announcement and invitation of contributors

This is an announcement of a collaborative blog for the San Diego / Tijuana region.

SD/TJ Design, Plant, Harvest

Nourishing our shared space, caring for the commons. Proposals, Op-Eds, events, & news about food, water, air, energy, culture, and land use in the San Diego / Tijuana region.

All aspects of the blog are open to being changed, but here is one statement of my vision for it:

To create a quality source of content devoted to caring for the commons in the San Diego / Tijuana region. We want posting here and reading here to help us grow in our understanding of the space we share and how to care for it.

I see this blog as potentially filling the niche in the region that is similar to the niche filled further north by HopeDance Magazine and here is only partly filled by Activist San Diego, San Diego Indymedia, Vision Magazine, The Light Connection, and a combination of other media, the communications of various listservs, and the announcements and newsletters of local organizations.

The main features of this collaborative blog include posting, mapping, and event-sharing. There is:

• a main blog where selected contributors can post, and a "free-for-all" blog where anyone can post;
• a Map Channels page where google maps of canyons, permaculture sites, community farms and gardens, nurseries , event locations/meeting venues, and story locations, could all be displayed and/or turned on or off;
• a shared calendar to which anyone with a google calendar can post events.

The next step, I think, may be to encourage individuals and organizations to start adding their content to the maps, calendar, and blog.

This announcement is an initial attempt at that. To be more effective than this mass email, we may need to meet in person with the people who would be doing the posting to demonstrate the technology.

If you see value in this collaborative project, contact me, and we can organize a meeting (a pot-luck?) where we can step people through adding to the maps, posting to the blogs, and adding events to the calendar.

I expect the beginning of this to be a bit chaotic--I'll be letting almost whoever wants to to be a contributor to post to the main blog. When some people are posting and reading, with their help we can refine things.