" of art builds, about motivations in dogmatic communities such as activist groups, and various other thoughts about subculture and ways to avoid Tragedy Of The Commons within volunteer organizations.
Our larger event is having something of a crisis around the human sustainability of one of it's biggest projects. I recently started a Google Doc about that specific logistical crisis, and, before long, it turned into 15 dense pages and I got feedback from many people that it was helpful and reflected things that many at the event had been thinking. I can easily transform that material into set of blog posts about tragedy of the commons, motivation, the typical rationality traps that behavioral economics likes to study, sunk costs and planning fallacies and the like, and my general weirdo 20 years of experience organizing within a subcultural model for events and happenings and organizations.
Also interestingly, our event was originally started by libertarians with terrible utopian ideas about seasteading, and has now morphed into being "just a festival", with a much more generally liberal population, where we uncomfortably coexist with a few of the libertarians. It's a very interesting San Francisco dynamic that's worth writing about.
I'm in a crew that is embarking on a new art project for this event, right at the same time as that larger logistical crisis is unfolding, so I'm going to get to make a lot of new mistakes to make this year doing something completely new for our event. It's interesting times. It needs to be documented.
I don't want to do an Instagram account. I want to attempt something of a group blog with several friends, with no real pressure on anyone to write on a particular schedule. I think I have other collaborators who would contribute regularly enough to make the group format sensible. I want it to be a standalone blog on wordpress or some squarespace template rather than part of a livejournal clone or on Facebook.
I don't need advice on whether or not to talk publicly about my group's crisis- I've thought this through very thoroughly- and I'm just looking for advice on blogging as a group. Tell me about possible platforms to use and ways to organize it that don't involve Livejournal or it's descendants, or about ideas about motivating group writing contributors.
Logistics: What's the best way to run a group thing with multiple logins via a Wordpress or Squarespace? I'd like the ability to migrate it elsewhere in the distant future, what should I consider? Are there examples of a similar thing that I should take into account?
Names: help me name the blog.
I'm interested in names having to do with planning fallacies and tragedy of the commons as much as about our actual event. We have plenty of event-related in-jokes (it's a boats event, therefore it's "the shipshow") , but much of what I want to edit down into blog posts is basically about planning and working with volunteers and weird motivations for doing impossible things. It's all similar to the kinds of projects and problems that activists and artists have been struggling with for ages.
Background about the project, because I am stumped on a name:
For the last couple of years I've been helping organize a portion of Ephemerisle, (previous years video here and here), which is an incredibly difficult all-volunteer event without a central organizer and thus with no budget. We do serious heroics to pull this off. I want to do a group blog about both our event prep/build this year, and more generally about planning fallacies, about working with volunteers, about motivations, the weird political dynamics within the event, and other interesting group dynamics.
Within my own group, I tend to document our build/meetings/trainings prodigiously on Google Photos as one way to pay back fellow volunteers- people like having pictures and comments about themselves, plus what we do is somewhat amazing and weird and makes for interesting visuals. The event itself has an extremely outdated web presence that doesn't reflect it's current makeup and people often come to us thinking we are doing something extremely different.
I know we've learned so much which I'd like to document for future builders of stuff for the event. I'm inspired by oral history type stories about similar scenarios, such as the Voices From The Farm book and the People's River History build blog.
I am also trying to synthesize my general organizing experience into more of a series of writeups about what I've learned from all-volunteer projects, about the flaws of the "burning man model" of art builds, about motivations in dogmatic communities such as activist groups, and various other thoughts about subculture and ways to avoid Tragedy Of The Commons within volunteer organizations.
Our larger event is having something of a crisis around the human sustainability of one of it's biggest projects. I recently started a Google Doc about that specific logistical crisis, and, before long, it turned into 15 dense pages and I got feedback from many people that it was helpful and reflected things that many at the event had been thinking. I can easily transform that material into set of blog posts about tragedy of the commons, motivation, the typical rationality traps that behavioral economics likes to study, sunk costs and planning fallacies and the like, and my general weirdo 20 years of experience organizing within a subcultural model for events and happenings and organizations.
Also interestingly, our event was originally started by libertarians with terrible utopian ideas about seasteading, and has now morphed into being "just a festival", with a much more generally liberal population, where we uncomfortably coexist with a few of the libertarians. It's a very interesting San Francisco dynamic that's worth writing about.
I'm in a crew that is embarking on a new art project for this event, right at the same time as that larger logistical crisis is unfolding, so I'm going to get to make a lot of new mistakes to make this year doing something completely new for our event. It's interesting times. It needs to be documented.
I don't want to do an Instagram account. I want to attempt something of a group blog with several friends, with no real pressure on anyone to write on a particular schedule. I think I have other collaborators who would contribute regularly enough to make the group format sensible. I want it to be a standalone blog on wordpress or some squarespace template rather than part of a livejournal clone or on Facebook.
I don't need advice on whether or not to talk publicly about my group's crisis- I've thought this through very thoroughly- and I'm just looking for advice on blogging as a group. Tell me about possible platforms to use and ways to organize it that don't involve Livejournal or it's descendants, or about ideas about motivating group writing contributors.
Logistics: What's the best way to run a group thing with multiple logins via a Wordpress or Squarespace? I'd like the ability to migrate it elsewhere in the distant future, what should I consider? Are there examples of a similar thing that I should take into account?
Names: help me name the blog.
I'm interested in names having to do with planning fallacies and tragedy of the commons as much as about our actual event. We have plenty of event-related in-jokes (it's a boats event, therefore it's "the shipshow") , but much of what I want to edit down into blog posts is basically about planning and working with volunteers and weird motivations for doing impossible things. It's all similar to the kinds of projects and problems that activists and artists have been struggling with for ages.
For a name, I thought of
The New Wrath
posted by clew at 10:47 AM on March 12, 2019
“We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”and hence
― Otto Neurath
The New Wrath
posted by clew at 10:47 AM on March 12, 2019
Response by poster: Shipshow of Theseus?
posted by twoplussix at 11:53 AM on March 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by twoplussix at 11:53 AM on March 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: in case it's not obvious without context- "shipshow" is a play on "shitshow" which our event ALWAYS is.
posted by twoplussix at 11:54 AM on March 12, 2019
posted by twoplussix at 11:54 AM on March 12, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by clew at 10:45 AM on March 12, 2019