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Hey. I'm sick as a dog so I'm going to make this brief for now.
We are in the middle of completely rebuilding our website and backend from scratch. When I came to FSC, they were still inputting all member signups and data by hand into two databases. Very 20th century. Lots of other problems that will hopefully be solved by the new website. The backend is almost finished, and I am starting to transfer content from the old site to the new, but there is still a good bit of design work and section development to do, and a beta testing period, but I'm hoping to go live within the month.
The main problem with the old one was that I could not do with it the sorts of things that are being discussed here, so hopefully the new one will be seen as an improvement. But it is still just creating the structure upon which a ton of as yet created content will be placed. We have in fact very ambitious plans that include providing content that speaks to all the people that visit our site, including members, surfers, attorneys, academics and researchers, legislators, congressional staffers, sister organizations, journalists, and yes, even government types like the DoJ and law enforcement. They visit too.
We are developing not only policies (finally!) but also tools, but let me make one thing very clear. We can only move so fast. We must be deliberate. There is a lot of attention on us, and we have many enemies. There are minefields all over the place, and we have to make sure that when we develop a policy, that it is solid and can't in some way be used against us. I have already learned the hard way that a position that seems simple had very potentially serious unintended consequences that could have caused a whole area of the business a world of pain.
We are going to be polling our entire membership very shortly about these issues, to find out from them what is important to them and where they feel we should be putting our attention and energy. We will be investing in research tat will help our DC lobbyists immeasurably, and asking for data from our members that we will aggregate into a more accurate picture of who they are and what they do.
Out of all of this we will be able to develop policies that really reflect the needs of our membership, but I am not waiting for that. I am already pushing for policy development in obvious areas, but without a consensus from our membership in hand, I must proceed more cautiously than I normally would.
This is a great thread. I apologize for not posting more often, but I am so busy on a daily basis responding to media calls and working with the lawyers on litigation and policy issues, and then of course working to get the site done, and I have no staff to do this for me. So please be patient. We are working in the same direction.
Tom
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