SCN: SCN site and logo redesign

[Rod Clark]

> As a topic editor I can tell you that I am honest and can be trusted to
> only change the things I have been told are within my rights as editor to
> change.
> I believe I could have changed it to the way I would like to see it a long
> time ago - but it's not within my bounds so I haven't.
> And why not have the topic editors change the  menu - then it would be the
> way that they feel is best for their topic - given some guidelines.
> We aren't really stupid folks.

Lois, 

   Let me explain some of the things that I've been concerned
about in the Spirituality section, since apparently I've been
the only editor who has taken an interest in all of the
Community sections at one time or another, and this issue
spilled over into some other menus sometimes too.

   For a few years I watched as the Spirituality menu included
almost entirely mainstream white Christian churches. Finally,
after realizing that that probably wasn't ever going to change
by itself, I began contributing links to some black churches,
some Islamic sites, a few Eastern Orthodox and Hindu sites and
some more Jewish links than the few we'd had, and so on.

   In all this recent heated discussion and concern about how
hard it is to navigate the menus (and it really isn't as hard as
all that) so far we've entirely avoided talking about the more
important issues of why we basically didn't even acknowledge on
the previous site's Spirituality menu that local black churches
existed, or that Islamic people existed in the Seattle area, and
so on. As an editor, I was and still am to some degree concerned
about the extent and fairness of our treatment of these and
other "lesser" peoples and religious beliefs on our menus, even
after SCN improved a lot in that respect after the move to our
new tree structured menu system. At the time, I didn't make a
big issue of why I wanted to add them to the Spiritality menus,
but maybe leaving the various editors' proclivities so
unexamined as you suggest isn't such a wonderful idea as you
think it is.

Rod Clark

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