Things to do in 2008

I thought I would put up a housekeeping thread to elicit some discussion from members and participants about what you like on the site and what else you would like to see.First some basic stats: we have ninety-nine members registered, including academics from thirteen different countries, along with a couple of dozen student participants who have signed up over the last month or so. This makes us, as philosophy blogs go, very large. I’d like to build on that strength over the course of this year. We’ve had over 40 000 page views and average somewhere under three hundred a day, which I think is fairly respectable. There’s no reason why those numbers can’t steadily improve.I’d like to get people’s creative suggestions about a few things: (i) how do we best develop and diversify the kinds of items people post?; (ii) what would be the best way to increase the frequency of substantive posts on different topics?; and (iii) what would be the best way to elicit fuller and more diverse discussion in the comment threads? (One serious question concerns the fact that about 98.5% of the comments so far have come from men.) Shorter posts seem to be getting more comments than posts which include working papers, although the latter are being downloaded (and presumably read). I think this is probably a function of it being a lot easier to comment intelligently on a short post which you have read than a long working paper that you don’t have the time to read. So while it seems to me that it is worthwhile for people to post their papers here, we shouldn’t expect that to be the primary vehicle for online discussion. A number of people are following and participating in the Estlund reading group, which is great. Obviously democratic theory is not something that everyone in political philosophy wishes to work on, so there’s no reason why other reading groups on quite different topics can’t be organised to run simultaneously, if anyone wishes to step up and do that.I’m keen on the idea of using our podcasting capabilities, since I think it’s much easier to digest a paper quickly when you can hear it being read in addition to seeing it in front of you. It’s possible that we could organise an online political philosophy podcast conference, or alternatively a podcast colloquium series, where authors record themselves reading their papers, someone else records some comments, and then everyone else listens and reads along from the comfort of their homes, offices, or favourite iPod-listening location. There are some logistical difficulties here, but surely far less than organising travel through O’Hare (etc.) in the middle of winter. It would be neat to have a weekly high-quality political philosophy talk that anyone in the world could listen to, or an annual conference to submit papers to, or both, or some combination of the two.There’s also the issue of whether doctoral students should have the same right to post items to the front page as post-PhD academics. This is something that it’s impossible to answer a priori, so perhaps people will have thoughts on that based on our experience over the last few months. So far, we’ve been flexible about what completion of doctoral studies means precisely for some new members, and in addition a number of very impressive PhD students have registered as participants. I’m wary of having first-year PhD students posting their term papers, but I’d also like to capture the quality work that some advanced doctoral students are doing. Maybe ABD status should be the criterion as some thought last year. Whatever the criterion, it would have to be something that does not rely on personal judgments about whether so-and-so is “good enough” to join.Otherwise, I’d like to encourage people to continue posting notices about conferences, journals, or other items of interest, in addition to substantive posts. We have at our disposal a resource that if used to its full potential could be of significant benefit to members of the political philosophy and theory community generally, and the only way for that to happen is if members feel free to take the initiative in experimenting with different ideas.