Yesterday the Chapel Hill News published a story about OrangePolitics.org, my personal project-obsession-cross-soapbox. It was a good story, oriented toward explaining the site as a community intended to inform and activate local progressives. You can read the story online, but you won’t get to see the crazy picture of me that took up the whole top half of the B section! Here’s an excerpt:
“I wanted to connect local progressive people to local issues as a way of helping them get actively involved in those issues,” Sinreich said. “What I “pictured was a groundswell of young, progressive activists who could be sort of energized and informed by OP. I wanted people flooding Town Hall to talk about the issues.
“That hasn’t happened. But it does seem to have sort of unintentionally filled a niche. It seems to have become established as a place for a lot of politically aware people to discuss local issues. All the local decision-makers seem to know about it. I think it’s playing a role, even if it’s not actually quite the role I had planned.”
OrangePolitics, which touches on a huge array of local issues — and, despite Sinreich’s best efforts to keep things purely local, a few national ones — has become a regular Web stop for many officials and politically involved residents.