Something to show for it!

The pace at this new job is very different from the pace I'm used to in the newspaper biz. Well, not so much the pace - it's all pretty fast-paced - but the pace of the results. As a reporter, I could write one or two, and sometimes three or four or even five, stories in a day and see them in the paper the next day, a quick, clear, concrete manifestation of the earlier day's work.

Today, almost exactly a month after my first day at work, I got my first concrete sense of accomplishment: We launched Build Green Schools, the first of two Web sites I will oversee and the first of five new Web sites we plan to launch in the next month. The concept is simple: It's a Web site that gives everyday people - students, teachers, parents, school administrators, elected officials, and all sorts of regular citizens - the information and tools to advocate in their own communities for green schools. (Green schools, by the way, are schools built with a focus on clean indoor air, safe building materials, lots of natural daylight and fresh air, low energy and water use, conservation and recycling of building materials, etc. etc. It's about healthy students and teachers and a place that's very conducive to learning as much as it is about protecting the environment.) My role in the site was pulling all the content together, writing a lot of it and editing what was written by people in our LEED for Schools program. I put it all up on the site, dealt with sorting out links and images and things like that, gathering all the news coverage of green schools, and just sort of overseeing the whole process. From now on, my role will be maintaining it - any changes or updates or other work on the site will go through me. Up next, I have less than one week to do the same thing with a site oriented to homeowners, renters, homebuyers, etc., teaching them to make their own homes healthier and greener. I'm sure you'll hear more about that when we launch next week.

As part of the site, we wanted a social networking component so the grassroots advocates who visit the site will have someone where to interact with each other, asking questions, making suggestions, sharing experiences, hashing out ideas and otherwise working together on advocating for green schools. I put that site together here on MySpace: This is the MySpace profile, and this is the MySpace discussion group. Feel free to visit both and join and participate if you're interested!