Dopp Juice Archive

Here’s what’s on my desk right now:

Dopp Juice – Maintaining this blog as a platform for self expression (supplemented nicely with Twitter).

Technificant – A tumblelog I started recently for collecting the random beautiful nuggets of “stuff” I find on the web. More fun than a barrel full of del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com feeds.

Cerado – My favorite. client. ever. I’m handling project management, technical writing, and website development for the brainchildren of mad genius Christopher Carfi. He’s keeping me quite busy these days with brilliant undertakings, and is the reason I’m unavailable for your projects.

The Writ – Leading an initiative this year to migrate the site to a more stable system that better addresses the community’s needs.

Genderfork – A photo-a-day blog that explores the grey areas of gender, which up until recently was handled under a pseudonym.

Poetry Chapbook – I’m compiling some of my more challenging work (which has seen virtually no internet airtime) from the last two years and am going to make it available through Lulu.com soon.

My themes for 2008 are authenticity, identity, and community.

What are you up to? Post me a link to your roster.

This is the first in (what I hope will become) a series of video blogs about this year’s revitalization of TheWrit.org. In this five minute video, I give a brief overview of the tumultuous history of the site and its vision to be a resource for emerging writers.

WRITvlog1: Beginnings and Vision from Sarah Dopp on Vimeo.

(Sidenote: This is my first ever video production project. My biggest complaint is the quality of the audio, and I think I need to go buy an external microphone. Other tips welcome.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about The Writ — my baby project that turned into a teenager and ran away from home. It’s had more than few near-death experiences out there in the big scary world, but it has relentlessly refused to die. At the time of this writing, The Writ has been alive for four and a half year and has 5,783 member accounts. People contribute to its workshop and use it to support each others’ writing every day. I haven’t touched the site in two years.

It hasn’t been without leadership, though. Julián Esteban Torres did an exceptional job of organizing an editorial staff, keeping promises, cranking out journal issues, and trudging through a hacked-together half-broken content management system on a mission to do something beautiful.

He and I have been passing the baton back and forth for the life of The Writ. He organizes people and I organize systems. I think our tandem leadership is the reason The Writ has survived. Both of us have invested our time, energy, and personal money into The Writ to the point of burnout more than once, and neither of us has ever made a dime.

The baton is back at my feet now, and I think I’m ready to pick it up again.

I don’t usually write publicly about my projects while they’re in their early stages; critique can kill a dream. But this one’s been already through the firing range and it ain’t dying anytime soon. Moreover, this isn’t about a website; it’s about a community. The only way I can do it justice is by listening and being transparent.

I want the community to have something more stable to stand on. They are a passionate group and they’ve proven they can take care of themselves if they have the tools to do so. I want to open up a line of communication for group discussion, self-organization, and collaborate planning (I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do this). I want to migrate the site to a stable and widely-used open-source CMS so it has a chance at evolving as technology changes. I want to make the website pretty again. I want to add features that put more control in the hands of each individual user. I want to honor the community’s organic growth over the last four and a half years and let whatever passion has fueled that growth to guide this process.

And I think that if the community also wants these things to happen, these things will happen.