Sorta cross-posted to the Seattle group. For photos of the playas in this drama, click here, thanks to dinazina for being our photog.
So we had our get-together on Saturday night, attended by 14 local folks). We chatted with Nigel about the Pelz campaign before he abandoned us early (again), and talked a little baseball.
We got down to the nitty-gritty pretty shortly, though. Brian from Washblog was there to make his case, and in the end, he sold us on adopting Washblog as our Washington state progressive politics blog.
We set a deadline of November 8 for the Scoop conversion, and started setting some really generic guidelines, such as having a small “editorial board” to handle administrative issues, such as look/feel decisions and the squashing of supertrolls (so we don’t have to put EVERYTHING to a vote).
Once we’re up and running with Scoop, we’re planning to have a mix of community rating, semi-permanent frontpagers, and “sticky” posts. Providing all this works out as planned in the coding, the community will be able to rate diaries, and those that reach a certain diary-mojo threshold will be automatically frontpaged. There will also be semi-permanent frontpagers, a la Kos, Booman, SusanHu, etc., who will provide a consistent voice and will serve as “insiders”, so we can keep a communications feed going with local governments, Olympia, and our Congressional delegation. The “sticky” posts suggestion was Cyrilb’s, and the idea was to have certain posts be available on an ongoing basis – so if someone posts an authoritative diary about upcoming initiatives, it can be made “sticky”, and will remain visible longer than diaries normally do, and hence will have a longer useful life.
As for the editorial board; at the moment it’s Brian and the folks who were out Saturday night (and I assume Brian will include Noemie and Portdork and his strong posters already at Washblog). Moving forward, we’ll let strong writers rise to the top and have elections or something to get a more solid board to make day-to-day background decisions. This wasn’t nailed down, but we can work it out as we go.
We will have input with the Scoop developers on look/feel, operations, graphics, categories, etc. We want this to be a fairly polished product, as we’re obviously hoping to expand the audience. Brian’s the Scoop liaison, but I think several of us will wind up with our fingers in the pot here and there.
So, thanks to Brian for handing Washblog over to the progressive community, and thanks to everyone who helped with the conversations to this point (and will help moving forward). Thanks ‘specially to everybody who came on Saturday night and helped hash all this out…
N in Seattle
Nigel
Harriet
Jason and Julie
cmk
em
dinazina
Blair
seattleliberal
The dude from Randy Gordon’s campaign we never got introduced to
cyrilb
and last but not least, Brian!
