Volunteers

Helping Cafe Q

You can help us become the best LGBT site on the web by providing us with good content and helping us police the site.

If you would like to be part of this ground-breaking project, we can use you as a volunteer for many different things. You do not necessarily need to "apply" to be a volunteer.  We consider a person to be a volunteer anytime they do something nice for us like send us pictures and information, post good stuff on the site and then call our attention to it, etc. You can take on a project where you contribute regularly or you can just just make occasional contributions as your time and inclinations allow.


Content contributors are persons who contribute quality, mission-critical content to the site. By mission-critical, we mean content that furthers the goals of Cafe Q.  Those goals are to become the premier portal for all things LGBT in the Sacramento region. Think of it as one-stop shopping for all your LGBT needs -- information, news, entertainment, romance, and other vital information. Here are some areas in which you can contribute critical content:

Community Calendar:  We would like to maintain a community calendar better than any other in Sacramento. As a volunteer you can research area events and post them on our calendar if they look like something a significant number of area residents would be interested in. We are particularly interested in persons who will specialize in a particular area such as theater, art, music, festivals, etc. By selecting a specific area and spending only one hour per week, you could do a great job and make a valuable contribution to the community.

Community News Bloggers: If you can write clearly and would like to report on local happenings, you can set up your blog to do so and we will feature it. You do not have to just report the main events; you can specialize.  So you can have a blog for art news, music news, theater news, etc. as well as political and activist news. You can display photos and videos on your news blog. Here are a few suggestions of some types of things we would like to see.  You can probably think of a lot of others.

• Community Guides: We would like to start putting together some guides to the local LGBT community.  Something similar to a travel magazine that has articles on various sights of interest.  These would be done in the Blog format with pictures and videos.  But they would have specific information about the sight of interest like street address, hours of operation, admission, etc.  Think in terms of a guide to the Sacramento Zoo or one on the Summer Friday Rock Concerts at Cesar Chavez Plaza. For an example of the kind of thing we are looking for check out this blog entry on Slow Food and Brown Bag Concerts.
  

• Community Oral Histories: We would also be interested in a series of community oral histories on the lives of people in the community. These would also be published as Blogs and would consist of interviews, photos, sound recordings and videos. We are especially looking for someone who will do a series of "Wedding Stories" -- interviews with persons in the community who are are getting married. How they met, how they decided to spend their lives together, what impact their marriage is having on their lives, etc. Another theme might be something like NPR's  "Storycorps," where two people who have shared their lives (couples, parents/child) talk to each other about the significant things in their lives.

Events and News Stand Links: We provide links to other sites that provide calendars for the community.  We are always on the look-out for new sources that should be added.  The same for sources of news.  So, you can provide a valuable service by letting us know of any valuable links you have discovered.


We  need people who will be given administrator  privileges to police the site for misconduct, inappropriate postings or for persons who just need some help. When we have a few  people volunteering for these tasks, we will put together a workshop and teach you the ins and outs of Cafe Q and its platform and the many things you can do with it. Then we will let you select some specific tasks that suit your interests and time available. Some typical tasks would be looking over entries to the community calendar and removing any that are inappropriate or or out-of-date, checking the size of photos on member sites to ensure that members are resizing and optimizing photos or giving people assistance in setting up groups, etc.


Send a message to the administrator by going to the Administrator's profile and clicking on "Send a Message." Tell us what you would like to do, whether you have any special skills for doing it and about how much time you could spend a week doing it. Let us know in particular if you have any prior web experience or experience writing HTML, Cascading Style Sheets or embedding widgets, photos and YouTube videos.