Imho, discussion tends to get stymied on Counterculture – it doesn’t get much of a chance to attract interest, because new comments aren’t given any prominence. It works fine for new announcements, but you have to make a conscious effort to read any comments (the few that there are).
Few people probably know about the discussion going on under: Unclear headings on library web pages
We would be better served by a blog that gave new comments (as well as new postings) prominence, thus promoting more open discussion. I think that would also help to overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ between branches.
This is one of the (many!) things that is being discussed in the blog review project — it would also be great to stimulate discussion on external blogs. I believe it’s probably technically feasible with our current blog software but would require some (I don’t know how much) fiddling.
(Ritual disclaimers: I don’t speak for anyone else and am only cursorily familiar with the techonlogy.)
In the meantime I’m finding it worth skimming down the latest page of Counterculture regularly to check for comments – we seem to be having more discussions now than even a couple of weeks ago.
Great, we’ll keep our fingers crossed re outcome of BRP!
Must be something in the air which is pushing our ‘discuss’ buttons…