Dear OEN community,

What a diverse and interesting group we are!  Thank you for sharing part of your selves in the first community building thread.  It is now archived on the just-created "Community Building" hotpage.  We hope the introductions continue there, not just for another week but for a long time -- after all, we get new members daily.  Of course, "introductions" implies that there is more to come, and there is.  Quite a bit more.  Below we present some short-term goals, with the understanding that this community building initiative will ultimately go where OEN members want it to go.  We'd have it no other way.

Based on both public comments and private messages, it seemed to us that there was substantial interest in exploring ways that the OEN community can collaborate with other organizations toward furthering a progressive agenda.  Let's begin to do that here, in the second community building thread.  Do you have ties with other progressive organizations?  Which ones?  Do you have specific ideas for how OEN can collaborate with them?  Also, do you have specific stories of successful collaborations (or even things that went wrong) that you think the rest of us might benefit from?  We hope that this thread can not only identify future collaborative partners for OEN but provide those of us with an interest in collaboration specific ideas to pursue (e.g., regarding the health care debate that is on many of our minds) and a group of people interested in pursuing them.

Let's get to it. 

OEN Senior Editors