Streetsblog.net

Welcome.

We have some important news about the Livable Streets Initiative Community.

Two years ago, when we launched the Livable Streets Community site, we aimed to provide a forum where livable streets advocates from around the country could coordinate their efforts, build membership, exchange information and organize for change.

In many ways, the LSI Community has enabled tremendous success. We’ve seen a wide variety of groups come together to use the tools we provided. People have connected with each other from around the country and the world to discuss best practices in transportation policy and to share strategies for creating more livable streets and communities.

Unfortunately, as a nonprofit foundation in a down economy, The Open Planning Project has had to make some difficult decisions about the allocation of our limited resources. The challenges of developing and maintaining the LSI Community software in the way that it should be supported have proved to be unsustainable for our small staff. Instead, we want to focus and build on our core strengths: the Streetsblogs in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.; the Streetsblog Network; Streetfilms; and Livable Streets Education.

Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to shut down the Groups section of LSI Community. This shutdown is currently projected for the beginning of April. Your profile on LSI Community will continue to exist and will remain integrated with the comments sections on all the Streetsblog sites as well as Streetfilms.

We by no means intend for your efforts on LSI Community come to an end.  Instead, we want to help you migrate your groups and activities to alternative platforms that will better serve your needs, such as Ning, Meetup, Google Groups and Wordpress. We are currently exploring the best ways to do this, so stay tuned. In the coming weeks more information will be sent to Group administrators.

When we shut down the site, we will be keeping the user sign-ins and profiles active until we build a new profile infrastructure for commenters on our blogs.  We're committed to nurturing and supporting the vibrant community of readers and commenters on all of our blogs.

We have also decided to migrate StreetsWiki to another hosted platform, and it will no longer be officially part of our online presence. 

The LSI team will send updates about these transitions as they are available and further warnings as we approach a shutdown date for the Livable Streets Community Groups. Please post questions and comments below and we'll do our best to answer them.

Most of all, we want you to know how much we value your participation in the movement for livable streets.

Best of luck in all your work!

Sarah Goodyear
Editor and Community Manager
Streetsblog Network