What is 'Shifting Ground'?
This is a website with four areas - a Noticeboard, a Resource Area, a Bibliography Area and a Discussion Area. It is 'interactive', in the sense that anyone with access to the internet can not only look at what is here, but also submit new items to each of the areas, or respond to what is there already.

What is the site for?
Shifting Ground is a discussion and resource space for those interested in new social and cultural movements. Many such movements have their own WWW sites, and there are numerous discussion lists and boards and sites for communication amongst activists. But until now there has appeared to be no place for academics and activists who are thinking about such movements to communicate with one another, debate about ideas and find relevant materials and information.

What kind of thing counts as a new social and cultural movement for the purposes of this site?
While being open-minded about this, we are most interested in the more informal, under-institutionalised end of the spectrum, rather than in more formally constituted parties, NGOs or charities. So, for example, we're particularly interested in encouraging talk about:
· political protest movements
· alternative lifestyles
· self-help groups
· co-operatives and utopian communities

What sort of focal concerns might such groups and movements have?
We are most interested in discussing those which in some way count as positive, good and fruitful, rather than reactionary, violent or oppressive. Some of our own specific interests are vegetarianism, gardening, tai chi, radical environmentalism, complementary medicine, anarchism, cycling, sexual politics, paganism and new religions. However, we want to be open-minded rather than prescriptive about subject matter (though we might try to rein things in a bit if the discussion strays too far).

What sort of things might people talk about on the site?
What we most want to happen here is deeper, more long-term, reflection about the nature and significance of social and cultural movements. Of course, many of the participants may also want to swap other kinds of information with each other. They may want to share 'nuts and bolts' information about the organisation of one movement or another. Or they may want to further the cause of a movement - by posting more 'polemical' pieces, or by sharing tactical and strategic information with each other. However, we'd rather that people just posted links to other sites which might be more appropriate for such activity, and kept discussion on this site to the more reflective and critical.

How does this site work? How can people interact with it?
After a lot of thought, we decided to launch Shifting Ground as an unmoderated WWW site, so that anyone can send in contributions. It will be automatically archived after an item has been on for six months. Should there be any obvious or annoying abuse of the openness of the site, we might decide to change it to a moderated site.

We have set up a number of web spaces and categories under which most of the material will be grouped. New categories can be invented with no great difficulty if they are needed.

At present, these spaces and categories are:

The Noticeboard
This is where you can post items of relevant news, such as:

• Notices of Conferences or Gatherings of interest to readers.
• Notices of Forthcoming Papers in easily accessible journals or papers which have been given at conferences. Those who wish to have copies might write the individual author.

The Resource Area
This is where people can post resources, or details and short descriptions of resources, pertaining to our subject, such as:

• Papers, either already published in obscure journals or not published at all.
• WWW links to other relevant websites
• Details of useful journals and so on.
• Book Notes - not terribly long, and sometimes merely the title and other details of edited books or monographs. Not all useful and relevant books are well marketed, so do contribute notes.

The Bibliography
This is where people people can post the details of published books and articles. Over time, this will build into a comprehensive, searchable bibliographic database on social and cultural movements.

The Discussion Area
This is where people can post:

• Questions that have been bothering readers, problems they are encountering, references that they need and so on. These should be questions that have clear and simple answers, rather than issues for discussion.
• Short Notes are contributions, ranging from a paragraph to a few pages, that are designed to be slightly provocative, that raise an issue with no obvious answer, that let out a notion that has not yet been fully formed or pose a question that has been repeatedly arising without any clear path opening up - and the responses to those short notes.
• Book Discussions. People can post the title and details of a book they consider to be an important text in the field, and invite people to comment. Further responses can be either detailed or short, and people can respond to them in turn.
• Post-Conference Discussions Periodically, and by arrangement with the organisers, we will host a discussion in relation to a relevant conference, in order to give people the opportunity to continue conversations beyond the life of the conference itself.

Webspinners:

Tom Cahill, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change and Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University
Bronislaw Szerszynski, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, Lancaster University
Graeme Chesters, Department of Applied Social Science, Lancaster University

Contact Shifting Ground directly:
t.cahill@lancaster.ac.uk
March 1998