Content Push For 2026

[Kevin Colburn]

Dear Steam Team, 

We have some exciting news to share with you about our online river guide, and welcome your feedback. As we’ve worked on the tech aspects of the NWI we’ve realized that despite our collective efforts many river pages are empty, missing key information, and/or lack modern photos. To address this gap we secured a grant to infuse the NWI with new content and introduce new people to the Stream Team. We think this will make all of our work really shine, and lead to increased safety and more fun being had on the rivers. Here is what we plan to do over the coming year:

1. Promote Updates: We’ve restored/created features on the AW site that encourage people to view recent photos and trip reports. The goal with this is to help all visitors see what’s new in the NWI, including the Stream Team, and to remind visitors that they too can add trip reports and site content. 

2. Track Updates Better: We are going to update the Contributors tab to track more kinds of site edits, including gauge changes and river feature changes which are not currently surfaced on the tab. With this in place we will have increased accountability and transparency in changes. 

3. Run a Trip Report Contest: We are going to run a contest with a great suite of prizes for a bunch of different categories of trip report photos and stories. The goal of this is to encourage people to add content to the AW site, and give editors more images and descriptions to draw from in crafting the river-page. It will also have big safety benefits and make the site more engaging. You are encouraged to enter!  

4. Pay Some Content Curators: We plan to hire approximately 8 boaters from around the country to add, edit, and otherwise curate information on river pages. While the NWI is mostly crowdsourced (THANKS!), staff also adds a lot of photos and other information and we feel like more dedicated effort to this end will be really helpful at filling in gaps and increasing data quality. We will offer these folks guidance on respecting the work of others with an emphasis on filling in gaps, and how to engage with this team. This is not meant to replace volunteer efforts but rather bolster them. This will be about a 6-month push starting later this spring, and we are excited about this opportunity. Hopefully this push will encourage more content editors and more site visitation. You are all eligible to apply.

We hope you find these changes supportive of your work, and we look forward to answering any questions you may have and working with you on this.

[Tom Welander]

> We plan to hire approximately 8 boaters from around the country to add, edit, and otherwise curate

> information on river pages. ... We will offer these [Content Curators] guidance on respecting the work

> of others with an emphasis on filling in gaps, and how to engage with this team.

Cool.  Consider offering that guidance to volunteers, too.  The main thing I need is clear protocol for editing a reach's main content.  Not a technical how-to but rather an etiquette how-to.  I would fix a lot of problems and fill gaps in long-existing reaches if I had a way to get the original or previous streamkeeper's approval to do so.  But that chain of responsibility is undocumented... long gone.  Adding comments isn't doing it.  I'm not aware of any instances where corrections that I've suggested in comments were picked up by the page's last editor and incorporated into the page.  They just languish in comments along with decades of other boater's suggested corrections.  The pages appear have been orphaned for a decade or more. It seems like it should be simple and yet I don't have a good answer when I stop and try to determine if I should assert myself.  I wish the manual had a chapter titled "Who am I to change this content"?   --Tom W.

[Thomas O'Keefe]

Good observation Tom. I have authored a lot of content over the site over the past 30 years and routinely run into people who have objectively better and more up-to-date information on runs I have not done in years but they feel uncomfortable being the ones qualified or empowered to make an edit.

I can't say that I've picked up on any of your comments but I do routinely go through comments and Trip Reports and update river pages when I see useful information. I agree a style guide that includes best practices would be helpful. I wonder if a webinar format would be good for this to allow for some discussion and Q&A.

Tom

[Pete Giordano]

And I would suggest again that being able to track changes is key. I've seen updated content which purports to be improved from the previous version but there is no way to tell if it is substantially different or just stylistically different because the previous versions aren't available.

pete
503.504.0366

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