Have you applied to join our Elections Committee yet? We're looking for people to help make our 2018 election coverage great(er).

Meanwhile, with a lot of elections coming up in 2018 and Greater Greater Washington's growing numbers of volunteers, a few questions have come up about whether people connected with GGWash can be involved in political activity. To answer those questions, we created a new policy and a color-coded table to explain it.

(You can also open this in a new window).

The basic principle is simple: We want to avoid conflicts of interest so the content on GGWash is written with your best interests in mind, the readers. People who work for, or volunteer for, Greater Greater Washington need to be acting with the purpose of educating and informing our readers, and persuading them when appropriate with good disclosure.

A lot of our contributors, volunteers, and staff have opinions on issues which is fine, but we just don't want people covertly trying to help a candidate win office. (Instead, the Elections Committee will be going through a more formal process to decide GGWash's actual political endorsements!)

We don't want to stop people from helping out candidates they agree with, but we want to ensure that their allegiance is disclosed (except for the Elections Commmittee, which has to wait until the endorsements come out).

We hope this is helpful. Is there anything we missed? Do you have any questions? Post in the comments!

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.