Welcome, Donna. We’re excited about having you as a member of the DS team! I’m looking forward to learning about your experiences and sharing in your knowledge.

Welcome aboard Donna, glad to have you sharing in the passion to speak up. Blog on!

Donna~
I look forward to your wisdom. I’m so glad to see you here.

me too, any chance to get pieces of Donna’s wisdom and experience is a gift.

Donna, this feels momentous that so many particularly talented people are adding their unique voices to the mix at DS; what a blessing it is to have your wealth of experience and thoughtfullness. I have long been interested in sublimating the weird gender roles patriarchal societies and institutions place on humanity, so I am particulary interested in your thoughts on this subject. Welcome!

What can I say Donna. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. One of the things our online community needs it the ability to take relevant successes of offline activism for use online. This is a dialogue and it is new ground, and to be successful we need people like you and Sue who have this experience to keep an eye toward applying those organizational and communication ideas to this community as well. In particular I am very interested in how you built community and how those strategies and techniques might be used to grow our community here at DS.

In addition, I have been contemplating how we can create trails out of the online world to the offline world. I.e. social actions that are more conventional (marches, print, lectures, art projects, demonstration, etc.) being inspired or begun online. I think there is a real opportunity to explore this connection and to build it with this community of people with experience in both on and offline activism.

So my first question would be – can you share any initial thoughts you have around strategies you have used previously and how they might inform and or shape the strategies for our growth and development as a progressive community attempting to make a difference?

Hey, Donna, how great to be able to share this forum, as we have so many others, with you! I am struck by what you wrote and by Andrei’s reflection about how we bring our on-the-ground activism to this on-line environment, and then we have the challenge to to use what we do in this online community to inspire us to go out and make more waves in the on-ground environment. I personally find this forum to provide information that I don’t always have access to, to expand my political analysis of a cross-section of issues, and give me a place to test ideas. I think the most important thing about this community is its multidimensional nature–we have a little of everything in terms of focus, helping us all to be more broadly conscious.

Thanks for the wonderful comments. I’m definitely feeling welcomed! And Andrei, I will take your questions to heart and perhaps, in collaboration with my partner in crime, put out some thoughts about strategies for creating positive change!

I cant wait to see what you partners in crime and revolution come up with. I also like Sue’s on the ground distinction – instead of the word so many of us nerds use – offline.

One of my favorite things at DS so far is to see the growing welcome of new bloggers. Some day a welcome will be 100 comments!