Erika Owens

Hosting a Hugo site on Mayfirst

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:47:11 -0400

Erika Owens http://localhost:1313/blog/hosting-a-hugo-site-on-mayfirst/ -

Woohoo, this website is finally updated! I will document my Drupal -> static site saga at some point, but first, a brief description of how to host a Hugo static site on Mayfirst.org.

Getting setup with Hugo generally

So, why Hugo? Well, it’s what Mayfirst uses for their own static site content. I just followed the Hugo docs to set it up locally first. This was great. Really easy to follow, ran out of the box easily and I just used the default theme. Then I searched for simple themes, and found some helpful posts. I eventually found one I liked and began adjusting things. Given my really incomplete styling knowledge, I eventually complained on Bluesky and got some extremely patient and kind and amazing help from María A. Matienzo (thanks again, María!!!).

Getting Hugo onto Mayfirst servers

This process was made possible by some more help, this time from the incredibly patient Jaime Villarreal from Mayfirst. (Thank you Jaime for YEARS of patient support!) Since I was trying to migrate content from my current site, I didn’t want to take down my current site while I setup this new site. Jaime helped me setup a staging site, which involved creating a new hosting order to setup a staging site, which created its own new website essentially. I was then able to SFTP files onto this staging site.

Side note: when I was organizing my folders to be ready to be on the Mayfirst servers I changed things slightly and couldn’t get the Hugo server to load anymore, but it was just that, like commenter number 1 here, I was not loading the server in the right place. I did run into a few snags like that where I was just doing something slightly wrong, but from a combination of searching for answers and retrying a bunch, I did figure things out.

But where was I supposed to put the files on the Mayfirst server?

In the Hugo default file structure:

the files directory -> site/files on the Mayfirst server
the contents of files/public -> site/web on the Mayfirst server (note: the contents of the public folder, not the folder itself!)

I also edited the hugo.toml file:

config = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files”

archetypeDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files/archetypes”

contentDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files/content”

layoutDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files/layouts”

dataDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files/data”

staticDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files/static”

themesDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/files/themes”

source = ""

publicDir = “/home/users/[your-mayfirst-user]/site/web/public”

publishDir = “../”

And this got the site up on the staging site! One other tiny thing was that the home button was misbehaving so in my theme I edited it in the sidebar.html layout to hardcode the nav to go to the specific site (staging or live) and not the base URL.

Finishing the migration

I let out an audible cheer when everything was up and working on my staging site. It was so exciting to have it completed, and be able to show it to people and get help on the finer details. The final step in the process was to move my site from the staging site to the “live” site.

Jaime advised the easiest way to do this is through the Mayfirst Control Panel.

delete your web configuration (and the associated server access account)
delete the existing databases (don’t need those anymore with a static site!)
restore your web configuration (it creates a clean folder structure on the Mayfirst servers)
re-add your server access account

Then, logout and log back in again, and you’ll be able to SFTP the files over following the same process as the staging site. I changed the config to the live site instead of staging. Waited for the upload, and, it worked! Woohoo!

Let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can describe in better detail (please email me till I get comments setup here).

Thanks again to María and Jaime for all the help. Really glad to have my site in a more simplified format. Yay!

- http://localhost:1313/blog/hosting-a-hugo-site-on-mayfirst/ - This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license

Cutting the cord from Google: It's not just you

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 08:47:11 -0400

Erika Owens http://localhost:1313/blog/cutting-the-cord-from-google-its-not-just-you/ -

Maybe these days you’re thinking about weaning yourself off of Google products and services. Recently, May First conducted a survey to better understand what the barriers are to people leaving Google products, especially gmail. They’ve released an early look at the findings (full report coming this month).

Some highlights:

Lots of people have this question
…but the #1 barrier is all of us
Tech may be less of a barrier than itself

The survey received 450 responses (I was one of them), which was more than the organizers had estimated and reflects the intensity of interest in the topic. I was very excited to see this raised as a pragmatic question—the fact that the survey was trying to understand why people used these tools to me made it clear this is going to be an honest conversation and not just about the way we wish things were.

The we is pretty critical here though. By a long way, the top barrier listed was “existing collaborations,” meaning, all of us. We can’t get off these platforms cause we’re already on these platforms and even if one of us leaves, if the rest of us stay it just gets so difficult! I don’t think this result is a huge surprise, but it does underline why individual choices alone are not a solution. In addition, in reviewing the results, Jamie McClelland pointed out that tech-related reasons were reported as comparatively less of a barrier. This could indicate that the challenges with “cutting the cord” are less with training or functionality and more with, again, how we collectively are organized and collaborate.

In this survey update, they shared the audio from a presentation of the results and a transcription of the Q+A session that followed, which includes a lot of great tips and links to resources around secure communications, how to be conscientious about data acquisition and tracking, and related topics. It also included a shout out to the NP Dev Summit, which is a similarly great place to talk about the intersection of tech and values in a candid and aspirational way.

In the closing, another speaker (whose name I did not catch, sadly) explained how the movement tech providers are not looking to replace corporate providers but instead to offer “good functionality and great politics.” I’m excited to see the recommendations that come out from this research about how those of us who are still muddling through these questions can bring our politics into better alignment with how we organize our digital lives.

- http://localhost:1313/blog/cutting-the-cord-from-google-its-not-just-you/ - This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license

A question as an offering

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:47:11 -0400

Erika Owens http://localhost:1313/blog/a-question-as-an-offering/ -

My Aunt Debby Cooney this summer. (Photo by her brother Rich Coursey)

My aunt passed away yesterday. After having a diagnostic test come back ok this summer, she suddenly faced a stage four cancer diagnosis in mid-September. Getting third-hand information from my mom, it sounded like they were still trying to understand what was happening medically and then she took a sudden turn and was gone.

This summer she had organized a family reunion and I’m so glad I was able to make it to that. She really enjoyed bringing everyone together. Another relative this time knit together a bunch of old family films, where my aunt popped up from time to time as a toddler. I didn’t get to see her again after that, even though I could have gone home for Thanksgiving. My mom told me it was probably ok to wait till early December (I had some deadlines I was stressing about), so I did. Just before my grandma died, my aunt made a sudden appearance at her mom’s house, five hours away from where she lived. She said she just had a feeling and so made the trip. It was surprising, and a bit unnerving, to see her so unexpectedly, but it turned out she was right to come. Her mom had a stroke shortly after and died. I have really tried to live that lesson, to make the trip when you can, but clearly have not learned it well enough. I will try even harder in the future to stick to it.

We spent every summer at my aunt’s house in Harrisburg, for at least a week. Lazing around in their air conditioning (fancy!) and cable TV with a different assortment of stations than ours. In recent years, she’d taken to sending cards for nearly every holiday. I didn’t even always remember to acknowledge them with a text. Probably cause her kids are a bit younger than me, she also got pretty into texting, complete with emoji. I could take a week to reply. I dunno, I just didn’t get why she was saying hi in all these ways! And it’s only now it’s dawning on me: you should have asked.

My aunt took so much delight in asking. I guess in acquiring things by many means (yes, shopping), but also cultivating friendships and information and recipes and ideas. She asked me about all sorts of things in my life. When I converted to Judaism, she was supportive. She came to the service commemorating my conversion. She asked me about Judaism, even if her questions were a little weird like what do Jews think of Jesus. (…they don’t, really, which is kind of the idea?) But when she got really into Catholicism, I never asked her much about it and honestly found it a mix of silly and worrying. It wouldn’t have cost me anything to ask her what she enjoyed about it or how her Bible study was going. But I didn’t.

This is also a lesson I should have learned sooner. My aunt lived a couple hours from where I went to college and would come see me from time to time just to get dinner or hang out. She’d ask me about my life. Just pleasant, nice. Nothing heavy or that I thought much of. But then it would get back to my mom that my aunt already knew about some update in my love life. My mom would be so offended I told my aunt before her, but I wasn’t playing favorites, it’s just that my aunt had asked a question and I answered! At the time, I just thought it was funny sibling rivalry stuff, but clearly could have done a bit of self reflection about the importance of asking questions, too.

I don’t really know what to make of all this. I hope it reminds me to be a little more curious about people and generous with my attention. I often think, “Why would people want to hear from me anyhow?” and don’t think there’s much worth sharing, but I guess a question can be its own offering. I know my aunt always had my back, even if I was sometimes confused by how she interpreted my interests. But I guess that is also its own lesson—she could only get so far asking on her own, I had to open up more and learn about about her and her interests for us to really connect. An embarrassing case in point: when I was a teenager, she gave me a Carole King CD for Christmas. All I could think of the CD was the big SALE sticker on it from Media Play, muttering to myself about how could she think so little of me to just get me some bargain bin crap. I don’t think I said that out loud, but I was also not effusive (or conversant) in my thank you. Come to find out, it was one of her favorite albums and I was a huge, self centered asshole who could only see everything in the worst possible light. (Some things never change.) Probably about 20 years later, I had by then realized I had been a jerk and wanted to try to reciprocate sharing music, so I invited her to an Aimee Mann and Ted Leo show in Harrisburg because I love them both (heh) and thought she’d enjoy it too. It was a fun show, but I can’t say we came away with some new profound understanding or resolution (I do think she understood I was being a regular teenager).

Who knows, maybe now is the time to finally, actually listen to Tapestry.

Header image: My Aunt Debby Cooney this summer. (Photo by her brother Rich Coursey)

- http://localhost:1313/blog/a-question-as-an-offering/ - This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license

Moving from the US to the UK

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 08:47:11 -0400

Erika Owens http://localhost:1313/blog/moving-from-the-us-to-the-uk/ -

I once tried to write a travel diary and it was the most boring writing I’ve ever seen in my life. Hopefully this won’t be quite so bad. In just over a month, I will be moving from the US to the UK. I realized it might be useful to document some parts of this process like:

getting a visa
getting ready socially
oh my gosh, all the life admin stuff
moving an 18-year-old cat across an ocean (some of the existing documentation pointed us in the direction of taking the cat over on a boat)
how the hell you pack your stuff to take it on a boat
how the hell you decide what, of the absurd amount of random things people have bought you and you yourself have accumulated over several decades, you actually take to another country
and probably other, maybe even emotional (gasp) things about moving for the first time in nearly twenty years

Part of my preparation (/procrastination) appears to be re-watching both Slow Horses and Industry, and enjoying the Paralympics! We’ll see how this goes. If you have any advice, or requests of things to document, please reach out. (I had to turn off comments on this site years ago cause of runaway spam, but welcome conversation always!)

- http://localhost:1313/blog/moving-from-the-us-to-the-uk/ - This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license

A socialist approach can work in business

Thu, 30 May 2024 08:47:11 -0400

Erika Owens http://localhost:1313/blog/a-socialist-approach-can-work-in-business/ -

(originally published in JSK fellows)

In Philly’s activist circles, heading to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit was an annual tradition. I accompanied colleagues from the Media Mobilizing Project there one year and on one of the many field trips throughout Detroit, we visited an enormous abandoned factory. It was astonishing in its vastness and emptiness. We were the only ones there in the shell of a building that used to be part of what made Detroit Motor City. In our travels, we also learned about the unionization efforts at factories like that one and organizing efforts led by Grace Lee and James Boggs. It was a really formative trip for me, witnessing both the ravages of capitalism as well as the perseverance of the communities that remained.

About a decade later, I found myself in another place with an especially intense perspective of capitalism. As a 2024 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, it has been just as jarring to be immersed in a place where its local industry is seemingly running the world. The exploited workers that power much of the internet we know are not located here in Silicon Valley (and therefore harder to organize than meeting people at the factory gates), but the riches being reaped into this region are similarly astonishing. The fancy cars on every single block, the endless startup pitches droning on in the background at coffee shops, the sense I get in so many interactions that the rest of the world should really just be grateful that it gets to benefit from the concentration of intellect and innovation gathered in this one place. It shouldn’t surprise me, but the oppressive certainty (of the importance of money! the existence of meritocracy! the faith in continual growth!) of this place has (further) radicalized me.

Silicon Valley has just made it so clear: This isn’t the only way. I know it’s not because I’ve learned from activist communities about how to infuse values and justice into my work as a nonprofit leader. Our industries, including journalism, don’t have to follow boom and bust cycles. And as leaders, we can make our budgets work in ways that are collaborative, fair, sustainable, and push back on the actually quite fragile narrative we’ve been sold that the market is the only way to succeed.

Start with solidarity

I’m not going to claim to have solved the question of how to keep moving while everything burns around us, but spending 10 months in the town feeding that fire has only made it more clear to me that solidarity must be part of the answer . Solidarity, meaning understanding that our struggles are shared and working in coalition, is a concept I value in community organizing, but I think it can (and should!) be expressed in business as well, including in the journalism industry.

How solidarity can show up in business:

Redistribution: The concept of giving what you can and taking what you need can truly, I promise, be a sound business strategy.
Economic justice: We must value workers and have their needs central in budget planning.
Centering relationships: Let’s organize around people and our ability to learn from and support one another.
Not trying to do it all: Know your role, stick to it, and expand impact through collaboration

I’ve tried to experiment with these strategies in my own work as co-director at OpenNews, drawing inspiration and urgency from what I’ve seen in Detroit, Silicon Valley, and beyond. I share these ideas in the hope that the more we talk about alternatives to the status quo, the more we try out new ideas, the more we take action together, the closer we’ll get to finding ways to sustain journalism and the people within it.

Redistribute resources (that includes money)

I know it can be hard to believe, but it really is true that all of us giving what we are able can create abundance. Thinking about money can immediately make everything feel scary and scarce. But…who has ever gone to a potluck that ran out of food? (Ok, maybe you didn’t like all the food, but I bet it was there.) Most of us have had plenty of experiences of people showing up for each other when someone has a need, and then that person showing up for their community the next time. It actually can work that way in business, too. You just have to do it.

In one small example at OpenNews, we changed our conference ticket structure to make it easier for some people to pay more, some people to pay less, and some people to not pay at all. And you know what? We brought in a ton more money than when there was just one ticket price. In addition, the overall event budget structure included funds for scholarship payments to participants who needed funds for travel or participation.

Through this experiment, I saw how it was not only okay to bring solidarity values into a business plan, but it could be profitable for us and support the needs of even more participants. I don’t need every experiment like this to succeed to know that it is definitely worth the attempt.

Budgets are moral documents

The pressure with constructing an overall organizational budget can be immense, especially if you’re trying to layer in values-driven decisions. For most of the budgets I’ve worked with, staffing was the majority of the budget so that’s where I focus. I’ve learned a lot about different benchmarks and models and ways of thinking about salaries, but here’s how I try to understand fairness:

What is the lowest payscale? Is it meaningfully above minimum wage? (Currently in California the minimum wage for an exempt salaried position is $66,560, and in January 2025 nationally it will be going up to $58,656.)
What is the highest a staff member can make at the org? So, for a journalism org, what’s the highest a senior reporter makes?
What is the differential between the lowest pay and the top leadership of the organization?

These factors and the needs of workers should be central to any planning around budget adjustments, too. For example, if an org feels it needs to increase the pay for leadership to compete for top candidates, what is the plan to similarly raise other salaries so as not to exacerbate the gap between roles? Unions are also obviously hugely important in setting the terms for compensation for employees. It’s been great how many negotiations have also covered related topics like limiting the amount of time freelancers/contractors can work before they must be given the opportunity to become a full employee.

It’s critical that we compensate workers for all of the time they spend doing journalism, including the often invisible and unpaid work that many journalists do, especially people of color and women. This background work of advising, network building, research, and relationship support is what powers reporting and the sustainability of our organizations.

Center relationships

Even though it’s often less visible: Work is all about relationships. I have seen it throughout my career, whether it’s tutoring kids, talking to voters, producing journalism to inform audiences, or facilitating events. All of these activities are ultimately about people. How to connect people with each other, with resources, with their power to learn and change the world around them. These relationships are already the foundation of the work that we do in journalism, and yet they are often not seen as central in how we do that work.

Hierarchies and received wisdom determine how many of our workplaces are constructed. Ideas of leadership often conjure an image of a single person. This simplistic idea of leadership driven by one person alone is another capitalistic narrative of scarcity and exceptionalism that infects many workplaces, but there are other options.

I’ve been experimenting with different modes of shared leadership, and have become really interested in scholarship around “relational leadership,” the idea that leadership is something that we ALL enact, together. Why not construct our organizations in a way that serves the needs of the entire staff? With back to the office mandates, we hear so much about the importance of informal discussions. That’s relationship building time! But it doesn’t have to just happen around a virtual or physical water cooler, it can be infused into how meetings are conducted, who makes decisions and how, into the structure and plan for the entire organization.

Part of what I’ve appreciated about scholarship on this style of leadership is that it has demonstrated that it actually makes good business sense. People with strong networks inside and outside of their organizations are powerful change agents who help to ensure new efforts succeed and don’t waste time and money. Let’s start making these relational skills core to our organizational structures.

Sometimes it is ok to stay small

One of the ways I managed to keep OpenNews’ budget going in recent years was by keeping the organization small. Staying small is always an option.

Chasing grants, chasing growth, chasing new projects, these are not the only ways to keep an organization afloat. Growth is also not the only way for an organization to evolve and flourish. I was really cautious about when to hire new employees and how. When so many people seem to measure success by growing budgets and team sizes, it can feel like it’s not really an option to stay small or that it is a failure somehow. But I don’t think that’s true (even if the imposter syndrome does continue to tug at me). In addition to having a more manageable budget to fundraise for, one of the other benefits of staying small is that it makes it easier to focus on your organization’s specific remit.

When I’ve shared this idea with other journalism leaders, I’ve heard responses like “but there’s so much more that needs to be done than our current level of staffing has capacity for!” And I can see that, but I think that’s where we get right back to solidarity being expressed through coalitions: you can get the other stuff done in collaboration and community with other people.

Expanding your own organization isn’t the only path to greater impact. When we collaborate across orgs, industries, and disciplines, we can find new ideas and ways to tackle the problems with journalism. As I’ve written before, public funding may not solve all our problems, but the coalitions building to experiment there are going to teach us a lot. Artists and activists rely on our journalism for their work, might there be ways to partner so we can strengthen the social impact we all seek?

Operating from a place of values requires taking action

Through my JSK Fellowship, I’ve learned from theatre and history, conversations and workshops. I am continuing to build an understanding of the kind of leader I want to be and the type of journalism I want to support.

Especially in a place of such deep economic disparity, I did not expect business strategy to become something I kept coming back to. But I guess in that way it actually makes complete sense: when faced with such blatant injustice, I want to do something in response. And, in the solidaristic mode of working from where I am in collaboration with others, I know how to make budgets work in a values-driven way and it seems like that is a useful skill. In addition, I have a willingness to not just talk about theory and ideas, but to find ways to put them into action. I love creating processes and procedures that center equity, access, and justice and get results. Working for justice and making organizations sustainable are not mutually exclusive goals.

If you’re curious about similar questions, please do reach out. I may come back to update this piece later as these thoughts are very much in progress. Thanks to Mago Torres and Krista Almanzan for feedback on this piece, and to this piece from Hamilton Nolan for the unexpected inspiration.

Header image description: the word “solidarity” in cursive writing on an orange striped background
Header image: Image credit: Tartantastic

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