I joined the Coffee Party nationally and in Dallas earlier this year, and attended the first meetings with high hopes. As I reported on the Dallas Coffee Blog I started earlier this month, it's very easy to click a Facebook button and join a cause. It's a lot more difficult to create something sustainable afterward.
The Dallas Coffee Party kicked off with great fanfare, with local TV and print news coverage of the first meetings, and after the second meeting I volunteered to become an admin for the Facebook page. I was sick for the third meeting, and at the fourth, was one of six who bothered to attend...out of nearly a thousand Facebook members. Of course, that the meeting wasn't properly publicized or added to the national FB page where members looking for meetings could find it didn't help, but as a result of that meeting, I set up a Dallas Coffee Blog and an @dallascoffee twitter feed to gin up interest. I believed - and hoped - that if a local person wrote original content and tweeted other content of interest, more people might feel a connection and an inclination to actively participate.
In the interim, the originator of the DCP quit, and in-fighting broke out between two of the other three admins, leaving me stuck in the middle. Although the Coffee Party is thriving throughout the country, it's dead in the water in Dallas because of a lack of momentum and planning, and because too many of the few grown-ups involved actually decided to behave not as grown-ups but as petulant children. While I don't count myself as one of those pouting tots, it's obvious I've got some anger seeping through here, so I'll simply tell you what I did earlier today: Transferred all the DCP bloggings as a single note to the DCP page on Facebook, and after deleting the @dallascoffee twitter feed, I'll be deleting myself as a DCP admin.
It's true that not much time has lapsed between my first blog and tweet efforts and now, but with a thousand DCP members, and my RT'ing @dallascoffee tweets to the DCP page and linking to all the blog entries, I can't say that the word didn't get out. The word got out, but nobody cared. That's fine. I gave it a shot, and as I wrote on my DCP note, I'd rather write one blog nobody reads than two. Only one local person directly accessed the 28 tweets I've made...the other four are from CP's elsewhere. Almost 400 people subscribe to my @laurie_gold twitter feed and I'll concentrate on them rather than the five (again, including just one local person) who subscribed to @dallascoffee.
Because I'm proud of the blog entries I wrote for DCP, I'm going to insert them here onto my Toe in the Water blog...later today, after I've done so, I'll come back in here and provide links to any who are interested. And, as I wrote on the DCP page, I look forward to somebody with vision, patience, and a game-plan to reinvent the Dallas Coffee Party so that I can rejoin. In the interim, I'll look for another group to hook up with, possibly one in Ft. Worth. Sad that in one of the largest cities in the U.S. we were unable to sustain things here, but it's time to move on. My experiment failed.
BLOG ENTRIES ADDED TO TOE IN THE WATER FROM SHORT-LIVED DCP BLOG:
Financial Reform...It's Complicated
Stand Up...Or Stand Down
What If You Gave a Coffee Party and Nobody Came?
Corporate Fascism?
An Experiment
And, in case anyone's interested in links to articles from the @dallascoffee twitter feed...
Lost Decade Looming? (Paul Krugman NYT)
More on TX text book fight
New project of freepress.com invites us to keep media on its toes by submitting biased and or overblown reporting.
A nun is "automatically excommunicated" after sitting on hosp comm that agreed to perform abortion to save mom's life.
NYT: A generation gap on immigration
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the...
Coffee Party USA is launching Coffee with Main Street campaign from now throughout the month of June.
Million-Dollar Ad Blitz to Kill Net Neutrality
The Senate approved a provision putting space between bond issuers & rating agencies
NYT: U.S. Said to Allow Drilling Without Needed Permits
NYT: Senate Beats Back Efforts to Ease Regulation Bill
Commentary on Findlaw about First Amendment
Newsweek article on Walt Whitman important for us to consider
Huffpost - Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, USA TODAY found.
Rabbit hole of corporate spending on campaigns.
Tom Friedman in today's NYT
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