We soft launched the “Groundspring Community blog” today. The design still needs some tweaking, but there are already a handful of posts. (Jeff has done a great job getting this up and running, as we only finished deciding we wanted to do this yesterday)

The Mailing List Must Die

Mailing lists still dominate most nonprofit use of the net and with them comes all the dysfunction they entail. (I received 6 notifications about the Planetworks conference today to highlight just one such dysfunction, I didn’t care about any of them to highlight another.) I tend to resist the “blogs will revolutionize the world” rhetoric, but I do think the they represent a something potentially very new for the corporate form — honest communication. (and make no mistake 501c3 is a corporate form, our motivations just don’t stop at profit) Email changed the face of grassroots organizing in its day, but I’m glad to see Groundspring not only building new, web enabled tools for organizing, but also experimenting with new methods. ### Transparency

This is an experiment, but I think we’re doing it right, and I think we might avoid some of the more obvious missteps of the Google corporate blog launch. (we also have managed to avoid having 5,000 people link to us before we even put up the website) Everyone in the organization has an account, posting hasn’t been relegated to a marketing or sales department, we don’t have an some approval process (no prior constraint as we say in the open publishing circles). And I imagine posts are going to be eclectic and all over the place, now about technology, now about trainings, now about theory, as different members of the team post. So far we’ve got a couple of posts that sound a little “marketing speak”-esque, and a couple really good ones. I think we’ll improve on that. (and we’ve already gotten one really good comment. Wow, it was months before I got my first comment on LM) ### To Be Young and Talented

Lastly, 6A has taken a beating lately, and I firmly believe the blogging community should read the writing on the wall, and invest in a platform that supports the community. That said, they make a very good product. We choose to go with TypePad because it scales both up and down to the skills of our entire team, and because I thought, being a company that does web development, it wouldn’t hurt to spend sometime learning from the masters. As a company we’re committed to open sourcing our own products, and I imagine as part of that commitment we’ll eventually move to using a free software tool for the blog, but for right now, for our company, TypePad is the right choice, and one I’m happy with.