In her excellent post, "Lane County, Oregon - How to get involved locally," Cynthia Beal quotes Tom Altee as saying:

"We are early on the curve here; we're all on the leading edge. We are all researching the "manual" for how to do what we're doing, what we need to do. No instructions exists. They are being written piece by piece, as we go along. "We build the road we travel." You need to join in the road building, as well as the traveling. Try some things, make some mistakes, learn something -- and then tell the rest of us. Ian's idea of a "best practices" log is great; it will make a tremendous difference. But we can't wait. We need to move ahead. We will never know enough to succeed. We will always know enough to learn, share, and feel our way together."

In that spirite, a category called "Best Practices" has now been established in this forum, and you are invited to post your personal and your community's experience with what seem to be those best practices under it.

If you're not familiar with how the categories function of this software works, please take a moment to read the About page. Essentially, if you have a best practice to communicate, or you have a best practices section on your community's y2k site that you want to post the URL of, when you create a new thread to do so ("Ask a New Question"), you'll be presented with a pull-down menu in the text entry area that has the existing category options in it. You'll see the "Best Practices" heading listed there. Selecting it will make sure that your post stays grouped with the other best practices posts when it disappears off the "New Questions" list on the upper part of the forum's main screen when the "expiration" date comes up.

Contributing your experiences and URLs to this category will help other communities, so please post what's worked, or seems to be working best.

-- Bill (billdale@lakesnet.net), October 22, 1998