Thanks for emboldening my reply. I am not at all in pg's league as an influencer of online communities, but I've had a personal website with information and a point of view since 1995, and have been very active in online communities since before most members of the general public had ever heard of the Internet. (I started out on commercial online services.) Any online community allows an opportunity for a member to become conspicuous by contributing good content. Quite a few online communities are organized around an initial common interest everyone has (e.g., homeschooling or education reform or gifted education in the communities I'm most active in) and every community broadens its topic scope over time as people form friendships and share other interests.

Were I to set up a social news forum (presumably as a subpart of my personal website, to which I have devoted very little maintenance attention for years), I would announce that first to my 566 Facebook friends, most of whom I have met in online communities. (Many of them I have since "face met" at conferences around the country about the issues we all care about.) Many of them would be good moderators of a forum, and would be happy to help in return for finding new, good content and sharing that with a broader community of readers. I'll have to try the experiment, as soon as my busy technical adviser (my oldest son) squeezes some time together to upgrade my website.

P.S. Is there already a good site of this nature for news and discussion about education policy, or will I have to build my own? There is no sense in reinventing that wheel if a good wheel is already available.