I am going to launch a new website soon, something to do with my gaming hobbies. It will be community centered and will encourage women and folks of color to participate. I’ve planned it for a while, and I can launch it by myself, but that wouldn’t be fun.
I am going to try something new, and see if anyone would like to join me in this project. Like an internship or job study (completely unpaid, it is hobby site I have in mind). There are a lot of moving parts in launching a site, and I do all of them as part of my job. I would like to learn for myself how to mentor others and share the knowledge and best practices I’ve collected. This will be a learning experience for everyone involved!
My vision for how it would go down is that a few people, or maybe half a dozen, would meet up in-person or online (in a Jabber conference [I will help folks get this working]) at least once a week, and we would plan out, discuss, and eventually launch this site I have in mind.
Among the areas we will cover are WordPress configuration (and probably theming), copywriting (specifically for the web), policy (community standards and licensing), and a bunch of other stuff involved in webcraft. Part of why I am doing this is to methodically document all these moving parts, and to create a kind of checklist/manual.
I urge every and any one to join us, and if you are a women or person of color, please consider giving me a chance to work with you. I have a toddler, so I understand the constraints that caring for your family can put on opportunities for collaboration; we will try our best to accommodate folks’ schedules, and I am fine if a lot of this is done in email, if that works for you (though I encourage real-time chat, for spontaneous question answering and discussion of ideas). No coding experience is required, though access to a computer probably is (I learned to make websites on computers at the library, so there are options there).
I intend to create that foundation that allows us to know which questions to ask; personally, I can’t figure out anything if I don’t have that for the task at hand. I plan on getting started in about a week, so if you are interested, contact me or leave a comment. And if we are fortunate enough to have lots of people get in on this, I am fairly sure it scales up well, and I also have a long list of future sites to launch. 