Dear readers, if you are a weekday only reader and sensibly were off the grid yesterday, please visit our kickoff post where we tell you what we hope to accomplish with our fundraiser and how to contribute.
I really appreciate the speedy and generous responses. It has been distracting, in a good way, to see all the PayPal notifications, “Check is in the mail” messages (the kickoff post gives you the sordid details), and kind comments on Neil Barofsky’s endorsement.
Our first target was $6700 for upgrading both the site hosting and the level of site support (meaning ongoing configuration fixes, since WordPress is very fragile in high traffic implementations). You met that despite the trauma of Sandy. Our next target was $15,500 for our guest bloggers, which you met in 40 hours over a holiday weekend. We are up to 352 donors, and our target for the fundraiser is 1000 (some of our donors thus far have given us quite sizable contributions, but we also value the participation of those of you who are on limited budgets but still want to say thanks).
The third target is for travel to conferences. That includes not just out of pocket expenses (last year’s donations enabled me to go to INET in Berlin and Lambert to cover Netroots Nation in Providence, for instance) but also having guest bloggers work on a dedicated basis while I am away. While our regular contributors (as in Lambert and Matt Stoller) also provide a great deal of content on an ongoing basis, it’s based on news flow and time available in their calendars. If they need to provide a full day of site coverage at specified times to support the readership, it’s at the expense of their day jobs or their sleep, and it isn’t right to ask them to do that on a charity basis.
So our next target is $7500 for travel. Going to conferences keeps us and our contributors current on leading edge conventional wisdom (which is often but not always wrong) and allows us to see both important, contrary thinkers and some of the bad guys in the flesh, which is also helpful in calibrating information. So help us keep informed by getting out and around more!
