How might you measure this? Engagement: Strengthen, broaden, and diversify engagement through effective and meaningful online discussion and information exchange on public issues This is an updated (draft) goal of E-Democracy.org and applies essentially to the online spaces and experiences we host ourselves. We need your help in identifying metrics that are both measurable and that measure something useful. While there is something satisfying about simply hosting online spaces that last years while many spaces flame out in weeks or months (or are filled with flames like online news comments) "open" is not a metric that is all that persuasive with potential volunteers or funders. So what should we measure? What measures will help us track our inputs and outputs? For example "inclusion" is a big emphasis http://e-democracy.org/inclusion in recent years, so we are very interested in how we compare the results of what we are doing to in lower income/highly diverse/immigrant areas (where we have some funding) with what is happening in our all-volunteer areas (we have 10 neighborhood level Issues Forums open and suddenly 10 new ones in the start-up pipeline driven by new volunteers for example - http://e-democracy.org/nf ). Once you move from volunteer oriented work to funded efforts, the bar is a lot higher (even if you still have lots of volunteers everywhere.) So what and how would you measure against this goal? Steven Clift http://stevenclift.com @democracy P.S. We've had a decent discussion on this post on the Democracies Online Exchange: http://groups.dowire.org/r/post/AmcuBr8r3WsKaHFerfTNV What would you add?