Posts filed under 'Announcements'
September 6th, 2006
I was surfing some political blogs and found this Canadian piece. While the context of the sentiment isn’t relevant, I noticed the embedded chat tool in the sidebar and wondered if it would be a good tool to incorporate here.
Gabbly is a chat service that allows you to chat around any webpage. The tool is supported by several browsers (Firefox 1.5, IE 6.0, Safari 2.0, Flock, with more on the way), and a link can be provided for a floating version of the chat. There is no filtering — other than using our domain name as the name of the chatroom — so all sorts of content may diminish the chat experience. However, each user has the ability to censor users on their own and thus manage his own sensibilities.
August 8th, 2006
I added a news feed that will allow us to bring in some published content elsewhere on the web as blog posts here. The first test was done last night with Politics1, the very cool campaign coverage site that has been running (more successfully) as long as we have. In addition to disseminating news on congressional elections (and other campaigns) throughout the States, Ron Gunzburger also sells — or at least sold — me some Jimmy Carter campaign buttons. It should be one of our goals to get listed on his site.
This new news feed will evolve over time to include other useful information from other sources. In the future, the posts will likely be better marked than they are now to indicate an external content source. (Just to clarify, Ron isn’t coming here and posting … although that is a privilege that can be opened up to interested 3rdparty members.)
Below is a list of political blogs Ron lists in his blogroll in the lower sidebar of his site. You might want to take a look at some of these and see if there are ones worth adding to our own feed.
POLITICAL BLOG ROLL:
July 31st, 2006
We are going to try setting a regular time for a community chat, Monday evenings at 11p Eastern/ 8p Pacific. This time was chosen by those participating in the chat last time.
July 19th, 2006
A new page showing recent edits to this site is available from the front page of the Third Party site. Hopefully, this will make it easier for members to see what activity is new to the site and provide easy clicks to navigate into the area to continue a discussion.
Let me know what you think …
July 17th, 2006
A forum topic has been created to discuss the goals for the current quarter. Please contribute with ideas to help us prioritize. Also, a reminder that we are looking for active members to post to our roll call by July 20 (in a few days). These are the people we will be counting on first and foremost to help us generate some momentum.
Building community and generating content are closely related. None of us should be expected to do everything, and none of us should try. Trying to interact with this site in a visible way on a daily to weekly basis will go a long way to helping stimulate interest in time for this election season.
July 12th, 2006
The technical upgrade may be wrapping up this migration phase, but our content needs are ongoing. In some ways, this move complicates things since we now need to make sense of of our new communication channels.
One of the first orders of business is to set up an online meeting time for organization members interested in helping shape 3rd Party in the near future. In the meantime, here is a top-o’-my-head list of needs for content on our new site:
- Bloggers — following and commenting on news of interest, and also on the platform development process
- Researchers — pose and help answer key political questions through primary and secondary research, posting results on PoliticWiki
- Position Statements — building on our growing political research, author position statements grounded in real-world need and experiences
- Link Managers — check our old list of political organizations and resources and help convert them into their new home (in this blog, as a page in the site)
- Essayists — our existing essays need to be migrated from our wiki spaces to the more permanent and protected blog pages, but we also are looking for writers to create 800-1000 word essays to stimulate conversation
- Template Designers — although we feel this current design is a major step up over the old circa-1998 web template we have been using, we are hoping to form a committee to help design another upgrade for this fall (major or minor)
- Topic Leaders — our forum, wiki, chat and blog needs some short-term focus to help stimulate the community into action. We are looking for some volunteers to suggest and spearhead discussions for a week at a time.
If interested, please contact Jeff or myself, or make use of the forums available here to make your presences known. Thanks.
July 12th, 2006
As we wait for the 3rdparty.org domain to fully arrive at our new location, some bugs have already been discovered and are being addressed.
- The forums were misordered from the import of UBB data on July 3. (corrected)
- There is an issue with the Quorum login with some usernames, so the chat area may produce some non-functionality or even PHP errors. (in the process of being corrected)
- The wiki pages are not showing up when clicking on links (corrected, once 3rdparty.org resolves correctly)
Please try to post comments here that identify new problems. We’ll try to address them as quickly as we can.
July 11th, 2006
Whew.
What began in 1998 as a couple of former high school pals typing into the Great Void has now gone through a second major growth spurt. For the past few weeks, this web site has been working through some technical issues in the background to publish a new upgrade for our Third Party community. We’re expecting some hiccups, of course, but are otherwise pleased to only be a week later than our intended symbolic re-launch date of July 4.
Please feel free to explore the new space and, of course, report any problems. Dive into the content. Research political questions. Make connections with others. Come to the online chats we will be scheduling. Make yourselves known.
A special thanks to those of you who have been hanging in there over the past several years. Jeff and I feel like a hurdle was cleared this past year, and we enthusiastically look forward to the continued evolution of this community.
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