whyroots

Whyroots?

The "Why" part of our name is a play off of both the most important interrogative pronoun and our age demographic, Generation Y. "Roots" refers to "netroots," the grassroots activist movement organized through the Internet.

Why?

Whyroots was born of the concern that there's not a place for young writers and thinkers to participate in the netroots in an intelligent, deliberative way. Further, we recognize a frustration among politically and culturally conscious young people with how a great number of established and widely-read voices on the Internet rarely break down policy issues in such a way as to advocate clearly and logically why certain views ought or ought not to be held. Moreover, we believe not enough substantive interaction and debate takes place in the netroots, both among writers and between writers and their audiences.

Consequently, Whyroots is an online womb for ideas and discussion about important policy and cultural issues by a group of intellectually adventurous writers in the Gen Y age group. We believe the best and most cogent ideas don't emerge from a vacuum, and instead from the challenge of allowing them to be consistently probed, argued with, and opened to development.

How?

There are two main elements to the Whyroots project: The prompts and the blogs.

Each week, the core group of Whyrooters responds to a prompt. The prompt can be an academic essay, an article, a photograph, a thought or consideration—essentially anything that spurs intelligent, original discussion about a socially relevant topic. Each writer responds to the prompt individually, and the discussion continues once all responses are posted. The idea is that the responses to the responses are of equal, if not greater, value than the original responses themselves.

The blogs give each writer an opportunity to discuss topics of great personal interest to them on a more regular basis. These pages will showcase our greatly varying interests, areas of expertise, and opinions, all the while providing a transparent look at each of our own biases.

Thank-yous are owed to Rory Kulz, Gordon Cieplak, and Andy Warner for their work, respectively, on the concept, branding, and illustrations.