Back in the winter of 2007, I was asked to join the political blog MyDD as a weekend front-page writer. I was smart enough to know that the blog already had enough people writing great content on polls and electoral politics, which aren't my strong suits anyway. So I set out trying to determine what it was that I might be able to add to the community.

One of the things I settled upon was an idea that probably has something to do with the fact that there were years of my life that I thought I was destined to become a professional anthropologist. I decided that I would use my soapbox at MyDD to conduct in-depth interviews with some of the amazing people doing the tough work of progressive politics -- thinkers, issue activists, and hands-on organizers. The wonderful added benefit was that I, a curious person by nature, would be able to ask truly excellent people questions about how and why they do what they do.

In a less-than-inspired moment, I named the interview series Hearing Progressive Voices, which brings us to the first point of this post. Since I curtailed writing on MyDD, I've moved the series to its own home -- and now I'm regretting the name. It strikes me as awfully long and awfully clunky. In short, I'm seriously in the market for a new name. So if you have suggestions, by all means please send them my way.

(Please do keep in mind that great branding would convey that (a) the series is rooted in the progressivism and (b) the point of the series is for us all tap into the wisdom and experience of the interview subjects -- though ideally in the form of a very two-way conversation.)

But I have another reason for writing this post, and that's to force me to think through what I think a series like this is good for and what it might achieve, however small.

If there's anything that I believe, it's that we can learn a great deal from people who do things differently than we may personally do. To that end, I'd love for the interview series to facilitate someone working on community radio in Philadelphia sharing ideas and experiences with a person working on using technology to make Washington DC more transparent -- and for all of us to learn from both of them. Now that I think of it, I guess the series has a sort of consilient streak running through it, though I never thought of it that way before now.

Getting the series to that point of usefulness is an uphill battle. It's not a project that I can do or want to do alone. The ten interviews we have up there now, no matter how interesting, are probably too long and too dense for the web. I've been torn between thinking that the interviews themselves just contain too much information and the idea that we might be able to format them in a way that might make them more accessible.

Anyway, the point of this post is just to put a flag out there indicating that I do have dreams of getting Hearing Progressive Voices, under one name or another, to the point of making a useful contribution to the critically important discussion of how we're going to save the world and all that jazz.

So I'd love to hear thoughts on how we go about creating something that helps to tie together all the various threads that run through progressivism, a site that's both useful and entertaining. I hope you'll at least consider following along via RSS or following the site's Twitter account. And again, if you have suggestions for some new branding for the site, by all mean please let me know.