Volunteers sought for Kiwiblog

Earlier this week Kiwiblog joined the Online Media Standards Authority. That puts the same responsibility on Kiwiblog as the mainstream media, but without the resources, Kiwiblog has no paid staff. It has myself, and a couple of existing volunteers.

I’m making a call for anyone who enjoys Kiwiblog, and can make an ongoing regular time commitment to consider volunteering to help both maintain Kiwiblog, but also expand it.

I don’t have any set roles in mind, but I do have a number of things I would like to be able to do.

• Have someone go through the comments each day and select a particularly insightful or funny comment as Comment of the Day, to be given its own blog post
• Have someone go through the comments each day and select a comment that argues in opposition to a post I have done as Dissent of the Day (as Andrew Sullivan does)
• Have someone do a quarterly analysis of MP and Ministerial questions, press releases and news stories (take around 8 – 10 hours a quarter)
• Have someone monitor the decisions of the BSA, ASA and Press Council, pointing out the more insane complaints which get rejected
• Have someone read other blogs and do a daily or weekly “Best of the Blogs”
• Have a person or persons as additional moderators to do warnings over abusive comments
• Have people read various online columns and editorials, broadly classifying them as pro or anti a particular party, so that we can do a regular analysis of which columnists and newspapers are most often in agreement with, or opposition to, each party. This would be an incredibly interesting exercise. With half a dozen people it would probably be just an hour a week.
• Have people listen to Seven Sharp, Campbell Live and other current affairs shows and if a segment is political, classify it as pro or anti a particular party .

I’m also open for suggestions as to what other regular features would be welcome, if we had the resource to do it.

If you are interesting in volunteering, then e-mail me and say what areas might be of interest to you – or suggest a new one.

There are those who basically want to silence voices on the right. I want to build them up to be even stronger, and provide even better analysis of politics and the media.