Proposal: Sustainable Living
What is the intended audience?
The description is supposed to describe the audience, not the content of the site.
asked Jan 12, 2012 at 17:23
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6 Answers
Anyone who is interested in living a more socially and environmentally sustainable lifestyle. Which we hope will be everyone. It's a pretty broad audience, so it doesn't really make sense to describe the site in terms of audience.
My proposed audience statement: Proposed Q&A site for matters related to an environmentally- and socially-sustainable life style of individuals and families.
To elaborate, my hope is a target audience of individuals and families, as opposed to corporations, NGOs, etc.
That's not to say that discussion of corporate or NGO initiatives ought to be completely off topic, but they should be discussed in the context of how they relate to individuals and families, not on the corporate/organization-policy level.
The audience may also include small, grass-roots organizations, (or even small businesses) whose purpose is to help individuals and families achieve a more sustainable lifestyle. Such groups might include neighborhood recycling coops, neighborhood gardening groups, investment clubs, etc. But the key here is that discussion should be about helping individuals and families achieve sustainable living.
Sustainable corporate practices would fall into differently scoped sites, in my opinion, such as the current Green Energy proposal, which seems to have more of a corporate/enterprise focus than this one.
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3The Green Energy proposal has now closed. I'd hope that Sustainable Living will be broad enough that anything that would have been on-topic at Green Energy, will be on-topic at Sustainable Living.– 410 goneJul 30, 2012 at 13:54
The audience will be anyone on the web who has questions about sustainable living (as set out during the definition stage) that can be answered objectively and factually.
They might be representing themselves as individuals, or their families; or as technologists, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, engineers, procurement agents, or whatever.
Remember, to become viable, the site is aiming to exceed 15 new questions every day, and 1500 visits per day, within a year or two. That's a hard target. It will need (at least) thousands of lurkers, a few hundred occasional contributors, and a few dozen regular contributors (the 90:9:1 principle). So reaching a broad audience is crucial.
Tags will enable users to filter questions, so a breadth of questions need not drive anyone away. After all, the questions were pretty broad during the definition phase.
I like the idea of avoiding too much of a focus on corporate or national orgs, but I think regular dialogue on local-level orgs (or local chapters of national orgs in some cases) should be encouraged. I'm all for helping individuals and families live more sustainably, but at some point helping that happen likely requires some community-level actions.
And, as a disclaimer, both of the organizations I volunteer with (Engineers for a Sustainable World and particularly the Transition Movement) are chapter-based orgs with a community focus - so I'm probably biased.
I like Energy numbers approach. That's my proposal:
"A Q&A site for all who want to live sustainible, or help others to do so - individuals, families, businesses, activists and technology providers"
There is a lot of discussions in the professional and NGO field too among experts who share information rather freely, since the field is often very experimental. I am working in sustainable and self-sufficient living business and I often exchange information or discuss experiences, often with local specifics. I find that this platform would be also great for whoever is doing anything with sustainable living on any scale. It would be better by far than existing formats such as this one.
