Spring Cleaning 2007

Thank you folks for sticking with CitizenWill through thick and thin (including a major outage May 15th, 2007).

A little history. January 31st, 2006 I relaunched my 2005 Town Council campaign website (Concerned Citizen) claiming I’d

be posting some articles on last year’s election – including an analysis of campaign finances, my ideas on what to do to bootstrap Chapel Hill’s municipal networking initiative, comments on my new appointment to the Town’s Horace-William’s Citizen’s committee and other issues I’m concerned about…

More than year later, with 412 published posts under the Concerned Citizen/CitizenWill banner, I still haven’t gotten around to a full debrief on election 2005 😉

I have managed to cover a few other issues, Carolina North, RAM Development’s conquest of Downtown, election reform and more than a few odds-n-ends.

I’ve also started, then left as drafts, about 100 other posts. What to do with them?

Like a diary, part of the reason I have a ‘blog is to jog the old memory – to remind myself of how and why our Town, University, local organizations, citizens have arrived at our current destination.

Another part, to make my research available for others – local or remote, now or many years hence – to build-on, deconstruct, dispute, debate, etc. As I’ve posted on before, I’m creating a long tail documenting the issues before my local community in the small hope that others will find a kernel of benefit.

I never expected hundreds of folks to check in daily and, I imagine, my digressive style easily reflects that expectation…

Long windup. Just wanted to provide some context on the tumult I’m about to inflict on you, my readership.

Do I think every word I dribble out is a gem worth preserving? Hell no.

These bits do represent, to some extent, a distributed memory store for me (and possibly others) to lean on. So, rather than discard all those partially constructed pieces, I going to clean house, polish my notes/video/audio off as best as possible and publish the morass – out of order, sometimes out-of-context – labeled [SPRING CLEANING].

I won’t be publishing all the drafts. I won’t be posting many in their entirety. And I will certainly try to do a better job of keeping up from now on ;-)!

So, to use a phrase I’m seeing posted more and more along Franklin St.: “Please excuse the mess….”