At Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, we’re continuing to experiment with ways in which residents interested in climate change issues might take part in an online conversation about how well the city’s program to fight global warming is working.

When we saw that many users seemed daunted by the prospect of becoming regular guest contributors to our group weblog, we launched a series of online forums to lower the hurdles, making it simple to take part by the tried-and-true means of one-off comments on our various forums.

Now we’ve tweaked our approach again.

When we set up the forums, we wanted to take advantage of online conversations already going on, so we subdivided our forums into half-a-dozen more specialized ones, such as government watch-dogging, energy efficiency, business and transportation issues. We thought by cross-seeding existing online forums and our own, residents with expertise in those topics could then take part in just that one forum on our site, without being overwhelmed or distracted by other carbon tax-related issues they cared less about.

But it hasn’t worked that way, perhaps because the forums were too specialized. So to make things even simpler, we’ve merged our various subforums into one main discussion area. Now you can raise any issue you like, creating your own thread or just joining one already in progress, and take part in the larger conversation.

Visit our discussion forum now and take a look. Join in and help us track the progress of Boulder’s efforts to tackle global warming. See you on the boards!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under About this project, Background & history, Goals, Your stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.