I’ve taken a lot of flak for the name of this site over the years. The flack all stems from the word “underground’ it sounds dark…..the\u00a0‘underground’ must \u00a0bunch of folks sneaking around doing who knows what. I was told once that some people in town feel this is a\u00a0‘subversive’ site and another said\u00a0I was the leader of the Londonderry Shadow Government.<\/p>\n
A little history about the Town Underground site. Back in 2001 when we purchased a house in south Londonderry I decided to get involved in what was going on in town government. I started attending a number of public meetings. Conservation Commission was one of the first, School Board, Town Council, and a number of others. I quickly learned that attendance at these meetings was, for the most part, the same small number of people. Even those that served on various town boards seemed to \u2018recirculate\u2019 moving from board to board. Not many new faces in the audience or on the boards themselves.<\/p>\n
My thought was that if there was a website that allowed people to see what was going on, maybe more people would be interested. I also noticed what I preceived as a number of \u00a0‘cliques’ on several of the boards. Yes, they welcomed new people, but if the new folks tended not to follow the status quo they end up as the outsider.<\/p>\n
Ok, I needed a website. Now what to call it? My Son and I were watching the History channel one afternoon. The program was about the French Resistance, the Underground. I said to my Son ‘hey how about Town Underground\u2019 ? I did a quick internet search and the\u00a0name was free so I registered it. I’ve got the website, so now what? I needed a plan, what to do with this new ‘underground’ website?<\/p>\n
I wrote a quick page, the same page that has been on this site since it went online. I also setup the TU web forum. I thought a place for people to discuss would be helpful, and again, get more people involved. Back to the plan the ‘Underground’\u00a0\u00a0is online, now what?<\/p>\n
\u00a0Counter to all the ‘Underground’ movements\u00a0that have come before\u00a0me in history, I told people about the site, sent out email and made the site public.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The format was pretty simple at firts. I would attend a meeting and then\u00a0write a post\u00a0people could read and\/or respond. It was all out on the very public Internet for everyone to see, in hind sight, maybe ‘underground’ was a poor choice for the site. It doesn’t really reflect how things are done on this site. The site had no ‘members only’ section until 2009. Here is a little secret about the member\u2019s only section. There is not a lot there, only nine posts in just over a year.<\/p>\n
So I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time to rename the site, something more reflective of the intent.<\/p>\n
Now what to call it? A few thoughts:<\/p>\n
A TU Community Forum, Londonderry NH.<\/strong> I’d still get to keep\u00a0TU in the name. I guess I’d just have to explain TU a few times to the new folks.<\/p>\n
Your Point of View, Londonderry NH.<\/strong><\/p>\n
The Dark Lord of Londonderry.<\/strong> This would be a hit with some of the other \u00a0Londonderry bloggers. Ok, this one is just a joke, I can’t help but to poke a little fun at those those bloggers. I am going for an upgrade,\u00a0after all, the King is gone I think I can be more than a pawn.<\/p>\n
Your suggestions. I’m sure there are a few thoughts out there.\u00a0Comments are open on this one, no names or email addresses required.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve taken a lot of flak for the name of this site over the years. The flack all stems from the word “underground’ it sounds dark…..the\u00a0‘underground’ must \u00a0bunch of folks sneaking around doing who knows what. I was told once that some people in town feel this is a\u00a0‘subversive’ site…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}