for Contributors

LeesburgTalk will thrive by developing a vigorous community of readers and contributors. Ideally, many of our readers will also be contributors: offering comments, sending in pictures, writing posts for the site. At this early stage in the site’s development, we are going to be rather deliberate about bringing on new writers. If you’re interested in contributing or just have an idea to share, please post a comment below or send mail to “feedback –at– leesburgtalk.com“.

We want LeesburgTalk to reflect the passionate, diverse voices of Leesburg, but we also want it to remain a place of civility and respect for other people. Guidelines for comments are simple: be brief, be relevant, be informed, be polite. We screen comments from first-time users before they are published. We will delete or censor any comment that:

• is abusive
• is off-topic
• contains ad-hominem attacks
• promotes hate of any kind
• uses excessively foul language
• is blatantly spam

Repeat offenders will be banned from commenting on the site.

If you’re interested in doing more than commenting, we expect our posts to adhere to the same standards we demand of our comments. Here are some other guidelines that should be helpful.

We love people that want to specialize. If you, for example, want to attend all of the meetings of the Leesburg town council and report on them, that would be hugely valuable for LeesburgTalk. If you want to take photos of the gardens in Leesburg and post them to our site, we’d love it.

We want you to be transparent. If you have a financial interest or a friendship or an enmity that is spurring you to write something, you should tell the readers.

Strive for accuracy. Try to get your facts right. If something is wrong, we want to correct it as soon and as visibly as we can.

Special thanks to Dave Winer and Lance Knobel at InBerkeley.com for motivation in getting LeesburgTalk re-launched.