Restoring our Histories – Dragon Fruit Project Working Day Recap

May 10, 2017 — By Lavender Phoenix

DFP QC Day — Image Description: Community Room filled with people sitting around tables on their laptops.

The Dragon Fruit Project had its FIRST EVER quality control working day this past April 9, which was a great success. Over 15 volunteers (also known as the QTs for QC) came out to help review over 20 transcripts to prepare them for publishing on our digital portal at www.dragonfruitproject.org. Quality control is crucial to our work because it ensures that many more can have access to the abundance of stories within our community.

Since 2013, DFP volunteers have gathered over a series of working days specifically focused on various steps of the project: interviewing elders and youth; transcribing interviews; creating inspired artwork; hosting intergenerational panels; identifying and categorizing key themes; and preparing biographies for the digital portal. It has been incredibly fulfilling and rewarding for us on the DFP planning committee to see the work transform and expand from the initial process of gathering stories into the multitudes it has become today. We are striving to activate our movement hxstories to empower our communities.

Now, you can check out our Dragon Fruit Project Hxstory Timeline at bit.ly/DFPTimeline!
A team of dedicated volunteers and interns have been working on compiling this timeline for over a year. Through acknowledging the intersectionality of the queer and trans API experience, numerous important events from API and queer and trans history more broadly have been included in this timeline. The coverage on queer and trans API organization history has been focused on the earliest organizations of their kind and organizations that have been important in queer and trans API hxstory based in the Bay Area. Expanding from the Timeline of Asian and Pacific Islander Diasporic LGBT History that we created from our 2014 Wiki-edit-a-thons, we recognize that we still have yet to document all critical events and moments our communities have struggled though. If you have feedback or input for our Dragon Fruit interactive timeline, please take 10-30 minutes to fill out this survey – we welcome your suggestions and comments!

In 2017, we look forward to continuing to provide more exciting opportunities for our established volunteers to re-engage in different ways as well as for new volunteers to be introduced to the project. We hope you’ll join us. If you would like to volunteer and work with the Dragon Fruit Project, please fill out our Volunteer Interest Form here.

Warmly,
Dragon Fruit Project Committee

Image description: A group of 20+ individuals crowd in triangular fashion to take a selfie. — Image description: Introducing our first ever Quality Control team! A group of 20+ individuals stand in triangular fashion to take a selfie.