Letter From the Observatory Founders

Welcome! We are excited to share your expertise and research with our growing public audience and build your reputation as an authority in your areas of expertise.

We’ve designed the Observatory to be a resource that audiences can trust and have a deeper level of engagement with. And we’ve also put a lot of thought and care into showcasing your expertise: your research, news articles and commentaries, books and publications, events schedule, and multimedia.

Your author page on the Observatory is designed to be a primary destination for anyone who wants to know about your works and ideas.

For centuries, the most popular encyclopedias and reference guides were composed of well-written entries, signed by experts invited by the publishers. Readers were guided by the experts to learn about what mattered on a particular subject, and the writing was both compelling and accessible.

As a contributor to the Observatory, you can make the best impact with your expertise through concise and well-edited, definitive, and evergreen information. In addition to your current work, we encourage you to review your own archives to identify what you’ve produced that has relevance for today and the future. And we also developed a tool to produce Guides that you can use to give audiences a big-picture education on your areas of expertise.

And, to that end, after you complete an article in the Observatory, consider adding a Quick Read version—a simplified, more easily readable summary of the full article of no more than 500 words.

We believe that your work has value for readers who may not have higher education degrees or be familiar with the topic, and we hope you will use this unique feature to widen the horizons of your work’s accessibility.

Thanks from the Observatory co-founders:

Jan Ritch-Frel

Jenny Pierson

Reynard Loki

April M. Short