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October 24, 2009

The Enterprise & a new Free Liberal

A week ago today I was sipping tea at the Auld Shebeen in Fairfax with Free Liberal publisher Kevin Rollins, talking jive about stewarding the Free Liberal brand. And as often happens, the conversation was supplemented with notebook squiggles and hasty illustrations.

Let me give you a little background: Kevin is currently a graduate student in economics at the George Mason University. And he also fills out a nexus of relationships as the Managing Editor of Econ Journal Watch. To break up the long hours of scholarship and academic drama, Kevin gets nostalgic with reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Can you blame him?

In case you don’t remember, Star Trek: TNG is about these people who explore space and routinely make the stupidest possible decisions when facing the unknown— but you don’t have to take my word for it! Take this episode:

“Someone hacked our ‘droid— or ‘rhoid, whatever —through the galaxy Internet. Then it took command of the ship by mimicking the captain’s voice. Should we blast the ‘rhoid to smithereens with our ray-gun majiggies?”

“No way! He is one of the main awesome characters. If we survive to the end of this episode, the ‘rhoid shall continue as a trusted senior crew member. It would be inhuman to destroy an inhuman mandroid just because he can be hacked a little.”

…or this one:

“We barely survived that encounter with the mysterious cyber-borg ship. What should we do now?”

“The only character who has experience with these cyber-borgs is urging us to get the heck out of here, but I say we send a handful of headstrong, ill-prepared people into their cyber-hive to investigate. It’s our only choice.”

“Make it… so.”

Anyway, they fly around on a ship called the Enterprise, which is the main connection to what Free Liberal is all about: personal, social, and cultural entrepreneurship guided by the liberal values of liberty and community. Even if the characters of Star Trek sometimes suffer from radically reckless disdain for consequences (and the lives of their crew), they get one thing right: every episode they ride their stereotypes raw into new conflict, defying any rational boundaries one might infer, putting their whole enterprise to the test.

So let it not be a surprise that a graphic of the Enterprise made it into our conversation and scribbles about the Free Liberal.

Right now, the Free Liberal site is clogged up with hard-coded content and links that are no longer relevant to the needs of the futuristic free liberal of today. It’s like that episode of Star Trek in which the captain got so busy with grad school that he didn’t write in the star-blog for a very long time. The homepage is like the ship’s bridge, with several well-meaning captains of other vessels at the helm, but they’re not savvy to the specific vocation of the Enterprise: Free Liberal isn’t just a vehicle to publish libertarian luminaries like Paul Jacob, Fred Foldvary, or Ron Paul— the free liberal enterprise has a unique history and mission.

Part of expressing that mission is pushing more of the unique Free Liberal content to the fore, instead of keeping it in the wings or burying it deep in the site’s innards. The captain needs to write in his star-blog again, and when guest columnists challenge core values of the enterprise, the captain should respond.

Another part of expressing the free liberal vision is highlighting the best content from history. This site has been online since 2003, and now has well over 6,000 articles including many features from the now-retired paper version of the publication. Kevin and I talked about flagging those high-quality articles and features that best articulate what the Free Liberal is about, and make them clearly accessible in a new section (which we jokingly called the Q Continuum; the Q is for “quality”). What are your favorite pieces from the Free Liberal of yester-year?

The third part is the site design itself. Over time, we’d like to make the site more like an online magazine, and there’s a whole lot we could do to make the site ready for the next generation of the web. There’s actually so much that we talked about breaking development into small chunks with achievable goals. I asked Kevin if he would be like to redesign the site in the open, with feedback from the community.

He just said “Make it so.”

You can follow the redesign on the Design Opus blog or follow @freeliberal on twitter here. Please submit your favorite Free Liberal features and articles in the comments below!

John Stephens is a Quaker web developer in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Posted by johnstephens at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2009

Survey: Help us improve The Free Liberal

Thanks for your feedback! Our survey is closed.

Howdy—

We’ve had several exciting conversations over the past few months toward improving The Free Liberal. This clunkety old site has served us well over the years, but we think we can do it better, maybe even a whole lot better.

It hasn’t been completely rosy. Behind the scenes, this site has caused a lot of despair, heartache, and shattered relationships. Paul Gessing moved to the desert to escape the stress, and Bob Capozzi has to meditate like ninety hours a day just to deal (it gives him the calm composure of a saint though). Don’t even ask about Kevin Rollins. As I write this, he’s cringing in the dark muttering about his “birthday present”.

Just kidding—our editorial team is mostly on the up and up. And yet we know the site needs some serious improvement. But, somehow, you come here and use the site anyway. Thanks!

Anyway, all of this is to say we’re interested in your point of view. Would you be willing to take a few minutes to fill out our very short survey? We want to know what you like about the site, what you don’t like, and stuff like that. There are no personal questions or anything.

This survey is open to readers, TFL bloggers, and everyone. Oh, and feel free to share your questions and thoughts below.

Thanks again! You’re super.

John Stephens is a Quaker web developer and creative professional at Design Opus.

Posted by johnstephens at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2008

Moving my Blogging

I am moving my blogging to this venue, which means I will likely post less on the others, which can still be accessed through my main blog at http://xianleft.blogspot.com..

I will be blogging about everything, from abortion to tax reform, education to crime, multinationals to defense and peace - and how all of this interrelates. For those that don't know, I am the designated anarcho-syndicalist on TFL.

Posted by MichaelBindner at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2008

Publish JDM!

Our old friend Jonathan David Morris has completed a book. He sent out this message today:

Dear Everyone In My Address Book,

As you may or may not know, I recently finished
writing a book. That's the good news, but here's the
bad news. Now comes the hard part: Getting it
published!

Luckily, there's something you can do to help me. A
petition has been established to make sure my novel
hits store shelves. It takes only two minutes to sign
this petition, and it only hurts a little tiny bit (I
promise). Please take a moment to add your name to the
list:

http://www.petitiononline.com/readjdm/

Thank you all in advance.

-JDM-


Posted by KevinRollins at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2007

Stumbling on Buddha

Wow! This quote from Buddha that we posted over two years ago picked up 7,662 views over the weekend. All these vists were thanks to StumbleUpon and its user ratings system. As the name suggests, SU is about running into something you wouldn't have known about and therefore you may not have sought out. Is SU the next great tool of the Internet?

-- KDR

Posted by KevinRollins at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2006

The Free Liberal -- Expanding its Presence Nationwide

The people behind the Free Liberal are on the move. I have recently moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a state think tank known as the Rio Grande Foundation. Our primary mission is to create an economically prosperous New Mexico. More about the Foundation and what we are trying to do can be found here.

Also, Liz Moser, another Free Liberal Board of Directors member, recently moved to Arizona to work for the Alliance for School Choice. The Alliance is based in Phoenix, Arizona and is dedicated to improving the lives of children by giving their parents greater educational options.

Although I will certainly miss seeing my friends at the Free Liberal on a regular basis in Washington, the opportunities to improve the world are often far greater outside the Beltway.

-- Paul J. Gessing

Posted by PaulGessing at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2006

Featured on the Free Liberal

Regular Free Liberal readers may have noticed that on the top of each article page on the Free Liberal there is now a bar that says, "Featured on The Free Liberal" followed by links to two Free Liberal stories. We just added this feature two weeks ago to point out to our readers what we think are some of the best and most important articles we've run during the previous week.

This week we feature Michael Strong's "Getting Serious About Helping the Poor in the U.S." and Jonathan David Morris's It's Time to Forget About September 11th."

Michael Strong's piece does something very important -- it casts a public policy problem in truly human terms. Instead of reading about dry housing policy, we see it in terms of one woman's struggle for survival. It is important to remember that we are involved in the public sphere not to merely move cold statistics in the direction we favor, or to realize some abstract ideal for the abstraction's sake, but instead to help real people who are suffering.

The style reminds me of a speech that my friend Clarence Young made to the Buncombe County Commission when they were trying to ban RV's from trailer parks. Clarence happened to own a trailer park, and he told the commissioners a story which put the bureaucratic rule in human terms. A man had come to him and asked if he could park his RV in Clarence's lot. The man said he only had a few months to live, as he was dying of cancer, and wanted to be close to his ex-wife and daughter. Clarence had a policy of not allowing RVs and he thought that the man was lying, he was sure that he had AIDS, not cancer. But, he decided to let the man stay. Sure enough, later that year, he died. The newspaper obituary reported that he had died of AIDS. Clarence pointed out to the Commission, "This rule would have robbed me of one more chance to do a good thing for a fellow human being." Needless to say, the commissioners were pretty shaken up.

JDM's piece does something rather different. He takes what would seem to be an unsympathetic position of "forgetting September 11th" and shows how in one sense, it is the most American way of dealing with the horror. JDM doesn't argue that September 11th isn't tragic, but that we cannot continue to live in fear. He tells readers:

You can hoot and holler all you want about this concept. You can say I’m anti-American. You can even accuse me of spitting on the memories of all those who died. But you would miss the point of what I’m about to say here, because this has nothing to do with the heroes or victims, and nothing to do with politics.

But, some readers miss his point nonetheless. One need only to click over to the Free Republic to see how controversial such an idea can be in some circles. The responses become more and more ludicrous with people equating JDM with all sorts of nasty ideologies. They even post pictures of people jumping out of windows at the World Trade Center. When one Freeper points out to them that they are misreading his piece, "Actually the title is misleading. Read the whole article," another responds, "The title is his first sentence. They're his own words. Yeah, he's doing it for shock value. He asked for it, he's getting it."

JMC1969 writes, "I'll forget when all the scum sucking, America hating, terrorist loving assholes like this guy, are dead, rotting in their self made Hell. FU! and may God forgive your ignorance."

-- Kevin D. Rollins

Posted by KevinRollins at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)

Free-for-all (frfr-ôl) -- n. A disorderly fight, argument, or competition in which everyone present participates.

from Dictionary.com



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