Undeterred by a complete and total absence of feedback I am following up on my proposal that we try to set up a joint blog to whom all the forum members interested in participating would contribute. I think a good way to begin to try to move this along is by collecting pledges.
I’m sure you know about how the Free State Project is collecting pledges, that is they have people promise they will relocate to New Hampshire as soon as 20,000 other people have promised to do the same. So this thread is for collecting pledges from people that they shall contribute to the Mises Community Blog once 14 other people have pledged the same.
OK here are the rules I am proposing and that will be in place until somebody suggests something better:
— The Mises Community Blog will be set up when at least 15 people have promised to contribute to it. Obviously the blog would be open to taking on additional writers who were not original pledges, but there is no sense in launching the blog if there is not enough initial backing for it. (I actually think a significantly fewer number of committed authors would be enough, but feel it is wise to make allowance for possible attrition.)
— If you have pledged to participate, but the number of 15 pledges was not reached then you are not required to do anything, since the blog will not be set up anyway and the MCB project will be over.
— There is a 45 day limit on the pledges collection. The 15 pledges have to be collected in 45 days or the MCB project is over, as it is unrealistic to expect of people to maintain a promise to contribute to the MCB at its startup indefinitely.
— By pledging the pledges promise to write one blog post for the joint blog in each 15-day period for the first 6 such periods of the blog’s existence. In other words each participant will in the first three months of the blog’s existence publish at least one post every two weeks. This means that by pledging all that a forum member promises to do is write a measly 6 blog posts, jet the joint blog is guaranteed at least 90 posts in as many days.
— ‘Mises Community Blog’ is a provisional name, which may be easily changed if a few pledges state they do not like it and come up with something better.
— The website will clearly and visibly state that each participant’s positions are their own and are not necessarily shared by any of the other participants.
Encouragement:
I encourage people to pledge and to take part. By pledging all you are promising to do is write 6 blog posts and even then only if a few other number of things come together. If 14 other people do not sign up you are not obligated to do anything. If the 14 other people do not sign up within 45 days from now you are again not obligated to do anything. You are only required to contribute to the blog for 90 days. Once the blog is 90 days old, you are no longer required by your pledge to continue blogging (though we hope you do). It isn’t a big deal really, it’s a small thing. You should do it.
Good reasons to pledge:
Blogging is good for you. Blogging will improve your writing. It will force you to think about things you are interested in more thoroughly and seriously. Going on public record about issues online will improve your state of mind and make you far less irritable in real life. Once you have penned a carefully considered and stylishly written 2000-word tearing down of the welfare state and published it for all the world to see, who gives a crap anymore if your stupid cousin lets slip something that is pro-Obama? You are now a public philosopher who makes addresses to the whole world, and getting into an argument with your family is now a complete and utter waste of your time and is therefore beneath you.
Project MCB is a good thing. Maybe you don’t care about blogging yourself, but you would love for this or that forum member to start or re-start blogging so that you may read his stuff? Pledge to MCB and it will serve as an encouragement for the people you would like to read to sign up themselves. Do your tiny bit to make sure MCB project takes off and you’ll have another vibrant libertarian blog for your bookmarks. This one actually updated by the people you know from your favorite online discussion forum.
Multiple-author blogs are the best kind of blogs. Maybe you toyed with the idea of blogging in the past, but were uncertain of how it would work and did not go ahead? Well with MCB you would have at least 14 other bloggers for support. Also as I explained, for most people a joint blog is their best bet of blogging for an actual readership. Personal blogs struggle because they generally can not generate enough regular updates to keep hold of daily visitors to the page. But with a joint blog how it works is that your co-authors make the regular updates for you and keep the readers’ interest for until you are ready to make your post. I am not promising you that you will have that with MCB, or have it right away, but I am promising you that if you want to blog while having the peace of mind that you did all you could have done to have your blog posts read, then you should write for a multiple-author blog.
Further explanation/thinking:
Editorial policy:
I propose a good editorial policy may be that posts should be primarily commentary of current affairs from a doctrinarian Austrian and doctrinarian libertarian perspectives. Posts on libertarian theory, philosophy, Austrian theory, history and economic history would be welcome as well. Brief posts like those at the LRC blog would be perfectly fine, but the important thing to keep in mind would be focus.
Participant bloggers should be aware the kind of readers we would potentially get may not be interested in what they have to say if it revolves around something that is far removed from the kind of things we discuss on this forum. If something seems as if it may be esoteric for the Austrian/libertarian interested crowd it may be best left for your personal blog.
I think the blog should scorn all word-for-word reposts, from either the participant’s personal blogs or from the forum, but if participant bloggers further developed their points from the forum on the blog that would be great.
Editor:
I think having a content editor-overseer may be good, if only for the peace of mind of the participants, as I don’t think he would have much actual work. But it may also work at the beginning to try doing without an actual person-editor, but just have a general consensus-based editorial policy that participant bloggers try to adhere to on their own, and go from there.
Technical-logistical stuff:
I propose the blog should be WordPress based, because WordPress has a much better commenting system than BlogSpot and with this potential blog being a blog of forumites I would hope that posts comments would end up an important and highly visible and voluminous part of it.
We would need a place for internal discussion, a tiny forum of our own somewhere would be best I think, albeit a new Mises community group may be fine as well.
Somebody would obviously have to set all this up. I will be hoping someone else states their readiness to set it up by himself, but if no one does, I am ultimately, in the interest of Project MCB, willing to do it myself. This certainly isn’t going to fail because nobody found the time to install a forum and open up a blog page, that would be pathetic.
One further thought:
As someone who was active in an online gaming clan for years I can say I have found that what works best in making a small online team vibrant is if there is not too much emphasis on rank, rules or procedure that would stifle initiative. So if things seem like they are ill-defined and hanging in the air, do not be alarmed as that is usually for the best.
