SfSchools invites all BOE candidates to blog

Today I extended the following invitation to all 2006 SF BOE candidates:

Dear 2006 SFUSD Board of Education Candidate,

As the publisher of the San Francisco Schools blog, I am pleased to offer you an opportunity to use our blog to reach a large community of dedicated educational activists and voters. You are invited to publish anything you like on the blog -- articles, white papers, petitions... anything you want to share with the voting public.

Here are the details:

• All BOE candidates are invited to join as a member of the sfschools.org blog team[...]
• You can delegate your membership to a colleague who can publish in your name[..]
• You can also submit articles to me to post in your name[...]
• Candidates will only be invited to join the blog for the duration of the election[...]
• There will be no censorship of any "lawful" blog posts by me or any other blog team members. Candidates will have full control over what they publish and what they choose to edit or remove.

Those are the proposed rules. The idea is to provide an equal access for all BOE candidates, to promote a healthy exchange of ideas, and to facilitate direct communication with voters and activists. Note that material published on the blog is indexed by all major search engines and will be easily located via web searches by the general public. This is an effective way to reach the web public. Even if you have a separate campaign website, the blog is a very effective way to reach a broader audience that would be unlikely to visit your personal site. You are also free to link to your site and help drive more traffic there.

Please note that I have no commercial interest in this blog. I fund the blog entirely out of pocket, with no revenue from any source. Your contributions to the blog will likewise be entirely non-commercial. Neither you nor I will make any money directly from your blog publishing.

If you have any questions about this offer, please contact me directly. I will read and respond to any emails you send to this address. You can also reach me by phone at [...] I hope to hear from you soon.

KC Jones
Owner and publisher @ sfschools.org

I know many of our readers will be working with various candidates. I wanted to make the invitation public in the hopes of reaching more of the candidates and in the interest of laying my cards on the table. I really think this is an opportunity for the cnadidates and I know it will be a useful service to voters if many of the candidates join.