How Cafe Q came about

The idea for this site came initially to me when a friend in Stonewall Democrats wanted to take a day trip to a Model Railroad exhibit near Mt. Shasta and wanted someone to share it with. I was the webmaster for the Stonewall Democrats and told him that it would probably be possible to put a feature on the website called "Outings" where Stonewall members could sponsor similar things and ask people to join them. However, for several reasons, this never came into being.

About that time, I was designing a new website for the Lavender Library and Gail Lang called a meeting of several people in the community to talk about going together and creating a website where all community events could be listed on a single calendar. This idea, also, did not make it very far. Around this time several persons had been sending out email lists of various events in the community. James Ozanich published his "Towne Crier" and Tina Reynolds also published a master calendar. Neither of these, however, could be searched by event type or other keyword.

For a while, there was a group that met at Uptown Studios to also address the problem of a single source of communication for news in the LGBT community. The major problem with a calendar of all community events on a single website is that it would require a paid employee to maintain it since volunteers could not be depended on to keep it up. No one was up to putting together a business model for this to happen.

More recently, when trying to develop a long range strategy for funding the Lavender Library, I formulated a strategic plan for the library that would have put a coffee-shop called "Cafe Q" in the front with tables out on the sidewalk. The coffee shop would have a large, flat-screen HD TV with subscriptions to Logo and Hear! TV, a wireless system, and expanded collection of periodicals and other amenities. An important part of the plan was an expanded website with personal profiles, a master calendar maintained by each organization, and an interactive, searchable catalog. In addition, it would have a city guide and business directory. And the website would sell display advertising and have an affiliate program for making money to support the library. The idea was to create both a physical and virtual community along entrepreneurial principles, with multiple sources of revenue. My ideas, however, were too ambitious for the other members of the library's board, and we soon parted company.

I then turned my attention to social networking sites and new web technologies. I was in the process of developing a rather ambitious site for connecting travel companions world-wide in the context of an international gay and lesbian travel directory, when Joseph Costa, of the Mens Discussion Group, turned me on to the NING platform -- a platform he used to develop a site for the discussion group. I immediately recognized that the platform offered a lot of features that could be configured to accomplish much of what I had been trying to do with the travel site and, also would solve a lot of other problems -- namely a method of hooking up for activities and day trips, a central community calendar, and member profiles. Best of all, it could be done in a matter of weeks.

After beginning development, I discovered a couple of sites that offered some of the functionality that I was looking for. LGBT Sacto offers a very good community calendar. And, during the Pride Festival Gay Sacramento began operations. This site has very comprehensive and up-to-date local LGBT coverage. Both sites, however, are primarily informative and not social networks for meeting and organizing. I have put prominent links on the home page to both sites since they are valuable supplements to this one.

Another important site I discovered along the way was Meetup.com, a world-wide website with localized content for most cities and regions. Meetup allows members to enter a profile and form groups that meet in person. It has 509 groups in Sacramento of which eight are oriented toward the LGBT community.

I have tried to organize the site in a way that I think most users will find the most useful. I'll be collecting comments from membersw as we go along and making gradual improvements based on their feedback. A major focus in building the site was the idea that a social network must be made up of people who use it productively and contribute content in many ways. Resources cannot be wasted on "lurkers" -- those shadowy people who never identify themselves and only use the site to further their own agenda. My observation of other sites is that if a person does not post their picture or contribute any worthwhile information about themselves on their profile, they will not be active, contributing members to the site. An even more important consideration was that people do not like to get friend requests and messages from persons who have a gray silhouette or picture of their dog for their face pic and have posted responses like, "just ask" or "don't get me started" for the narrative on their profile. For that reason, we require a face pic and reasonable profile to be a member and approve each profile. In other words, we require that you be a real person before you can send messages, post events or organize groups.

While we realize this policy will eliminate a lot of good people who must remain closeted because of their families or jobs, we recognize that by making the site open to everyone to browse, these persons can still find the site to be a very useful and valuable site for getting information and news on the gay community. In addition, persons who are not members may still attend activities sponsored by the many groups that we hope will form here.

Our motto and guiding principle at Cafe Q is "Living large is the best revenge." If this site enlarges your life more than you ever thought possible, then we will have succeeded.

Jim Webber, Creator and Administrator