Starting today: YOU own Green & White – our new crowd-sourced vision, and we need your help
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You know, this website keeps surprising me.
As you know, I havent really written much or paid much attention to this place so far this year – and I had expected people to start declaring GnW dead over time and to lose interest of the community (some of them were doing that even when the site was fully active).
But man, you guys just keep coming back – our awesome contributors and editors like Mansoor, Qazi, Babar and others keep posting great, relevant, topical posts and analysis, and people keep commenting and discussing them and following them.
I take a look at GnW things about once a month these days, and everytime I see traffic’s increased, RSS subscribers and twitter followers have grown organically, about 4 people a month have emailed us wanting to write or contribute posts, and 3-4 startups have announced their launches here…. and our Community friends and regulars like Atif Mumtaz, Faisal Chohan, Anthony Mitchell, Obaid, Salman Munir, Sohaib Athar, nash, M. Mirza and many many others keep pinging us on the twitter account and elsewhere, giving tips and wishing us the best.
Its endearing – this little-website-that-could has achieved its final stage of community-maturity: Its growing and propagating on its own!
So with that, its only fair to change the rules and finally – and fully – put the ownership of Green & White back into the hands of YOU.
Starting today – anyone can signup for a writers account and contribute articles to Green & White. There’s no immediate vetting process. But editors may choose to manually approve posts.
Starting today: YOU own Green & White
Here’s how this works:
- CDF Software will no longer play host and sponsor of the community – all Green & White assets will be moved to a separate server
- All money earned from Advertising will be kept in a separate pool for Green & White. That money will be used to fund hosting and maintenance costs
- All assets that relate to the Green & White brand – the logos – will be released with a creative-commons licensing so that its not owned specifically by CDF, but rather by the community.
- The current Editors will also get admin rights to the platform, and they will be able to choose what to do with the money in the bank for gnw.
- Anyone can signup a useraccount with Green & White by going to http://greenwhite.org/wp-register.php – and then they can immediate start sharing their thoughts and contributions
- Admins can then promote your account to authors and editors and admins as they see fit
- Finally, if someone wants to change some tweaking to the code behind the gnw platform, the admins can work with them to share the gnw sourcecode and theme data too.
But WE NEED YOUR HELP TOO
Sorry for shouting, its important… crowd-sourced systems can be challenging too. Green & White was respected I think because of its generally high quality, good insight, bold opinions and fearlessness, and a razor-sharp focus on only some types of topic focuses.
We’ve seen many websites that opened up contributions fully (in this country) and failed because they were either overwhelmed with spam, or diluted because of a general lack of topic focus.
The editors can only do so much, because they’re just volunteering their time just like everyone else… but I hope that I can trust YOU readers, like always, to keep writers in check and making sure they’re on topic and relevant, and to quickly vote to promote or dismiss people to keep balance here.
If you love green&white, and I hope you’ll continue to do so, please get involved!
Help us code the site – update the themes, brands, plugins
Keep sharing and discussing things pertinent and relevant to this industry.
And get more people involved.
And keep this site open, welcoming, fresh, relevant and inspiring.
Remember, the single most important part of what makes Green & White different is ALWAYS choosing to be objective and constructive – there’s plenty of websites out there who are biased in their analysis FOR their friends… we’ve been one of the few who’ve been the first to criticize our friends to keep them ethical.
Btw, today’s the 3rd birthday of Green & White. Thank you for a great 3 years – Hope to see great things from all of you.
Over and out
2:41 pm
It’s a brave, exciting move and I’m sure with positive contributions from the GnW community you guys will continue to make good things happen. Well done GnW!
1:38 am
I am confused over your this decision – i believe GnW can do better under your administration.
As Mahmood said, giving control to community is a brave move, but we will have to see the commitment of the community to keep things rolling.
4:48 pm
I think it’s a cool idea, though very hard to pull off. Maybe an rating (*LIKE*) system to push down less popular and pull up more popular (possibly higher quality) posts. Something like http://www.stackoverflow.com. Check it out – it’s way cool!
1:22 pm
Good idea! atleast we can put this system on as a test bed for other platforms in the future!
11:57 pm
For the first two year I was the regular reader. I hope this new change will bring back reader like me.
Good luck!
4:07 am
Interesting … as long as you keep editorial oversight it may work fine. Anyway I believe in utilizing the potential of sites and its good to see some action here.
8:00 pm
This is a GREAT idea, I’m all for it! There are lots fo things that need to be cleared as well but this is a good reboot.
So, what is the general direction now, what kind of articles are we looking for now? There has to be a Code of Conduct for authors which covers conflicts and full disclosures.
Anyhow, like I said, its a good start!
3:49 pm
Great and brave idea. I belief G&W has promising future and this move will make it even more brighter.
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9:48 pm
A good move indeed. G&W was a nice site in a not-so-distant past with regular posts as there was some regular writers like Saad, Osama and Qazi etc. I hope the new blood will revive this site.
7:49 pm
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6:34 pm
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