How Can You Help with Wis.Community? Money and Kitties edition

You may or may not have found yourself sitting on the porch on a beautiful summery/fallsy day like today, and asked yourself "How can I help out that nice Wis.Community site?" Well, maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that I'm going to tell you anyway. 

This is more or less a labor of love on my part, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to keep spending money to make it happen. It's more or less a retirement project on my part, but it has been severely eating into my fixed income, and my time. So there will be a series of articles here, giving you some idea how you can help out if you value the information here. If you like the school board videos, the videos of candidate forums, and the other little news items you won't see anywhere else, then you can help to keep this happening. In the long run I would love for this to become a stable business that will become self-supporting, and that will become more of a community project, and less of a "let's listen to Steve talk" project.

Which brings us down to money. I know a lot of people think everything on the internet just happens, and is free - but they're wrong. There are hosting costs, development costs, large amounts of time, conference costs, etc. I am going to the LIONS conference in Chicago again next month, as well as another conference that will help me to get great community engagement ideas. I've been willing to shell out for these things because I have a dream. But you can help.

We have a membership program. Over on the right side of the front page there's a membership widget. It would be great, if you can afford it, if you would chip in a little cash to become a member.  It's cheap. It's easy. And you can help us to do wonderful things like take on some student interns to cover more news and information from the community. I've got NO interest in putitng up a paywall to make people pay to access the site. But somewhere along the line we need some funds to keep doing this.

Okay - the begging for money is over. Once per week or so we'll suggest some other way you can help. Most of the rest are free. 

And since you actually clicked through and read this -- here is a video of kitties doing cute things!