About the name

The following is reprinted from a post on my personal blog. The name of this site is open to change-- "SD/TJ Design, Plant, Harvest" is not at all simple to tell to someone and have them remember. Below is some of my reasoning.

I think what is happening with the blog is

the creation of a public space. It is meant to be a page where people meet, collaborate, and are able to go their separate ways, but they are all benefited by sharing a space with many others with different foci, yet a similar underlying goal.

"Design, Plant, Harvest" references the three things I at least sometimes neglect. Am I just "planting" (doing, doing, quick intuition, mindless fiddling), neglecting to design? Am I just designing (thinking, dreaming, hesitating in indecision), neglecting to plant? And have I planted, but never harvest--?

"Design", influenced by permaculture's emphasis on design, was the title briefly.

And I do want the blog to have more than just gardening info, but value having consideration of all the rest (land, water, energy use) rooted in the organic gardening, permaculture design metaphor.

But maybe all that will be left behind and the site will go in directions I don't forsee.

Maybe it will be no more than a demo that inspires some other project.

So, now is a time to stop and design what I'm doing--the aesthetics of working with the computer--what kind of experience do I want to harvest here, to help our mind, body have?

Today I discovered SD Foundation for Change's "Plant, Water, Nurture" statement about what they do. That pushed me to get around to publishing this little statement about the name SDTJDPH, as I had been meaning to do.

Changelog

Technical and design changes to the site (at least some of them) are listed here. And also:

Unresolved Issues (though maybe we'll put this on its own page):

• The events calendar and the map channels involve editorial decisions about what content appears there. As mentioned in Operating Procedure, it could be best to keep the site itself fairly content-neutral (with only the check, "are they caring for the commons? Is there a way they could be seen as caring for the commons?"), while enabling contributors to share their different perspectives. As it is now, the calendar is focused on east-central San Diego. Map channels is less of a problem, it is just waiting for more content. In the future, the events calendar page could simply point to a list (or to a map) of calendars, and individual contributors can compile and share the calendars most of interest to them or to their neighborhoods.
  

Changelog

2008-02-29

• Made the mapchannels map default to slideshow & terrain view, and set the sidebar to be initially collapsed.
  

2008-02-07

• Made authors' names appear at the top of each of their posts, linked to their profiles. The name at the bottom also links to the profile now. If you change your display name, the link will be broken. Let me know if you change your name. If you haven't yet posted, the link will also be broken until I add you to the list in the script.
  

2008-01-28

• Modified the border images to correspond to changing the template's width.

2007-12-20

• Changed template width so that larger maps could be displayed. The relevant numbers are: 740 -> 950px & 485 -> 695 px

Looking forward/looking back, for the week

On encouraging posting here

I'm uncertain whether to post here or to my personal garden blog.

We do need a group (representative of the kinds of organizations and individuals we'd like to post here) to establish some sort of example for those who would post here.

I'm concerned about at least two things here in my posts: (1) This could be seen as one guy's odd project unless we get some other posters; (2) By not posting, this site could be seen as dead or as too formal / unusual for new posters to post at.

To help overcome those barriers, I want to encourage anyone who reads this or who has already become a contributor to post to this blog or the free-for-all blog.

I will also be inviting new contributors from those who were at the meeting this Sunday:

• Ian Miller
• Debbie

About the future of this blog

Ian posted some of the notes from our meeting yesterday. Main outcomes of the meeting may be the following: a statement of guiding goals, and plans for two future meetings.

Guiding goals

Here, from the meeting notes:

• goals / purpose
  

• place where organizations go to get their events publicized
• individuals can find events in their community of the greatest interest to them

• ease of use is a priority
• offer multilingual ability
• seek to integrate diverse perspectives in the region

Here from what I wrote down:

• To become the place where organizations/individuals go to get their events publicized.
• To become the place where individuals can find events of most interest to them.
• To seek and cultivate contributors who can help the project present a more complete and helpful view of the region. (This was the wording I could not remember from an earlier post).
  

We were focusing primarily on calendar integration. We also addressed, blogging, mapping, and the use of Wikis to create knowledge base applications--such as tree-pruning tips or local gardening knowledge.

We also mentioned the possibility for publishing on paper: versions of the internet documents created collaboratively (e.g., and agenda view of the upcoming calendar); and to market the collaborative technology we create (e.g, cards in cafes, mentions in the SD Reader).

Upcoming meetings / in-person collaboration:

1. Ian planned to come up with a demonstration of some of the ideas he mentioned during the meeting. I think these include ideas about the wikis and about the calendaring.
2. Probably after that, we'll arrange a meeting to help contributors learn to use the mapping, blogging, calendaring, wiki, etc. features we decide will be a part of our collaborative project.

At both of these meetings we hope to have a projector so we can display the technology we're talking about.

More on the meeting

Some concerns:

• Should we try to dialogue with more existing organizations about what we hope to do? Activist San Diego, IndyMedia, etc., may be people to work more closely with.
• Do we have too wide a focus? Should our goals be more like the following: "to develop a protocol that like-minded groups can use to mutually publicize each other's events."

I sort of like that lower-key statement of goals.

I did appreciate that there was an interest expressed by at least Mariah and Ian to have better reporting about the permaculture/foodnotlawns type happenings--something this blog hopes to address.

Mariah recommended a simple archive of photos and videos, free of editorial content. I mentioned that like for streetsblog, we can have photos and videos on the various media-sharing sites tagged with identifying labels such as "sdfoodnotlawns" or "sdtjdph" and then aggregate these. Ian mentioned "tag clouds", which I'm not 100% familiar with, as a means of aggregating content by neighborhood or subregional location.

As an example, here are photos tagged with "sdtjdph", and "sdfoodnotlawns".

Other things addressed include:

• wanting not to be over-dependent on google (some, however, like me, don't mind this if it reduces time spent fiddling with technology)
  
• wanting to enable posting to the calendar without needing to register with some new system (google or otherwise)--anonymous posting, in other words
  

So anyway, what else happened last week?

The beginning of the week was a rest for me. Don found that World Market, not far from here, west on El Cajon & 53rd(?) (not in any online yellow pages I can find), is a budget source of seaweed and mushrooms and other foods used by the Asian community. And then he got to cooking up some fancy meals.

Five Gallons of Jerusalem Artichokes/Sunchokes + Amaranth

Don dug up these roots. He filled a five-gallon bucket to overflowing. I had been afraid to try more of them, thinking they had led to some bloating/ major gas due to the indigestibility of inulin. We've been slicing them and cooking them in a fryingpan with a bit of olive oil. So far no bad effects for me. We've eaten a lot.

We're both curious how sunchokes would serve us as an energy food for serious hiking or physical work--what is their actual nutritional value? Don also helped me prepare to harvest some amaranth grain.

Planning for the Garden

I rested and meditated on what to do with the garden. This will be reported later on the garden blog.

Rare Tree Walk, Balboa Park Walks, + Crash

On Saturday, Don went on a rare tree walk that begins every third Saturday at 10 am in Balboa Park at the visitor's center (in the main plaza-turned-parking lot). That's all the info I have.

I see in the Home Sunday fyi section of the Union Tribune there are other Balboa Park walks listed. . . maybe we can get these in our calendar to help us learn more about the plants.

Saturday evening I got hit by a car which was turning left without seeing me, but only had a minor bang to the knee, and the bike is fine, the driver was helpful. (There's a lot more that could be said about that, including about what I will no longer do).

Tule, Cattail, Sedge weaving workshop

The announcement, & some of the results:






I learned to make mats, bands, and cordage. And we hung out in a nice secret spot in Mission Valley for an afternoon. Now that we've done it, I realize there are tules and cattails closer to home as well. ( Laurie, the photographer, was also along for part of it.)

Taking the time to practice weaving using natural materials is potentially transformational in several ways. For one, I was made aware of how much time indigenous people had to do nourishing things in nature.

We passed Home Depot on the way back. I felt that the river with its reeds and river cane and my neighbor's bamboo forest was closer to being my Home Depot now.

A future project may be to use cordage I make to lash the bamboo & rivercane trellis and fence for the garden.

The week(s) ahead: an expedition; the garden

We've got an excellent start on restarting the garden here--I'm excited about that.

But first Don and I will be going camping somewhere, and then he's headed on to other adventures.

Thoughts about this post

In this post, written quickly, I strove for some balance between business, perhaps of wider regional interest, and personal reporting. If it were just a personal post, that might be best on a personal blog.

Reporting on food-not-lawns & permaculture-related events was also included.

This may be a good mix.

The hasty style I cannot avoid now if I'm going to post at all. Perhaps readers would prefer something more carefully thought out. Even so, this did take about two hours, and I've read it through to smooth rough spots.

Feel free to show us something different by example!

Also, I updated my links page.

Addressing the neglect of TJ on this blog; looking for two SD & two TJ editors

Here are a few ideas.

• Have two editors per region (two for SD, two for TJ) who invite contributors for each area.
• We can find TJ bloggers/ organizers partly by doing a blogger profile search on Tijuana. Here is a recycling blog and a dynamic individual's profile and list of blogs I found by doing that. We can also talk with south county organizers to get their suggestions. I plan to invite Daniel (San Diego Tijuana Border Blog) for that reason.
  
• Start a version of this blog in Spanish. We could have both Spanish and English posts in the existing blog, but a separate blog may be better, and there could be occasional posting of translations of certain posts on one blog to the other.
• Encourage posts to the maps in any language, and then add translations.
• There are cultures in both regions we'd like to have contribute whose preferred language may not be English or Spanish. Seek and cultivate contributors who can help the blog present a more complete and helpful view of the region.
  

Editors Needed

I'm currently looking for two people to be San Diego editors and two to be Tijuana editors. You would handle the tasks of inviting contributors and of updating the invited contributors page. You would be helping make decisions about the direction and design of the blog and about who would contribute, and you'd encourage contributors to post.

Too Broad?

It wouldn't hurt to question whether SD/TJ is too broad a focus for this blog. My feeling has been that there are many regional resource use issues that will be of interest, and that there are many who live on one side of the border who are interested in what happens on the other for various reasons. Also, beginning with such a broad focus may support the creation of neighborhood and sub-regional groups dedicated to caring for the commons.

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.

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!

Operating Procedure

On Sunday 12/29 2007, Julie Osborn, Colin Leath, & Michael Brennan met partly to discuss the future of this blog.

Here are my thoughts. First, there is a bit of tension between wanting to be careful about creating a quality, well-respected and well-worth-reading blog on one hand and (my own) wanting to create a place that is easy to use and open to many and working as soon as possible.

Influenced by holacracy, and agile programming, I'm focusing more on the latter at this point.

So, my aim is to get the blog and its features out to the SD/TJ community quickly.

If it fails and no one uses it, it can at least serve as the base for new blogs or other collaborative projects, having affected in some way all those who participated or became aware of the project.

So now about the operating procedure.

• One basic procedure. In posting as "Colin Leath", I will be posting as a member of the Editor's group, and as a Contributor. In posting as "Administrator", I will address technical concerns about the site. Eventually there could be posts authored by an "Editors" alias, meaning that the content there was approved by the three people currently serving as Editors.

Since I'm pressed for time, I will paste in a rough brainstorm I wrote up before the meeting.

Let me highlight this: If you'd like to be in the Editor's group for this blog (a group of three, intended to add solidity and permanence and more thoughtfulness to what would otherwise be a project led by one person), or if you'd like to help with the technical administration of the site (Admin of geolocation/mapping, Admin of site/post formatting, Admin of feed customization, or ??) please contact me.

I intend to make this collaborative project not dependent upon my own energy for its existence!

Here are the brainstorm notes:

2007-12-30-0811
on the proposal again.

--We can have two blogs: events, and all the rest.
sdtjdphevents-- anyone can post to, just by sending an email.

Roles we need:

Editors board--three people--selecting who is contributor, who is not, making other basic decisions about blog. -- so blog is not just one person's creation--

Contributors' board of some kind. ..

Reader's rep.

Admin of events

Admin of blog appearance

Admin of geolocation

Admin of feeds

"who do we most want to hear from?
"what do we most want to hear?

Goal: for reading and writing for the blog to help us grow:

See Hopedance mag as a model--

Have themes of month or of posting cycle--e.g. every third post, on this theme, this subculture, this part of our region.

Key features of blog:

(1) Filtering of content, based on what you are most interested in---

[perhaps not reasonable--]

(2) Geolocation of content--make it easy to see on a map where a post refers to--auto mapping of posts with, say [lat,lang] tag in post body.

(3) Relocalization-- finding content, events near a place could become simple.

(4) Ease of posting

(5) Content focus on resource use/creation (?)

(6) Quality of content (?)

-------------------------

(10!) Being useful to the people who are organizing people--

(11) but also/and also helping educate ourselves in certain areas--such as the nature of the local water system,

But if we focus mostly on helping set up permaculture systems?? Working independently of govt's??



---------

Yield-- is money needed?

What kinds of yield to look for??

---------------
Possible statements of vision:

--to help region become self-aware

--to help regional organizations, individuals collaborate

--support the relocalization of resource generation and use

--support the creation of great public space

--for the blog(s) to become a great public space itself

--to help create great neighborhoods

--to support caring for the global commons

--to help people live without needing or wanting to travel great distances/ reduce resource use

--Method: to create a virtual public square where many can present themselves and a few can be focused on-- (already the state of internet--e.g., san diego blog search?)

--to increase individuals' focus on the creation of public good over the creation of private estates.

---------
Measurable goals:

Are we sharing peace?

Do we love?

Do we look forward to each day?

-------------------
Governance: Organizational sustainability, growth
--decision-making
-decision implementation
-continuity
-celebration
-roles, accountabilities---
-"decision-making by integrative emergence" / holacracy / presencing / integral leadership / theory U. / Spirit / feeling the spirit, intention of the collective entity, or of the space, ground.

Content Possibilities

• News >>
• Proposals >>
• Opinion >>
• Events >>
• Maps >>
• Images >>
• Videos >>
• Sounds >>
• Dances >>
• Art >>
• Poetry >>
• Data Sets >>
• Jobs >>
• For Sale >>
• For Free >>
• Suggestions >>
• Politics of resource use >>

Customize the feed

By subscribing to a site's feed, your reader is updated or you are notified by email when there are new posts. By email, you'll be notified once a day; readers update more often.

If you don't want our whole feed, it is easy to subscribe to part of it. Maybe you want to read posts by only two of the contributors, or maybe you want to read just the posts that mention Tijuana. Here's how to filter the feed so you can do that:

[note: if this how-to is ever out of date, do a search for rss filter or feed filter and you should find something that helps.]

• Go to Feed Rinse and follow the directions.
• See also how you can get site feeds for specific labels. Here, for example, is the URL for the feed for all the posts labeled 'about sdtjdph': http://sdtjdph.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/about+sdtjdph
• By extension, you can label all your posts with your name and make it easy to get a list and a feed of all your posts. Then you can ignore some or all of the steps below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Enabling email subscriptions to filtered feeds is more involved. So perhaps only contributors will be interested in the following instructions in order to make it easier for their fans to subscribe by email to their posts.

If you don't want to enable email subscriptions, you can skip the following list. If you still want to create a link to the filtered feed, skip to #11, and modify the example there to point to your filtered feed.

To create a feed with your own title, description, and stable address using feedburner:

1. Take the URL of the filtered feed you made at refilter or feed rinse. For Administrator, using refilter, this looks like this: "http://re.rephrase.net/filter/?feed=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fsdtjdph&filter=author%3A%22Administrator%22"
2. Paste it into the form at feedburner.com, and click 'Next >>'.
3. For the feed title, perhaps put "Your Name at SD/TJ Design, Plant, Harvest". For the feed address, perhaps "sdtjdphyourname" or "YourNameAtSDTJPH".
4. You'll need to enter info for a new account, and then click 'Activate Feed >>'.
5. The address for your new feed is displayed. To enable email subscriptions, you'll need to continue. Click 'Next >>'.
6. You may want to check the "Clickthroughs" and "I want more! . . ." options. Click 'Next >>'. You should now see several tabs: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize.
   
7. Click the 'Optimize' tab, then, in about the middle of the list of links on the left, click 'Title/Description Burner'.
8. For the 'New Title', put something like "Your Name at SD/TJ Design, Plant, Harvest". For 'New Description' put something like "Your Name's posts at SD/TJ Design, Plant, Harvest". If you don't do this, the title and description of your new feed will be the same as those of the original feed. Click 'Activate'.
   
9. To enable email subscriptions, click the 'Publicize' tab. And about four links down on the left, click 'Email Subscriptions'. Then click 'Activate'. You're almost done.
   
10. To link to this feed from your profile, make sure you are signed into Blogger. Click on your profile--if you are a contributor to sdtjdph, this will be on the right hand side of the blog--then click 'edit your profile'.
11. In the 'About Me' text box, you can put the following: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/sdtjdphAdministrator">Subscribe to my posts on SDTJDPH by email or reader</a>
    
12. But instead of 'sdtjdphAdministrator', you'll want to put the address you gave your feed. If you forget what this is, go back to feedburner and click 'Edit Feed Details' just below the title of your feed (the biggest letters on the page), and look in the box to the right of "Feed Address".
13. Click 'Save Profile'. When you view your profile, there should now be a link to a web page of your feed. There, you should see links to subscribe by email or by reader. See my profile for an example.
    

Once you have your own feed URL, you can do all sorts of things:

• display the most recent three titles of your posts on a web page,
• have your posts appear on your Facebook profile,
  
• and on and on--

If you have new ideas to add to the list, let me know. If you'd like help with the two ideas I've listed, let me know too.

Contributors

Who do you want to hear from?

If you would like to contribute, or if you would like an organization or individual to be invited to contribute, comment here or email Administrator.

See also our Contributor Guidelines.

These individuals and organizations have been invited to post here:

(Many have only been invited by email by someone they don't know. If you'd like to hear from them, encourage them to post here!)

April 2008

• Larry Hogue
• Mission Group / Allan Hoffman
  

March 2008

• Robert T. Nanninga -- north county columnist
  

February 2008

• Walter Davis (SD Community Coalition, Left Hook Columnist, SD Megacoalition organizer, Walter Davis Enterprises)
  
• Kinsee Morlan (she links to other Tijuana bloggers--scroll down to the blogroll--we could invite)
  
• Keith Pezzoli -- David, one of his former students at UCSD, mentioned him to Colin Leath at the 1/31 Foundation4Change gathering.
• Estella W. Chizhik
• The UCSD Urban Studies and Planning Club and Professor Oscar Romo
• Vern Southard
• Jonathan Louie
• Bob Alba
• Some of the people whose emails I got at the Megacoalition meeting: Eric Bidwell again and Mike Copass. The others didn't ask to be listed here, so I'll just list first names: Natalie, Abby, Jenna, Lois, Angie, Donald. Also Mark Conlan.
• Tommie Watson
• Greeks Gone Green (UCSD)
• Ken Grimes, WALKSanDiego Executive Director
• Jim Baross, Chair, SANDAG Bicycle Pedestrian Working Group
  Vice Chair, Calif. Bicycle Advisory Committee
  President, Calif. Association of Bicycle Organizations
  Board Member, Calif. Bicycle Coalition
  Spokesperson, San Diego County Bicycle Coalition
  League LCI Trainer & Effective Cycling Instructor #185 K-C

January 2008

• San Diego Permaculture Guild listserve
  
• SD Food Not Lawns listserve
• Eric Bowlby and Carrie Schneider (Canyons)
  
• Geoff Smith (SDELN)
• Donny at Activist SanDiego
• San Diego Indymedia
• Rob Davis
• Richard Louv (Children and Nature Network)
  
• Bob Banner
• Rob Hutsel (San Diego River Park Foundation)
• Paul Maschka (sdmyco, sdfnl)
• Ava Torre-Bueno (Gardeners for Peace)
• Shannon Thompson (Shakti Rising)
• Jim Bell
• Donna Frye
• Ellee Igoe, Kate Hughes (IRC, SDFNL, etc.)
  
• San Diego State Enviro-Business Society
• SDSU Green Campus
• Zero Waste San Diego
• John Drais (Madre Grande Monastery)
  
• Marcia Boruta (San Diego Economic Conversion Council)
• Jane Higginson, Steve Bailey (SDPG)
• Kevin O’Neill, Mid-City Community Advocacy Network
• Community Housing Works
• San Diego County Bicycle Coalition
• Leslie Goldman, Your Enchanted Gardener
• Joshua Castro, libertarian advocate
  
• La Milpa Organica
• Beth Ann Levendoski, Tierra Miguel Farm
• Eric Larson, San Diego County Farm Bureau
  
• Save Our Forests and Ranchlands
• Jennifer Joe, writer for The Light Connection
• Diana DeRubertis, Planetizen Blogger (not yet contacted)
• Carolyn Chase, SD Earth Times
  
• Rick Zemlin, San Diego Ecovillage
• Colleen Dietzal, OB Green Store (not yet contacted)
• Willow Glen Farm (San Diego Roots)
• Back Country Land Trust (not yet contacted)
• Dan Watman, San Diego Tijuana Border Blog
• Ian Miller
• Debbie
• Mike Thayer
• Dan Noble
• Todd Ruth (carsharingsd, SD Family Urban Network)
• Trish, Martin, Gillian and others at Activist San Diego
• Philip J. Erdelsky (mapping)
  
• John Fanestil (Foundation for Change)
• Leiana Naholowaa (Foundation for Change)
• Matthew Miranda (calendar)
  
• Eric Bidwell
• Bill Hickman (Surfrider Foundation) -- they have a blog by Colin Newman, a policy blog, and a Rise Above Plastics blog.
  
• Fernando Gonzalez -- Scripps CHiPS (Committee for Humanity and Public Service)
• Committee on the Environment (COTE-SD)
• California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE)
• Participants in several county Rotoract groups: Mission Valley, Downtown, UCSD, North County
• Marty Anthony (Events Calendar)
• Bruce Lukaszewicz (Balboa Park Events)
  

December 2007

• SD Food Not Lawns
• Localpower SD
• San Diego Roots
• Community Farms and Gardens
• Michael Brennan

As more are invited, the list will be updated.

What kind of blog would you subscribe to?

As an individual or organization, what are the attributes of a blog you would want to subscribe to? Please comment here--

What kind of blog would you contribute to?

As an individual or organization, what are the attributes of a blog you would want to contribute to? Please comment here--

Welcome

San Diego is getting a little closer to needing to aggregate all the local "food policy" information - - like Vancouver, other cities.

As a demo (and this could be used for real!) I set up this blog and invited

sdfoodnotlawns,
localpowersd,
communityfarmsandgardens,
sandiegoroots.org

to all be contributors. Do you know of any others who might want to post events or news here? Email me at cleath at j9k dot org or comment on this post.

Once you sign up, it may be as easy as sending an email to post to the blog--so there should be no (technical or time) excuse for not posting here.

Once you are signed up you can create and share a profile which will display in a "Contributors" box on this page.

It is also easy to display this blog's feed on your site (ask me how--feedburner has a feature that enables this), and it is easy for people to subscribe to the feed so they can be notified when new events or news are posted.

Streetsblog and Planetizen's Interchange are two examples of collaborative blogs.

I hope "food policy" doesn't sound too crusty--we can change it.

At one point I had "San Diego (& Tijuana?)" in the title. . . If you know of Tijuana groups, we can broaden the focus.

Eventually, though, we'll want to enable a narrower focus and have neighborhood- and street-level announcements.

See http://www.nycstreets.org/projects for an example of that.

It looks like Local Power San Diego has been making efforts to set something like that up.