Contributor Guidelines and Vision

Here is a list of those who have been invited to contribute.

Our overall goal is 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. Any posting guidelines will be secondary to that underlying goal, so don't adhere too narrowly to the following.

• Frequency: Try to post at least once a month, even if you think you have nothing to say--we want to hear from you. Try not to post more than once per week, but if you need to add some supporting posts (links, calendars, maps), then you do.
• Links: This blog does not have a list of links to other sites on its main page. Instead, each contributor can create a page of links. Create a post with the links you want to share and link to this page in your profile (if you'd like help doing this, let me know). Tag this post 'links'. Then it will appear on our links page.
• Vision: Perhaps write a statement of vision, either as a post (this could be your introductory post), or put it in your profile. You could tag this post 'vision' and 'introduction'.
• Titles: Perhaps use a unique title (one others probably will not use) for your posts. For example, instead of "Links", write "LocalpowerSD's Links".
• Turn-taking: consider taking turns posting among people who come from different viewpoints. I'm not sure how to make this work in practice, but if we have only women posting, we should take time to encourage men to post. If we have only San Diego residents posting, let's encourage Tijuana residents to post (and perhaps correspondents about good things happening in other cities). Homeowners only? Find renters, homeless. A brainstorm of some other categories not to get stuck in follows. I'm sure you can add to the list: Age groups (under 20, over 50), suburban/urban, native/not, monolingual/multilingual, children/child-free, professions, incomes, institutional education level.
• A feed of your own: To help your readers to subscribe to your posts only, follow the feed customization How-To. You can also use the feed you create that way to display your posts on another website. In other words, you can post to this blog and then resyndicate your posts to your own website--displaying there only your own content while also showing you are connected to this forum.
• Comment notification: Currently, contributors do not receive notification when someone comments on their posts! Unless the contributor (1) clicks on the title of her post to go to the single-page view, and (2) scrolls to the bottom of the page and clicks on the last link on the left: "Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)". That may be too much of a hassle, so I'll email contributors who receive comments to their posts unless they don't want me to. Ask Blogger to allow contributors to receive email when people comment on their posts.

In general, if you're unsure what to do here, consider whether your post or your action contributes to caring for the commons. Should this blog succeed, what that means will probably be questioned at some point!