community

We have finally arrived at OrangePolitics, version 3! You may be wondering how the site is changing, and I hope to explain that here. The biggest change is to the entire framework of publishing - on the new site every registered user has her own blog! This comes with a few other changes, for example every new piece of content does not necessarily appear on the front page. There are several ways to dig in and find the stuff you want, including: the Latest content page, which shows everything that has been published; Keywords (at right), which allow users to label and organize posts any way you like; and the Watchlist, where you can keep up with the bloggers you are most interested in.The front page of the site also shows the 10 most recent comments (as before), as well as 5 recently popular posts (based on your ratings), and 3 random entries from the archives. All of these are available in the left sidebar. Right now, the people designated as "editors" have the ability to decide what goes on the front page.

Chris Richmond, Executive Director of the ReCYCLEry, and I have launched ReCYCLEry.info to publicize the ReCYCLEry and its partners' community programs such as the newly launched Blue Urban Bike program and Carrboro Greenspace.We have tentatively decided to keep the contributors limited, and leave the conversation to more comprehensive forums such as OrangePolitics. Theoretically, we may limit return traffic to the site, but this will leave us more time for real world activism, and keep the site a resource for pure information, media and community links.So we pose these questions: Should we attempt to encourage more online activism by creating a new forum? or Do we still manage to fully engage our objectives by leaving debate and editorial content elsewhere?