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That won't be able to continue at the same level once our baby arrives. I'd also like to be able to focus more significant time into researching, analyzing, and describing some of the deeper issues facing our region and how we can grow in a way that's inclusive of all people, longtime residents and new residents alike.

I also want Greater Greater Washington to continue to grow and thrive. Fortunately, with our large community of contributors and readers, I believe it can.

A path to sustainability

After talking with many contributors, editors, and advisors, I have come to the conclusion that the best path forward is for Greater Greater Washington to remain primarily a volunteer-driven organization, but also to add a few part-time or, in the future, full-time staff to handle some management and editing responsibilities.

We have always been about publishing content that comes from our volunteer contributors, and I think that is one of the greatest things about Greater Greater Washington which should continue. We will need more volunteer contributions and contributors, and I hope many of you can help out in this way. We also still need to find some more link editors so that we can spread the work out between many people across days.

In addition, there are many other tasks which need to get done to help keep the site running, like maintaining the code that runs the site, improving the design, reaching out to communities to find people to contribute, and figuring out how to best raise money.

Staff can manage and edit

Volunteers are great, but with rare exceptions, someone volunteering can usually only bite off a relatively small piece of work, and their work and home commitments mean that some days or weeks people just are too busy. But there are a few areas where we need someone to consistently take care of a responsibility day in and day out, and for that we will need to pay people.

I believe we need to have someone on staff who's actually keeping the trains running on time, managing things, making sure the organization has filed its proper forms, trying to make sure we respond to people who email in (something that, unfortunately, I often am not able to do), and so on.

A second big area is editing. We have always edited articles to help contributors refine their arguments and make them clear and effective. We've striven for a high standard of quality, and our commenters have also come to expect clear, information-filled articles. Therefore, someone needs to edit each article and work with the contributors.

Last year, we tried having a number of volunteer editors, who did a terrific job. However, sometimes they didn't all have time to actually do edits right away, and from day to day or week to week, a contributor might have different people editing their articles, making different kinds of changes, which caused confusion. Individual editors' schedules also varied, making it unpredictable whether they could edit something timely right away.

Thanks to some help from the Coalition for Smarter Growth and an interim contribution from myself, I am pleased to announce that regular contributor Dan Reed has joined GGW as part-time paid editor.

Dan has already been doing a great job editing many articles on GGW, and will be able to keep things going while I am out. So please congratulate Dan in the comments and when you see him tonight!

But we need your help

The existing funding will just help us keep Dan for a short while, however, and he can't do everything. We still need to raise money to keep him long-term (or, if he moves on to other things, find someone else), and fund having someone do the management work as well. I will be following up soon about all of that.

Plus, building an organization is also a lot of work. I need and want to keep the site going, keep writing, and also get ready for Greater Greater Baby. Here are a few areas we will need the most volunteer help:

• Organizational development: We have to figure out how big a budget our organization needs to be sustainable, how to structure it, and how to make it successful. Then we need to figure out how to get that money, and from what sources. Do we do online contributions, events, what? And when we decide what to do, we have to actually pull it off! Do you have experience building organizations and raising money for other groups?
• Technology and design: The blog runs on code I wrote myself. We should figure out whether to transition it to a major blog platform (probably eventually we should). We ought to make clear how to switch between blogs, and incorporate more of the features modern media companies use to remind people they can sign up for the daily email or go read other related stories. Do you know how successful online sites do this or have experience building features on platforms like Wordpress?
• The breakfast links: Each day's links is one of the most popular elements of Greater Greater Washington, but it is a lot of work. I want to spread the work out among many people. Do you think you would be good at reading the news and blogs really fast to find appropriate urbanist articles and then writing pithy, effective summaries?
• Planning or collecting events: We want to have more reader meet-ups and other types of events. In addition, people email us about many exciting events going on around the region. I'd love to have us do a better job keeping up our calendar and posting a weekly or biweekly event roundup, just like we have the great weekly Flickr picks. Do you want to help with either?
• Writing articles: We always want contributions. We're trying to strike a good balance of news, analysis, and opinion, which means just informing readers about what's going on with development, transportation, and education all around the region is a big part of that. Do you want to inform a large community of engaged residents about what's going on in your part of the region?

If you can help with any of these, please use this form let us know which of these, or what aspect of them, you are interested in. If you've done something in one of these areas before, let us know that too.

This will be the first of many posts about our transition into the long-term organization that Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education can be. Meanwhile, I hope to see you at Laughing Man, 1306 G Street NW, between 6 and 8 pm tonight.

Update: DCist's Martin Austermuhle figured out the missing context. For example,

I think he's developmentally retarded, and I use 'retarded' in the French way, meaning that he's late. He's late to development meetings, that's what I'm trying to say.

Update 2: Reporter Aaron Wiener defends the context of the quotations and gives even more examples of insults from Townsend: "He also called [David Alpert] 'reptilian,' 'pedantic,' and 'childlike,' and suggested he had a 'Napoleonic complex.'"

Spirited argument is important in public policy, but it should not cross into insults. When it does, that has a chilling effect on open discourse. Fostering an inclusive conversation about the shape of our region is the purpose of this site, but discourse must be civil to be truly open. That's why our comment policy here on Greater Greater Washington prohibits invective like this. In our articles, we try hard to avoid crossing this line, and are disappointed when we or others do, intentionally or inadvertently.

The "war on cars" frame unnecessarily pits drivers against cyclists and pedestrians instead of working together for positive solutions. The City Paper article, by Aaron Wiener, does a good job of debunking that, and is worth reading for much more than the insults it quotes.

When pressed, Townsend told Wiener he wants to back away from the "war on cars."

"I regret the rhetoric sometimes," he says. "Because I think that when you use that type of language, it shuts down communication with people who disagree."

We hope Townsend, his colleagues, and their superiors also regret the things he said about David and Greater Greater Washington. We look forward to the day when AAA ceases using antagonistic language and begins working toward safety, mobility, and harmony among all road users.

In the meantime, residents do have a choice when purchasing towing, insurance, and travel discounts. Better World Club is one company that offers many of the same benefits as AAA, but without the disdain.

Instead of escalators, people used rotating spiral "spinners" to get down to the stations. But trains entering the station blew off people's hats, which made people stop riding and the system was ultimately abandoned.

UrbanTurf broke the news of Donald Trump's planned design for the Old Post Office. New Columbia Heights reported that DC USA would place a curling rink in the underutilized parking garage. (Hey, maybe not a bad idea!)

Kaid Benfield announced that sprawl will no longer happen, Southwest TLQTC posted plans to redevelop Greenleaf Gardens, a public housing complex, and Alan Suderman discovered Marion Barry is running for mayor.

Finally, DC's elections board sent out a postcard telling residents they can only vote on April 23 at One Judiciary Square, nowhere else. Oh, wait, that last one wasn't a joke; it was just a really poorly-written note that conflated early voting and regular voting and will confuse residents.

What other local and regional April Fool posts did you especially like?

Why Greater Greater Education?

Greater Greater Washington has focused for 5 years on what aspects of our neighborhoods and communities make them desirable places to live, and how residents want to see their communities improve. We're especially interested in walkable urban places and what makes people want to live, invest, and stay in these communities.

For a great many people, far and away the number one factor in this decision is education. If they have children, they want to live somewhere where their children can get a good education. Period.

DC, in particular, has long had a trend of young people moving to its neighborhoods but decamping for suburbs once their children get to school age. That trend is changing as more and more people want to remain in walkable urban neighborhoods, but for many residents, the question is whether the education can get good enough, soon enough for their children.

It's also important to build a city that's inclusive of all people, in all economic circumstances and stages of life. On urbanism, that means having different price points for housing, affordable transit, and thriving businesses that meet people's different needs. On education, that means also figuring out not only how we can improve education for our own kids (for those who have kids), but for all kids.

What will Greater Greater Education discuss?

While Greater Greater Washington has always been explicitly focused on the entire region, we anticipate Greater Greater Education will mainly focus on education in the District, particularly DCPS and public charter schools. However, articles about education issues in other parts of the region are also welcome.

Our aim is to step out of some of the polarizing fights that dominate news coverage. We're not especially interested in debating whether Michelle Rhee was saintly or satanic, or if charter schools are inherently good or bad. On most of the burning questions, education professionals are just scratching the surface of actually figuring out the answers through research.

We're hoping to look at real data, and real examples on the ground of what is working and what is not. We're hoping to help educate readers, and stimulate a community and lively discussions, about what is happening and what needs to happen. We hope you will learn from our contributors who have experiences to share, and we in turn can learn from all of you through discussions in the comments.

We'll be starting with a lower post volume than on Greater Greater Washington itself to begin with—about one post per day, and link roundups twice a week, ramping up as we build up a larger base of contributors.

This doesn't mean we'll entirely stop talking about education on Greater Greater Washington. Some education articles will also cross-post on both blogs, and share a comment section. But there will be many articles on Greater Greater Education alone to keep the total post volume on Greater Greater Washington from getting too high.

Can you contribute?

Speaking of contributors, we want you! If you have experiences to share with education in DC or information to share, please email us at info@ggdcedu.org with a brief introduction and a sense of what kinds of topics you might like to write about. We welcome everyone from education policy experts to regular average parents to former DCPS students and many more. As with all Greater Greater anything posts, our contributors are volunteers.

We hope you will read, comment, share, and contribute so that we can build a community of people dedicated to better education, as we have for urbanism on Greater Greater Washington. Thank you!

People make a city great. Downtown job centers, historic neighborhoods, and new edge cities should all be full of people, walking to do errands, sitting outside at sidewalk cafes, enjoying parks, living life, and interacting with each other. ... As the region grows, we must preserve what already works and expand what is possible, to ensure that there are enough great neighborhoods for everyone who wants to live, work, shop or play in one.

That still seems just as appropriate today as then. A lot has changed, but a lot has not.

After it launched, Greater Greater Washington gradually grew. We got links from a number of local bloggers, and some national ones, like Matt Yglesias and Atrios. The Washington Post's Marc Fisher featured us in a column about my escapade trying to get a cab to a Southwest impound lot.

Other bloggers started volunteering to post articles as well, beginning with Jaime Fearer, then Michael Perkins, and then many more. Many people helped edit, redesign the site, do links each day, and much more. A lively and intelligent community of commenters formed on the site.

We fought some big fights, like to get enough funding to stop Metro service cuts, or save streetcars. We pushed (over years) for open data at Metro. We campaigned successfully for DC's zoning update to lower parking minimums, and years later, that battle has come around to the next phase.

All of this is possible because of all of you: our readers, our commenters, our editors, and our contributors. I wish there were room to thank every person individually. Instead, here are all of the photographs on all of the author bio pages for people who are, or have been, regular contributors. This leaves out many, many people, whose photos we don't have, or who were editors behind the scenes, and everyone who's contributed by commenting or just sharing stories with their friends. Thank you, all.

Discussing education is always going to be a balance between the needs of individual children, and any parent understandably puts his or her own child first, and the issues facing the community as a whole. How can we make education better for the kids in good schools, bad schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools right now, and also in the long run? Are those always compatible?

Most education discussions elsewhere in the media get very heated about a few hot-button issues, like "school reform" and Michelle Rhee. The editors and contributors who work on education generally don't have an absolutist position on these topics.

Those seeking to remove poorly performing teachers have some good points, but aren't always right. Teachers' unions have some good points too, but aren't always right either. Michelle Rhee was not perfect, but wasn't the devil; she did some good and made some mistakes.

We can all agree, however, that education in DC needs to be better for kids of many different backgrounds, different neighborhoods, races and income levels, and we need to figure out how to best achieve that shared goal. I hope our discussions about education can look at issues through that broad lens and bring a thoughtful perspective that is often missing.

Our education discussions spanned many topics last year

We've talked about a number of education policy topics in 2012. I looked at whether DC schools are "good enough" for parents with a choice, the problems with the rankings and statistics we have today, whether schools can be diverse, and how to promote diversity.

Ken Archer discussed whether Ward 3 schools are getting more exclusive and if we're headed toward 2 separate and mostly segregated systems. We asked whether 100% choice should be the goal, whether charters expel too many kids, and whether to have a common lottery

Steve Glazerman argued charters should not favor neighborhood residents, while Ken felt it would create a level playing field; a panel ultimately recommended against the idea.

Ken also talked about plans for Ward 5 middle schools and the DC claims that it has "universal" pre-K are dubious; even the auditors say so.

We started out the year with conversations about education funding in the budget, from Steven Glazerman, after-hours community schools, from Celine Tobal, and the widely-criticized IFF study on school closings.

These articles were all about education in the District, where the policy issues are very different from most Washington suburbs. That doesn't mean our education conversations should only focus on DC, however, and it would be great to have more about the issues in other cities and counties in the region.

What education topics would you like to discuss?

Can you help?

If we're going to have more discussions about education, we need posts. Greater Greater Wife and I don't have kids yet. These nonexistent kids are not enrolled in any local schools. Some of you do have children, and know interesting things about what's going on in your child's and other children's schools.

Can you share some of these? You don't have to have a Ph.D. in education or be a professional education researcher, though we also would welcome hearing from those folks. When we talk about buildings or bike lanes or parks or Metro, we try to look at things from the perspective of the regular person, and mix in a little bit of context. A post does not need to be a research paper.

Our commenters know a lot, too. Often a good post just poses some interesting thoughts and then gets a topic going. It's definitely not necessary to cover all of the bases of a subject to bring it up. A good post is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

Nor does every post has to answer the broad question, "what is the most important educational policy issue"? Often very small things, at the local level, make the greatest difference. One of the best ways to talk about an issue on a blog is by example: we discuss one specific architectural decision or intersection design or local zoning fight, and through a large number of these, creates a collage that builds up to the bigger picture.

Are you trying to pick a school for your kid? Why not write about what you're learning and what factors you're weighing? Have a kid in a school with a great principal? You could interview him or her and write about what he or she does really well. Or are you sitting on a gold mine of useful statistics of some kind? Share them!

If you have access to really great information that would help advance the discussion, but can't publicly put it under your byline, we're interested in that too. However, we don't have a staff of reporters who can take a general tip or topic suggestion and do their own research for an article; that's what we need contributors to do. Most articles don't need a lot of research; you can just write about what you already know.

Can you help out? Let us know on this form. Even if you can only do a little, with a lot of people it will add up. I hope you can.

Most read: David Daddio analyzed how people use Capital Bikeshare, and since April, this one post racked up over 51,800 views to the post page itself (not counting people who read it on the home page and RSS feeds). It got attention on Planetizen, Reddit, Next American City (now Next City) and more.

Runners-up for highest-traffic posts include Dan Reed's millennial post which also scored #4 on most-commented, an analysis and map of dying malls by Dan Malouff, Bradley Heard's summary of the Cafritz project in Riverdale Park and how it fits into Prince George's TOD strategy (or lack thereof), and historic names for DC neighborhoods, such as "Pipetown" and "Bloody Hill," by Kimberly Bender.

Most tweeted: Over 204 people retweeted Herb Caudill's amazing essay on so-called "anti-car" policies, including folks from all around the country, since his points are just as salient in almost every other city as they are here. It's worth a read at any time.

The Twitterati also clearly are very into open data. They got very excited about the real-time arrival screens Eric Fidler put together on a fellowship for Arlington County Commuter Services and Capital Bikeshare agreeing to release data in an anonymized form that enabled all kinds of people to put together great visualizations; these clocked in at #2 and #3 on total tweets.

Rounding out the top most-tweeted articles are ones by Christine Green on how planners are advancing public health and a very short post on a clearly hot-button issue, the fact that DC now has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, but 3 fewer votes in Congress than each state.

Most liked: Some different subjects interest people on Facebook than on Twitter, while others interest them all. The top "liked" post was the one on DC being bigger than Vermont, and it was also the 5th most tweeted.

However, 673 people liked Dan Reed's post on the National Labor College going on the market, while only 5 people tweeted it. (Maybe that's because the original title, which Facebook shows, is "College for Sale" (intriguing!) while the tweet was "National Labor College move presents development opportunity for Hillandale" (eh!))

You also really liked the historic neighborhood names like Pipetown (by Kimberly Bender), the recent revelation of Montgomery County school officials freaking out over a 5th grader riding Ride-On to school, and, once again, Herb Caudill on car-dependence.

Many thanks go out to all of these contributors and the many, many more who submitted posts that might not have made the top 5 in one of these categories, but which still informed, entertained, engaged, or energized readers about one of many important topics.