The Chicago Conservation Corps (C3) is a project of the City of Chicago, Department of Environment. Click on C3 or DOE to get more information from the main City of Chicago website.
Welcome! Thank you for checking us out! If you want to get involved here, a good way to start is by reading and commenting. Just click the comment link in any post.
If you want to post your own news and resources, read below for a little background, and a few groundrules. You can submit items by email, or register as a Contributor. If you read a bit of what’s here, you’ll know better what to share.
Already blogging someplace else? Please link to us! And if you’re blogging Green City Living, we’d like to link to you! Let’s work together.
And now, here’s that background we promised earlier…
Origin and Purpose: This blog is a product of the Chicago Conservation Corps leadership training class, first cohort, May and June, 2006. It is moderated by Michael Herman, a member of the first C3 cohort, working with Rebecca Blazer and Marissa Stassel of the C3 staff. The purpose of the C3 blog is to make the work and resources of the program more visible and accessible to C3 leaders, friends, colleagues and anyone else throughout the City and the blogosphere who wants to join us in C3 learning and doing. Over time, it will become a city-wide map and story of conservation assets and actions.
Who Can Post: All C3 leaders are invited to blog here, post news of relevant resources and events that they know about in Chicago, as well as news about their own leadership projects. Anyone can email us items for posting. Also, C3 leaders can create a login for themselves and be added at the “contributor” level. After a first few successful postings are moderated, and you get the hang of the technical details, you will be upgraded to “author” status, and be able to post directly without moderation or delay.
Overall Structure: We’re posting news items rather than conversation. We’ll make only 1-2 per day and seek to keep all postings short, 1-4 paragraphs. Generally, this means not more than one screen-worth of text. WordPress (our blogging platform) allows us to queue up posts for later dates, so if you write it today, but two things have already been posted, just date it for tomorrow or the next day and it’ll automatically show up then. There is, however, no limit to what conversation can take place in the comments attached to any one item posting.
Appropriate Content: We welcome news about C3 projects, resource links, upcoming events and other news items that are relevant to our work. Keep it clear, simple, and short. Use the categories as appropriate. If you think we need a new category, email Michael to request that. We’ll not post links to our own websites, but rather invite our classmates/blogmates to post those links, as they see the relevance. This keeps us all humble and looking out for what others are doing, keeping us all out of the rut of promoting our own stuff.
Credit/Contact: We will ask authors to post using their own names. This blog is part of the larger practice of becoming more visible as leaders. We want to show real names and soon your author byline will link to your own website or blog. It could link to your email address if you don’t have a website, if you’d like to be reachable.
Gentle Moderation: Whenever we get more than a few humans posting into (and actively owning) the same small online space, there’s bound to be some technical glitches and messes. The administrators, named above (and other who might grow into that role over time), will do whatever they can — and as gently as they can — to adjust the content, format, and guidelines like these to help keep this place easy to read and use. Please feel free to contact us if we do anything that makes a mess of your work and understand that we’re also learning our way into this project.
Please contact us by email if you have any questions about the weblog. Thank you!