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It was about 8 years ago that I first got a sense for independent publishing. Buds and I started a publication called The Finger in the summer of 2004. That was a long time ago. Since then I’ve been editor in chief of Evergreen’s student newspaper, been an advisor for three school years at the same student newspaper, and experimented with a slew of online and print projects. It’s time for a new experiment, and for something that lasts longer than a few months or a year. Here’s what I’m working on:

Moss Public Press
A startup news & technology organization based in the Pacific Northwest.

As a first project, Nicki Sabalu, Brian Fullerton, and I live-blogged the Seattle Mini Maker Faire, and we’re currently compiling a video of what we saw there.

It was a good first project. We learned about live-blogging, and I got a sense of how I could improve at that. It would be interesting to continue to follow some of the projects that were at the Faire, to go more in-depth on, say, how the Tesla Gun works, or to learn more about the communities that exist at hacker/maker spaces around the area.

As part of Moss Public Press, I’m also working on olywiki.org and olynews.org, a wiki and blog focused on Olympia, WA and the South Sound.

When I’ve been explaining Moss Public Press to people, I usually use a sentence like this to describe it: “It’ll be like sassy wood elves founded vice magazine and cared deeply about truth and civics.”

I don’t know what that really means. I’m betting my description of the publication and my goals for it will change over the next few weeks, and those changes will be mostly determined by your input.

Something I know for sure: I’ve done a bunch of short-lived experiments like this over the past few years. I’m feeling super ready to make something stick, and turn it into a job. Let’s do that as a team.

Freelance work
Over the past couple of months I started doing contract web development work on evenings and weekends with Ruby/Rails, Javascript, Wordpress, and Drupal.
My position at Evergreen as associate advisor to the student newspaper ends after June 29, and I’ll be looking for more contract work starting in July.

My goal:
To balance contract work with starting a new publication, Moss Public Press. If I can find a part-time job with low hours as a reliable cash-flow while I’m getting started with the freelance work, that would be acceptable.

Why I’m talking about this:
I want to team up with people. Maybe you’re doing freelance work and need someone to help with web-dev tasks. Maybe you’re interested in teaming up on this Moss Public Press adventure. Both of those things would be exciting.

Let me know what you think.