The Linewaiters Gazette

Starting Place

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Park Slope Food Coop in Park Slope Brooklyn, scrambled to adjust to the new normal of lockdowns and masking and distancing requirements. Unlike most other grocery stores, the coop relied heavily on member-labor, or a form of “labor-barter” that requires all members of the coop to serve a regular labor shift in some capacity within the operations of the coop, in exchange for shopping privileges. Yet, when everything shut down due to the pandemic, member-labor was suspended, and the coop shifted to a “skeleton-staff” of employee-only laborers. That meant that many essential functions of the coop’s regular operations would be suspended indefinitely. Among those, was included the regular biweekly publication of the Linewaiters’ Gazette, the coop’s printed newsletter and regular forum for public discussion.

What We Did

A small team of dedicated coop members gathered to continue publishing stories in the Gazette, this time online instead of in print, as access to the Coop’s desktop publishing office was closed to everyone save for a handful of employees. TimeTravlr, as the creative and tech lead in this group, developed a customized Wordpress web-publication that allowed for collaboration and content management for a team of more than 65 people. TimeTravlr in collaboration with the coop staff and Gazette volunteers created an online content-management Workflow that mirrored the Gazette’s print publishing process, but that allowed all work to be done remotely by volunteers working from home. This workflow streamlined the process of digital publishing, managed version control, and allowed different teams to have input at the right time and step in the process, while at the same time making the Gazette available on web and mobile devices.

The new digital Linewaiters’ Gazette is now more accessible, more accountable, and more available to the coop’s membership and the general public than ever before.