To Interactive Watersheds Yahoo Discussion Group members.
Please comment on the following statements if you are interested.

A recent article by Andreas Kluth in the "Economist" notes that "The era of mass
media is
giving way to one of personal and participatory media... That will profoundly
change both
the media industry and society as a whole."
http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6794156

He continues with a comment titled "The age of participation"
"In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the
Future in
California, people no longer passively "consume" media (and thus advertising,
its main
revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating
content, in
whatever form and on whatever scale."

The original vision of the Interactive Watersheds project very much followed
these
concepts. What we attempted to do with this nationwide model project was to make
a visit
to the site "look and feel" a lot like the experience a person would have if
they actually did
visit one or more of the watershed areas in person.

Ideally a viewer who visits one or more of the watershed areas in real life or
on the Internet
would become interested in actively participating personally in watershed
restoration
activities. And, they would also want to continually use the web site to stay
informed about
specific locations and issues they are interested in. The wealth of information
that is
possible to become available on the watershed web sites will make it possible
for an
individual to see dynamic multimedia information in a few hours or a day that
could take
weeks or months to find any other way. The Watershed Community Centers are
designed
to facilitate participation in a range of educational, volunteer and monitoring
activities.
These centers have also created and to invite discussion topics and submission
of
content for the web site.

To date this public participation has been seldom reported on the Interactive
Watershed
Web sites. This discussion forum is a good example. Does anyone have ideas
about how
to encourage more participation?