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Beta Version

System Status, Development Process, Participation Options

February 1, 2012

To meet the challenges of a dynamic internet platform and diverse stakeholder community, The Governance Commons is undergoing a transformation designed to meet the needs of our expanded reach. The new system will build off of the existing Commons’ knowledgebase and community to foster greater inclusivity, expertise, and effectiveness. This new system will also continue to encourage community building, particularly in the areas of genocide prevention and supporting the Responsibility to Protect. We encourage participation, discussion and contribution by experts. One Earth Future looks forward to continued engagement on our web site, both in its current and future forms, from issue area experts from civil society, business, and government organizations.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation for the contributions of Guy and Heidi Burgess. Acting as trail blazers in the area of governance information gathering, we wish to thank them and their team for their tireless dedication to improvements to site over the past two years. They continue to make their Beyond Intractability database available to Commons users through special gateways throughout The Governance Commons web site.

This remains the beta version of TGC. It still isn't complete, but we have improved (we think) the navigation system, the description of the project, and have added a great deal of content since we went live last March.  We are still hoping our users (you!) will help us fill this out even more and  improve the site further by 1) telling us what you like and what you don't like, 2) how to make it most useful to you, and 3) suggesting topcs we should be sure to cover, and content we should post or link to.  You can do this be sending us an email, giving us a call (at 303-533-1715) or filling out one of our user questionnaires.

Current Status:

TGC is organized around nine topic areas (called "challenges"), each with four portals (practice, education, research and development, and the Governance Chronicle--a general audience news and feature page).

• Chronicle pages are done for all nine challenges and have enough content in them to rotate (without further attention) for several weeks. After that, they'll need editors to keep them going. (Right now we are editing all nine, but as noted below, we seek help on this.)
• The other three portals for Violence Prevention, Rights, and Legitimacy are all done; Making Politics Work, Needs, and Fairness should be coming soon (within a few weeks) and the rest should be done within two months. However, all of these portals are still just beginnings. The Commons is called a "commons" because we want it to be developed communally--with materials provided or suggested by our many users. If we are missing things that you have written or know about that would be good to include, please let us know!!!
• The Fairness Education page is also written, though in an older format that we are thinking about changing.
• All of the still incomplete pactice pages, education, and research and development pages have working "more information" links which have extensive outlines of topics about which we plan to write when we compose the actual portals. Each of these topics is linked to a set of pre-configured searches, and, where we have them, topical essays. A description of known strengths and weaknesses of the current search systems is showin in a link on the top right of the more information pages.
• The Library now has over 5000 resources that have been hand-selected by TGC staff to be particularly interesting articles on each of the nine challenges. Our research assistants choose articles that they deem to be important and useful; our senior writers and editors will look through these and select some to feature on each of the portal pages. Even before the portals are written, all of these resources are available in the library, which can be searched, or browsed, using a variety of tools.
• The Participation Page lists all of the different ways in which users can participate in the Commons, even becoming contributors or affiliates. All of the options listed on the participation page are available now, although many of them won't become really useful until a fair number of people become active on the site and start discussing (and adding to) the content.

Next Steps:

Our two primary next steps are...

1. To ask our colleagues to look at the site and give us feedback on what you like, what you don't like, and how we can make it better, and
2. To start filling in all the missing content. Some of this we will do ourselves, but we also want to get our many practitioner and scholarly colleagues to help in this process. If you have content of your own that you would like to see posted or linked to on TGC, have other resource suggestions, or might be willing to consider deeper content involvement, please send us a quick note or click here to see a more detailed list of what we need and how you can get involved.