Call for ideas & help : a collective blog-zine-thing about disability & brain weasel repellent &tc

[untonuggan]

I have been brainstorming with partner and some other dw folks about a potentially very cool and exciting project. Also it is one that I cannot do alone (even if I had the spoons I did in high school, which was a LOT of spoons). So I'm going to talk about the idea and then see if anyone else is interested, and what they might want to do possibly.

~Idea~

A blog-zine-website type thing a la The Toast or Autostraddle, but aimed at disability-type issues or interests. Potential posts or sections or topics could include (but are by no means limited to):

• a section of things to look at when you have brain weasels
• "how to do X when your body/brain does Y" (kind of like bitesizedcleaning tips, but not limited to cleaning)
• cross-promoting people who have their own writing sites (fiction or non) or tarot readings
• "why austerity is terribad" and other political topics related to disability
• disability and history
• science!
• recipes for when your body thinks food is the enemy
• fandom reviews and recommendations that deal with disability
• terminology and ableist language
• Artwork/comics
• Poetry!
• Podcasts of written works and other accessible features (like being accessible to screen readers)
• Other things I may not have thought of yet!

Also, some kind of online store to support the site and possibly a collective fund that could be used for (a) monthly charity donations; (b) "oh crap my car died" type hat passes; (c) upkeep; (d) possibly a paid position at some point if someone is doing a lot of upkeep or web-dev or editing or whatever. TBD in the course of "how is this run?"

Kinds of things to maybe have in the store (Zazzle? Cafepress?):

• Coping cards for people with chronic illnesses (as opposed to "get well" cards)
• T-shirts or buttons or whatever (maybe ones that warn readers not to touch you today because your body hurts, or perhaps say things like "not your inspirational crip")
• A print zine of things on the site
• Funny shit to look at when you feel like crap
• Other possibilities!

Plus probably some sort of advertising but hopefully not terribad advertising.

~Kinds of tasks I can think of atm (but we can totally bitesize it and share srsly folks)~

• Organizing system/emotional labor of "how does this work, how do we make decisions, how do we handle conflict, etc"
• Legal side of "how do we do banking, setting up non-profit or whatever kind of corporation status, etc"
• Web development (accessibility important)
• Web maintenance (moderation, posting, etc)
• Content creation!
• Content decision making (when to post certain things, how often to post, etc)
• Are there things we decide *not* to post? How do we handle conflict about that?
• Networking (social media promotion, finding new creators, outreach to other sites, etc)
• The store - content creation for that, legal side, banking! homg

OK now that *I* am kind of overwhelmed...I still think this is allllll kinds of awesome and can start slow and steady and build, bc I know that is how I operate these days.
~In the comments or via PM~

• Your preferred username (dw, tumblr, whatevs) and pronouns
• What you might be interested in helping with, if anything. Any mad skillz?
• Some sort of ranking of how realistic helping is right now or in the future? ("I am finishing my degree right now, but later..." or "This sounds amazing and also I have a couple of spoons I could use for this while I lay on my recovery sofa" or "I would totally read this but I can't commit to anything new right now" or "I have ideas but I can't help implement them right now")
• name ideas?

Note: not helpful right now, anything along the lines of, "This is cool but totally unrealistic." My brain weasels can rain on the parade on their own without contributions so it would help if you did not feed them.

If there is a lot of interest I would be up for starting a dreamwidth comm about this, but would need a name.

Signal boosting appreciated

Comments

[worlds_of_smoke]

* Rachel, she/her

* I don't know that I could actually help. :/ I'm not sure I have any needed skills, but I'm definitely interested in trying. I can do fannish writing (I mostly read fantasy and YA), general writing, or forum moderation. I can also do betaing articles or being a sounding board for people. I'm good at cheerleading!

* Ideas: There definitely needs to be a "benefits advice" column. Obviously, there's a lot of difference in benefits, but I've found it difficult to find answers to plain language questions about things like going back to school or work while on benefits and getting married on benefits. At the very least, we need a list of contacts for companies/NPOs that do benefits analysis.

Also, policy discussion! We obviously can't cover the entire world, but maybe we can keep track of some of the more important policy stuff. And we should be discussing lesser-known policies. There's stuff that people don't actually know about, like the penalty that disabled people in American get hit with if they get married.

[anke]

Tangent: I would like to request that anything that is specific to one country say so and name the country near the beginning of the article.

[worlds_of_smoke]

Yes! This is super important. And tag it with the country name (both abbreviated and long-form if it's the USA or UK), if we use a tag system.

[delight]

I think some US/UK/Canada things would even need to be specified further down to specific state/county/provincial issues! But yeah, that is a really really important thing re: benefits. I know I've tried to advise people on "this was my PERSONAL experience with SSDI and education financial aid, which applies only to these 5 counties in the state of New York in the United States ..."

[cxcvi]

UK Specifically: Scotland has some very different laws than England. Wales is mostly similar.

[syntaxofthings]

Yes.

[ironed_orchid]

I love this idea of a "benefits advice" column. Ideally, I'd like to see different people from different countries/states answering to match the letter writer's needs.

[worlds_of_smoke]

Yeah, I think for it to be most useful, it has to be multi-regional. The only thing I worry about wrt: answering actual letter writer's needs is that we may not have someone who lives in that state or country. That's why I'd like to see a back-up "these are people who do benefits analysis" directory if we go through with this.

[untonuggan]

you have already helped with the "benefits advice" idea, which has generated a lot of discussion! also having people who are interested and excited is helpful too.

(and thanks for knowing your boundaries :) )

also if/when you have spoons, whatever help you are able to give is appreciated, especially things like cheerleading and writing!

[worlds_of_smoke]

Thanks! Glad to at least have given that much help. XD

Should we have some sort of chat for people to throw around ideas? How do you get an IRC channel?

[alexseanchai]

Easy: you log on to an IRC network (here are instructions specific to #wikihow on Freenode; here are instructions specific to #yuletide on Slashnet) and type "/join #new-channel-name" for the appropriate value of new-channel-name.

This does require either an IRC client or a web-based thingamajig, and I do not know how to make or make accessible the latter. Mibbit exists, but apparently does not work on Freenode, though it does work on Slashnet. Those being the only two IRC networks I have any degree of familiarity with. The wikihow link assures me Freenode has built-in webchat, though.

Nor do I know how to make a channel permanent, come to that, rather than only existing when someone's in it. But I'm on IRC basically all the time my computer's on, on Freenode (where I hang out in #dreamwidth) and Slashnet (#yuletide), so as long as someone on the network of our choice hasn't already got whatever we decide to name the IRC channel, we are golden.

There is also Slack, which functions similarly to IRC with a web-based client except that it keeps logs such that if I log out of Slack and someone says something in the channel and I log back in and rejoin the channel, I can see what the someone said. But I do not know how to set up Slack. And I have no idea about comparative accessibility versus IRC.

[worlds_of_smoke]

I have MIRC, though I haven't used it in... ever on this computer. XD I don't do the IRC much, though I've wanted to go into #dreamwidth. I just have a case of terminal social phobia.

We'd have to settle on a channel name if we want to have a live room to cheerlead and throw ideas around in. And it might be a good idea to figure out if someone is up to taking notes of ideas that the people in the chat think might be worth poking at.

Re: where to toss ideas

[syntaxofthings]

I've been highly advocating a members-only DW community for planning. Because it's easier to put actual planning-related stuff there and see what people think. You can also toss ideas there and people can take their time to read it over and debate about it. I think a real-time chat would take too many of my spoons, personally.

Re: where to toss ideas

[alexseanchai]

That's also a good idea. I like the realtime chat format too, though—maybe do both, and volunteers could copy any insights from the chat to the comm for the benefit of people not present in the chat at that time? Or just the comm, because that would work too.

Re: where to toss ideas

[syntaxofthings]

I think I would like that combination, eventually, when I'm done being excited about legal research and logistics. :)

Re: where to toss ideas

[worlds_of_smoke]

Oh, I think that having a formal DW community is pretty critical, for record-keeping purposes. But I think having a real time chat might be useful for when people get blocked or need cheerleading.

Re: where to toss ideas

[syntaxofthings]

Sounds good to me. :) Figuring out the details... later.