2 March 2009: Welcome to World Streets

Welcome to World Streets, the 21st century newspaper published by the New Mobility Partnerships that has a single job: to provide you with high quality, readable , concise food for thought, and leads specifically on the topics of sustainable mobility, sustainable cities, and sustainable lives, world-wide. Today's Front Page also displays postings for latest week.. _____________________________________________

* * * Go to Today's front page * * *

We want to make sure that Streets is a good read, and a fast one, for our overloaded colleagues working on these issues in cities and countries around the world, as well for others trying to follow the full range of issues involved. And while the exact organizational mix is still being played with in these early months to determine what combination is going to work best, we start out by providing each day one longer thinkpiece reporting on a specific project, policy, program, or person working to break the old mobility stasis somewhere in the world, and add to that one or two other items or leads that our readers may find of interest.

Streets adds new dimensions to the New Mobility Agenda, offering useful new tools and an extended forum for contributions, challenges and comments reaching beyond the focus group postings of the New Mobility Cafe. And it has a definite ethic and strategic approach to the issues involved. The first wing of this approach is our complete independence of any interests, government, commercial or others. Our party line, our doctrine, is sustainable development and social justice. And that’s it. Please take a minute to review our basic platform for all we do in this broiled sector, which you will see at http://www.strategy.newmobility.org.

Streets is regularly indexed by all search engines, ensuring a wide reach of all that appears here. The content is regularly provided on a volunteer basis by more than one thousand colleagues actively working on these issues with whom we have taken contact since the outset of the New Mobility Agenda in 1988.

World Streets takes the challenge of a polyglot world seriously. Click the Languages/Translations link on the top menu to see how we are trying to be useful to our non-English language colleagues.

The defining characteristics of World Streets are that it is not only a specialized daily newspaper, but also that it provides lead-ins on a steadily expanding set of useful tools, along with a searchable archive of information and past postings on the various topics that constitute our focus. To get a feel for how this works, we can think of nothing better than to draw your attention to Contents section that you will find on the top left menu.

* World Streets Contents: Just to your left on the menu - one click entry to all key tools supporting the message component of the site.

* Contributor/Author Guidelines: Click here - http://newmobilityagenda.blogspot.com/2009/01/contributor-guidelines.html

* Comments: Can be easily made on any given item. Find the piece you wish to comment, click the Contact link at the bottom of the item, and file your comment. If you do not have Gmail address or blog, it is easiest to send as "other"; but in that case we would ask you to identify yourself. Please end your Comment identifying yourself as follows:

• Name, email
• Organization (if any), URL
• City, country

* Languages/Translations: From the outset of The Commons back in the seventies, we have been continuously and often painfully confronted by the fact that our work is cross-frontier and cross-cultural, and that means that is also involves people whose daily lives center on languages other than English. For us this has been a particular problem, in the first place since our consistent target and concern are the problems and possibilities of technology as confronted by people in their day to day lives. Thus our target audience and collaborators are not necessarily international civil servants or experts trained for international work, but individual citizens and people in local government who live their lives and develop their competence in their own language.

For this reason we have long tried to do our best to use free machine translations to help our worldwide friends get at least a grasp of information that is otherwise available only in English. You will see in the left menu bar, our best 2009 effort at linking machine translations to this site.

Click here for more on this.

* To share a given item or article with a friend?: Again, straight forward: use the little email icon at bottom of each article. You'll see.

* Blogger help: Click http://help.blogger.com/

* Skype us: To install go to http://www.Skype.com Then to get in touch directly once you have Skype installed, click here: callto://newmobility/

* Questions? An email to editor@newmobility.org should do it.

• World Streets has just launched. How can we improve the service? Let us know here.

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