... talking to one self in public

I made the commitment to building a company. For that company I built a piece of internet infrastructure: an online message board. I created characters or gimmicks. Then I created personalities for these characters, using social media as a tool. Each character has it's own social media avatar.

To give each character a good personality I took some of the best conversations I could remember and picked out archetypes who's ideology or philosophy could give my characters context. My chosen theme for the forum is civics because it is something that may actually be studied by someone in the future.

My characters span many demographics. If they were real they would likely have no contact with each other. They only have one thing that they share as a subject, and it is the subject of the forum: the State of Florida.

I have not perfected creating a realistic or natural conversation with this infrastructure, but it looks good enough to stay encouraged as I learn about this state, the character of it, a bit about the people here, and how to write this way. It ain't Shakespeare and it ain't tabloid.

The forum is made to understand how people can disagree so fervently and both be rational, for me. Though it's mostly to illustrate the process of creating your own forum to discuss specific subjects with your friends and the people around you. Florida is the limit of the my own forum's geographic range. Forums must be limited in some way to avoid having a conversation that's too broad to be relevant. There are already plenty of trivial chatter sites in the social media world.

Visit my forum and check it out for yourself. If you're interested click here for a post about how to build a forum for free. The conversations can be as productive as solving neighborhood level issues to designing the perfect fantasy football team.

One thing about the conversations on the forum I have, they all have Florida in common. The subject you choose is up to you. Thank you for reading.