LifeQs

LifePosts

Answer one question or many - using words, photos or other media.

What's your favorite tool?

Steven Waldman
That's like choosing amongst your children! But if you're forcing me, I really like the LifeQs. It helps extra stories and photos from people in small bites, so it's a great way to get started without feeling like you have to be comprehensive. Also, it was kind of a blast writing the questions.
Ned Berke
As an editor, I love the timeline. It's so easy to use to outline information. That frees me up to do something more specific or anecdotal with the essay if I choose, but also puts all the key info out there in a clear way.

But as a user? It's LifeQs. When it comes to making LifePosts for my friends and family, I don't want to do all the work (heck, I use this thing all day. As much as I love it, I don't want to spend ALL my free time on it, too!). So I set up a bunch of LifeQs designed to get specific info from friends or family that I share with so that I can reuse their answers and media elsewhere. It's a really effective way to put them to work gathering the info while I kick back and eat potato chips.
Ju-Don Marshall
I really love the way LifeQs brings parity to contributions. It allows for quick answers, and I love the way the myriad stories and media contributions come together to create a nice tapestry on the page. You can also have a lot of fun crafting your own questions.
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Why did you decide to work with LifePosts?

Ju-Don Marshall
As a pseudo historian in my family, I was struck not only by LifePosts' commitment to creating a virtual space where people could come together to memorialize their loved ones but also by the possibility of connecting all of the most important threads in our lives to weave an even fuller family history.

Around the time, Steve and I started talking more seriously about the project, I was about to embark on a similar initiative to allow people to share their first-person narratives in text, video and writing. That project was to be a digital incarnation of a book I had pitched more than a decade ago -- a collection of stories capturing the oral traditions of African and African Americans in passing down stories from mother to daughter to granddaughter. The more Steve and I talked, I realized LifePosts could be the combination of all of those things. Most importantly, I believe LifePosts could become the glue for families and even communities to reestablish lost connections.

Already while building this project, I've shared lots of laughs and a few tears with family members as we've sorted through old photos and shared old stories to cobble together family history. For me, my LifePosts will become something I can share with my children and siblings and cousins, and in turn, they can share them with their families.
Elizabeth *
I worked with Steve at the FCC, as he oversaw a comprehensive examination into the future of news and information in America. I admired many things about him, but foremost: his great interest in the needs of local communities, his intellectual curiosity (which regularly turned what should have been 30-minute meetings into 2-hour interviews), and his ability to gather disparate globs of information and turn it all into a story that many audiences would find compelling. We stayed in touch after he left the FCC, and he would, from time-to-time, fill me in on his ideas for developing a place online where people could chronicle their major life events. The genesis was in obituaries (as newspapers fell away, where would people memorialize their loved ones), but it soon went wider to encompass everything from birth to death, as he says it. I loved the concept -- like Facebook, but focused on just those things worth remembering. And, having worked side-by-side, around-the-clock with Steve for more than a year, I knew that if anyone was going to make something like this succeed, it would be him.
Elizabeth Sams
From the very first meeting in Steve's dining room, I've been impressed with the people involved. And from the first time I heard the idea, I wanted to help make it happen. Several people that matter a lot to me have died over the past decade, and I started out intrigued with the goal of offering a better set of tools to create beautiful online memorials. As the idea of LifePosts grew, I've gotten even more excited about the potential for this to be a storytelling center for all the ups and downs that mark our lives. I believe everyone alive has moving stories to tell. I can't wait to see them unfolding here.
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What do you want LifePost to be when it grows up?

Ju-Don Marshall
It will be a community for connecting people, their stories and their communities.
Ned Berke
I want it to be the place where everybody comes to share and discover inspiring, human stories.
Elizabeth *
The human condition, mapped.

What do you do about people who died a while ago?

Ned Berke
Make it a project!

My grandfather died 11 years before I was born. I know so little about him. I had my mother and aunt go in and fill out what they could from memory: when and where he was born, what he did at what points in his life, etc. From there, I've been taking each little factoid and fleshing it out, and I've learned so much about his little quirks, sense of humor and general mindset about things... and I'm only into his teens! It's been a really rewarding project that only needs a few minutes here and there. Especially helpful has been getting my family to pitch in without taking up any significant amount of their time.
Steven Waldman
It makes no sense to say only people who died recently should be properly memorialized. LifePosts can be used to create biographies for anyone, no matter when they died. I did one for my grandpa who died in the 1970s. Here my favorite picture discovered along the way.
David Perlmutter
My dad died when I was 15, and now I'm 53. I really look forward to getting family members and friends to contribute to a LifePost about him, so I can learn more about him, and refresh distant memories. The nice thing is that it can be an accretive project. There's no rush to the finish required.

What's the meaning of the 3 bars?

Steven Waldman
As with most logo, one shouldn't be toooo literal-minded about it. But the general inspirations were: a) POSTS. Our designer, Lisa Powers, started with depictions of signposts, on roads, and then abstractified them. The different colors and heights give a sense of dynamism, like pistons. And the colors? Well we were searching for a mix of colors that conveyed "significance" but not overly somber (since we're also about the celebration of life.). Also, the colors looked perrrty.

An earlier version (in this image) had the third color in a more pastelle-ish blue, but it the whole thing seemed a little bit somber so we switch the the chirpier bright blue.
Lisa Powers
I like the word "abstractified."

Beyond the 'market need’ blah blah, why do you REALLY care about this?

Ned Berke
While running a local news outlet, one of the most common requests I received was for obituaries as well as occasional birth and wedding announcements. Like other news outlets, most of the time I had to say "No" because there were only so many resources and it wasn't "news." But, on occasion, we did do them - and they drew huge interest even from strangers.

It became pretty clear that people need relatable human stories about their neighbors to break up some of the drearier elements of the news cycle and remind them what brings them all together. Though many of the readers were strangers to the subject, it gave them a real, uplifting sense of community. And in the case of obituaries, the power it had to give comfort, support and hope to the families as people left notes and memories... well, it was palpable.

So that's why I really care about this. Journalism is about helping people, and that's not always a town hall rundown, crime blotter or business report... sometimes it's just shedding light on the moments of life, love and loss that bind them together.

Attached is a photo of Ed Eisenberg, a community activist whose passing I wrote about in 2014 (http://www.sheepsheadbites.com/2014/03/ed-/.../9-years-old/). The effect writing this had on me and, more importantly, his family, is something I think about a lot as we work on LifePosts.
Steven Waldman
Honestly, what FIRST got me going down this path was the realization that in my home 'town' of Brooklyn thousands and thousands of people were dying without any record, let alone a really beautiful telling of their story. In fact, one manic weekend I counted and estimated that of the 15,000 people who die in Brooklyn only 1,000 got either obituaries or little death notices. Over time, the idea evolved as I saw that there was a deep ned for these storytelling tools to be used to honor people and milestones in other ways. But that's the part that packs the most emotional punch for me.

Latest news about LifePosts:

Ju-Don Marshall

How can a LifePost help with grieving?

Elizabeth Sams
I think every loss is different, and no grieving process is predictable. But in my experience, an important part of grieving is the replaying of memories - both alone and in company with others missing the same person. There is comfort in remembering who and what you've lost, sharing silly jokes and sentimental stories with other people who are feeling the same loss. That's a feature of most funerals, memorials, wakes, shivas, but once everyone goes home, grieving becomes more solitary and more lonely.

Collaborating on a LifePost is way to continue the communal story-telling, grieving, and appreciating. And since LifePosts has no time limit, people can contribute when the time is right for them.

Where did the idea for LifePosts come from?

Steven Waldman
My wife is a funeral director (having formerly been a magazine writer). A few years ago, she kept coming home with stories about the remarkable people she'd buried or families she'd worked with. I'd invariably ask if there was an obituary I could read. No, she'd usually say. No obituary. I became obsessed and started counting: in Brooklyn, NY, where I live, about 15,000 people die each year. I counted maybe 500-1000 people that got a little death notice somewhere. The rest just vanished without a proper recording. Finally, a lightbulb went on related to my previous work on the decline of newspapers in local communities. Eventually, I also came to see that there were similar problems in the proper capturing of celebrations too. And then finally I got to the optimistic spot of realizing that the tools now exist to make it much easier (and more satisfying) to tell life stories.

I don't have time to do a big thing. Is there a shorter faster version?

Steven Waldman
Skip most of the question in registration (it's mostly optional). Use LifeStory. Put up a picture, a headline and a paragraph. Done.

If I hate writing, what's the best way to use LifePosts?

Ned Berke
Psha, easy. Fill out the form to create a milestone, publish LifeQs without answering any of them, and share it with family and friends. When inviting them, tell them to post photos and video if they have it. Then all that media is gathered in your library, your LifeQs and Overview section look pretty, and you've spent a whopping 5 minutes on this thing and haven't written a sentence.

How did LifePosts get its name?

Steven Waldman
Well we wanted something that was life affirming, even though memorials are an important part of the project. So, no DeathPosts. We wanted something that evoked milestones (without being too literal-minded about it). The notion of 'sign posts' along the road of life popped into our heads. The word 'posts,' of course, also has the digital double meaning, of posts on a website.