Receive bear hug.
A special thanks to all of those who make TSW possible, via funding and other contributions! We wouldn’t be here without you.
First point, we did not really get 20K in donations, as the current widget says.. it turns out that scammers steal credit card info and try to figure out if they are real by attempting to donate online. Aren’t people creative? Needless to say, I have to go back in and check hundreds of quasi-donations for reality. Last guess, prior to the influx of fake donations, was that we didn’t make our goal of $1000 last year. I didn’t want to bug people at the end of the year when they are doing their pre-tax donations, but when you get around to it, please consider a donation. Note that we are not a 501c3 so donations aren’t tax deductible.
In addition to paying various WordPress charges, and our amazing folks at Cloud Nine Web Support, I subscribe to various news outlets (WaPo, NY Times, LA Times) and Substacks, and even recently paid Twitter to get fewer obnoxious ads. These are all going up, and I’m expecting 2024 to require at least $1500 to keep us going.
We also have two potential volunteer opportunities.
(1) Analyzing PALS extract of CEs. It seems to me it would be fun for different people to look at these data and see what they make of it. What I’ve got is totals by Region and category for two five-year periods, simply asking the question “is the FS using more CE’s over time? If so, which Regions are using which ones?” I looked at the data and thought “this would an opportunity for open analysis and peer review” and asked a couple of university folks. They old me that they couldn’t do it (or have it be a grad student project) without funding. And I could write a pre-proposal to write a proposal. If that $20K were real… Anyway, anyone, students, retirees, those currently working, who are interested, please let me know and we can collaborate on this analysis.
(2) Virtual fencing post (that’s a post about fencing, not a fence post). Turns out that the Santa Fe is working with virtual fencing as a pilot with partners and offered to answer questions. This would be a fun post to write for someone interested in learning about this. Maybe a field trip and photos or video?
And if you want to volunteer to write posts on other topics, or have other ideas, please email me (sharon) at forestpolicypub.com.