A Progressive Infrastructure in Alameda

A couple of weekends ago, my neighbor Carl was telling me how Alameda needs a progressive infrastructure.

It took a while to figure out just what he meant. Essentially the idea is to have some way that the various active Alamedans (who are involved in a myriad of causes: election reform, peace, envirornment, land use/transportation, etc.) could have a common community, a way to get their message out, a pool of involved people to help support each other on related causes, and a way to back progressive candidates running for local offices

This is similar to an effort that Herb Behrstock had initiated over a year ago. Out of that, we got a yahoo announcement group going, but it has only 41 members as of this writing.

Perhaps a better approach to take is is to try to build a website along the lines of Don Roberts's website, but with a progressive bent. It would have to be multi-author, unless there is somebody who is willing to make this their full-time volunteer job. But multi-author would also make it more compelling, I think.

Fortunately, multi-author weblogs are really easy to make and maintain these days; this system (blogger.com) allows for multiple authors, each posting from a web browser.

Of course, the trick would be to get people to read such a website regularly, or subscribe to it - though few people still understand about RSS and subscriptions, alas.