Liam Eagle: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

It would be immodest to begin this issue with anything other than a thank-you to our readers for participating in what has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet.

Interesting because the balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we’re planning to do a lot more with in the months to come (if anyone doesn’t read the WHIR website, the all star team was selected by online reader voting). Inviting readers to choose the members of our team – and the subjects of these profiles – introduced a participatory element to the magazine that we haven’t experienced before. We’ll definitely be bringing more reader polling to the site and looking for new ways to incorporate that input into content.

Interesting, also, because the first trip through this process was a learning experience for us. We experienced a few hiccups – including one attempt to disrupt the voting process, and one poll winner who felt we left a few key people off the ballot, and offered some great suggestions.

Farther along the learning-process lines, our write-in slot opened the doors to an enormous list of material that runs the gamut from puzzling to amusing to well-informed, generous and useful recommendations – enough valuable recommendations to keep us in subject matter for years.

And therein lay the excitement. We were thrilled with the response from readers. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project, specifically, and the WHIR community in general.