Lose the Label
A Plan
How about this?
We make some amazing t-shirt designs to raise money and put it in a fund for new projects. We then announce an activism entrepreneur contest. People post their ideas on Lose the Label and the community decides which ones to fund. We can promote the contest on Facebook (through notes, and a group we invite a ton of people to), the blogs (I can make some posts announcing it, and maybe we can afford some banner ads), YouTube, Digg and whatever else we can think of.
We could repeat this project a bunch of times and probably expand it, too.
Thursday Open Thread
I rewrote the "workshop" section and the descriptions for all the tabs up top when you mouseover them. Grant's also going to adjust the projects module to let users add child pages to the projects they create and make admin lists to make them more collaborative. When that's done and we have a few good posts for the front page (Joe? Grant? Liz?), we can start focusing on outreach again. As far as other posts go, they'll show up in the "soapbox" section and every day I'll post an open thread on the front page with links to whatever goes up. Make sense? This way we'll have a more stable front page but also get exposure for the other (shorter) posts.
Resources: need HELP
Please help build the resources page. So far, there are 2 parts to it --- the main section with links to posts about activism (how-to guides), and a child page with a bunch of links to media, contacts, blogs, and stuff like that. The latter will serve as the core of the blogroll we're going to put on the right hand column of the front page later.
PLEASE CONTRIBUTE!
the front page
The last thing I think we need to do before we relaunch is clean up the front page. We've all been making pretty short posts lately and while it's nice that they get to the point really fast, when you put it all together, imho, it looks terrible.
Rewritten description and slogan
I made some changes to the description to better reflect what we do and just sound a little better. I did the same thing with the Facebook group about a week ago. Didn't think anybody would object, but if you do, here's your change.
The old description:
Meeting Sunday
Let's have a meeting Sunday night to talk about the new theme and all the wonderful things we can do now that we're not waiting for anything anymore.
Who can make it? Hypothetically, say,...930 ET, 630 Pacific?
Dig on This
So I just got this e-mail today. I think it poses a good question. What are everyone's thoughts?
"Dear activists, colleagues, and friends,
Well Fox News went to new lows in their analysis of Petraeus' testimony last week, when our friends at Media Matters let us know that they had 7 to 1 analysts in favor of escalation. It was hard to believe, even for FOX!
Updates, Announcements, Questions, Meta, Etc
Key words bolded for skimmers.
September marks Lose the Label's first anniversary. The initial Facebook group launched early Sept 06 and the website idea came soon thereafter, in a discussion thread. I still think it's cool how this whole thing started completely spontaneously, from scratch, through an f'ing Facebook group. Of course the website didn't go online until a long time afterward, when Grant came around, but the project itself launched in September. So happy birthday.
Grant's been working on the new theme. Check out the rough version here. We're going to need to work it over a little bit over there before we implement it here, but I like the jist of it already. The biggest improvement will be to profiles. Any preferences on color? Another thing --- we're going to have the Resources page to fill, so now's a good time to come up with some content ideas to fill it up. I have my posts about fliers and burnout activism to contribute, but we can do a lot better than that. We're also going to need to compile a good list of links to other websites we like (news, activism related + ???) so we can build a blogroll. I'm thinking that'll be on the right column of the front page. Any thoughts on the new theme?
Can we cook up some new projects?
Outreach/promotion --- not much going on. The page I set up for Facebook promotion is empty. Also, T-shirts and stickers --- what's up? Was I supposed to do something? I honestly forgot.
Also, just a reminder ---- here is the top page rotation schedule (after the jump). I missed my last 2 Thursdays but will be back this week. If anyone needs to pull out, please speak up. Likewise, if anybody wants in. Weekends are still open.