BloggerCorps has had its first success story in Kentucky: Bob Cornett reports that his education-focused grassroots group has found a local blogger to help them build a blogging strategy, thanks to our site. Unfortunately the other two organizations – in England and the Middle East – have not been so lucky. I think the main reason for this is that nobody is pointing to these announcements on their blogs.
BloggerCorps is an experiment in the un-organization. It has no physical presence. It's a blog. It is about matching up non-profits and activist organizations with bloggers living in their areas who are willing to volunteer time to help them blog.
So in order to succeed, Bloggercorps needs the help of bloggers everywhere to do what they do best: blog about it and link to it. That's the most important way you can help make a difference. We also need a sizable group of people with ties to nonprofits and activists, with guest author privileges on the Bloggercorps blog, who will post new announcements about people seeking help.
With nobody else posting (and nobody else requesting author privileges), Bloggercorps has gone dormant for the last month. I got swamped with several conferences and writing deadlines. I had hoped that other people would sign up for authorship and post stuff but nobody did. I'm thinking we should maybe migrate it from Typepad to WordPress – or maybe Civicspace? – in order to make that process easier. I am open to suggestions.
A bit of history: After I first blogged the idea a huge meta-discussion ensued about tools and structures, and it seemed like we'd get so bogged down in that, nothing would ever move forward. And since John Stanforth had kindly seized the bull by the horns, gotten the domain name and set up the BloggerCorps blog on Typepad, it made sense to just proceed with that structure and see what came of it. I still don't think it's a failed experiment… it just needs a lot of people actively posting on it, linking to it, and blogging about it so that other bloggers can find out about worthy organizations in their local areas who could use their help… if they could only find each other.
I'm open to suggestions and would very much like people to let me know if they'd like author privileges on BloggerCorps. We'll get you set up. Meanwhile, I hope all you fellow bloggers out there will put it in your aggregators and link to the posts whenever you see an appeal by an organization you think is worthy of help.