Operation S.S.F.I. ...Ready? Clear!!

Here at The Other Salisbury News, we believe that some serious innovation is necessary to bring our city back to life. We are confident that the good ideas and creativity imperative to Salisbury's survival are out there (we've heard plenty of them at Public Input and Council Meetings), they've just been ignored because they were wasted on people who weren't really listening. Well guess what Delmarva? WE ARE LISTENING!! We have decided that this will be a website that is used for the improvement of our town, not the division of it, and we plan- with your help- to make big things happen on the Eastern Shore. With that in mind we hereby begin Operation S.S.F.I. (Save Salisbury From Itself). Here's how its gonna go down.

Phase 1- Outreach. Email everyone you know about our website. If you work for the city this will be especially important. We will need all the eyes and ears we can get (cough, cough Greater Salisbury) if we are going to make a difference. So spread the word about us! The Other Salisbury News needs your help to get the ball rolling!

Phase 2- Dialogue. We need your help to keep the ball rolling too. We are going to start some discussion threads about a) the areas that need improvement in Salisbury and b) how we can improve them. Here's the catch: We want real solutions from people who actually know what they are talking about. That means that if you work for or with the city on a daily basis then we want your ideas. Do we still want input from the rest of you? Of course we do! We encourage everyone to share! But if we are going to make anything good happen, we will require some concrete solutions to complex problems.

Phase 3- More Dialogue. One of the surest gateways to success is effective communication. That said, we want the architects, accountants, lawyers, engineers, and public relations specialists to start talking to each other. Our website will provide the forum for open discussion. There is no point in discussing the mechanics of why Route 13 is terrible if we can't talk about the financial limitations of fixing it. Information is the key to understanding, and we want all of Salisbury to understand what the problems are so that we can start to address them.

Phase 4- Awareness. As our pool of ideas and readers begins to grow, the website will gain the reputation it needs to really get noticed (the merchandise line we are about to launch will help with that as well). When solutions to the problems are out there and everybody knows about them, they become very hard for the higher ups to ignore. Before long, they will have to acknowledge the problems and take action.

Phase 5- Secret. We are tentative about putting phase 5 up just yet. We don't want the City to send a bunch of teamsters after us because we revealed our genius masterplan too quickly. But trust us, once we get people talking, we'll clue you guys in to what the last phase is! A little mystery never hurts.

Now Delmarva, the hardest hump to get over will be getting people to actually participate. Lots of people read our site, only a few take the time to comment. However, we are confident that if we keep at it, eventually more people will respond. We just have to persevere is all. Remember: you can always comment as anonymous and you can also email us with questions. Get ready Delmarva- it's gonna be a wild summer! We's about to turn this motha out.