The past three days have seemed like an eternity. So much has happened, and I realized that in all this, we never gave you any background about JoinTheImpact. On Friday morning, November 7th, I (Amy) received an email from a good friend, Willow Witte (our Cleveland protest coordinator). Willow like many of us, was fired up about Proposition 8 and seeking a way to mobilize. She had put up a post on her blog with an email template for people to write their local LGBTQ organization and ask for help planning something – anything. I responded to Willow’s email saying that we shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country. We have allowed our opponents to take our issues and make them local. Once they have divided us, they take their national movement and attack our smaller state-wide or even city-wide one. JoinTheImpact was forged as a way to give our community a national stage. We all must work towards equality in our state, but we need to know that every member of our community, across the nation cares about what happens in every state. California, Arkansas, Florida, and Arizona should not stand alone in this fight. We must all stand with them and for each other. These ideals are what spawned JoinTheImpact. That is who we were on November 7th at 9am PST.
Now, 4 days later, we are more than anyone could have imagined. Look in the mirror. We are you. We are your family. We are your loved ones and your allies. JoinTheImpact has not just gone national, it has gone international! Here’s the timetable so far:
1. November 7th – Launch
2. 5 Hours post launch – First 10,000 visitors
3. Midnight on November 7th – 20 cities organizing
4. November 8th (Afternoon) – Thanks to the help of organizers, we made CNN’s iReport.
5. November 8th (Evening) – Our site hit 35K visitors
6. November 9th (Morning) – 30 cities organizing
7. November 9th (Afternoon) – We got the attention of ParezHilton.com
8. November 9th (Evening) – The tipping point – Traffic jumped to 50K visitors/hour. With the help of Hostdango.com, we immediately switched to a new web server (Generously donated by Hostdango!)
9. November 10th 8am PST – Our initiative goes international! Now there are protests being planned around the world for the exact same minute on November 15th!
10. November 10th 11am PST – WetPaint.com enters the mix of local Seattle based companies donating time and services. Thanks to WetPaint, we now have an amazing Wiki to upload contact information and protest locations for every single city! They created a social site just for us: http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com.
11. November 10th 11pm PST – 49 states have local organizers in over 80 cities!!!
12. November 11th – 1am PST – We reached 1million visitors!!
13. November 11th 8am PST – Hostdango shows even more generosity by upgrading us to an amazingly robust dedicated server to ensure that we can handle the traffic!
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