I and some others have been messing around with the idea of a new "digital first" pro-gun org, and that does not yet exist, but this does, and is where I'll be writing about gun-related stuff: talk.opensourcedefense.org/u/jonstokes
This is sort of MVPish. It may not ever amount to anything other than "Jon's personal gun blog." Or, it may be a forum. At any rate, in the near-term I'm serious about using it for blogging and...
..for a private forum where journos & gun policy types can have off-the-record, non-hostile, informative conversations with people who know about guns.
Possibly of interest to my fellow software geeks. The software is a discourse.org install on EC2 (+ Aurora postgres), and I'm using a custom plugin I hacked together this weekend to get the blog-type feed in the profile: github.com/dotfire/sayona…
The site is pro-gun because I and the other folks working on it (@kareems is one) are pro-gun, but we'd very much like to host civilized discussions with people who aren't pro-gun.
I and others have a lot of these kinds of open-minded discussions in various private venues online, but it would be good to have more of them in the open. On a related note, I plan to moderate the /crap/ out of this. I'd rather shut it down than have it be uncivilized.
If people just want to do meme warfare and yell at each other, there are many many other venues where you can do that. This ain't one.
When I get the cycles (I'm heads-down on some other things right now) my next step is to organize some moderated discussions on specific issues. I'll tweet more about that later, though.
Here is the welcome statement. It's basically a "hey let's do this thing" pitch email that I sent out to a few folks who are involved, only slightly edited. Like everything else about this, it's a work in progress: talk.opensourcedefense.org/t/welcome-to-o…
Also, as a practical matter going forward, instead of twitter threads about gun stuff, I'll put a post up on the site and add it to my feed, then link it from here (maybe with a bit of added context).
To be clear: anyone can sign up. Sign-ups are open, and social logins are enabled. And if you sign up, then your profile will have a feed just like the one I linked above. It's populated by whatever you bookmark. So if you bookmark a post, it'll show up there.
I basically hacked the discourse bookmarking system into something like "share this on my feed."
