But as "pseudo-geek" online journalists ourselves, we've found real benefits to using off-the-shelf content management tools -- especially for a small operation without an in-house web developer, like our project at the BoulderCarbonTax.org web site.

I,Reporter partner Amy Gahran and I built out our site using WordPress, which we have installed on our Web host's servers. (Note that this is not Wordpress.com -- a hosted service that offers little flexibility).

We've added lots of widgets and functionality, and an online forum. Each step took just a few days, required just the smallest amount of expert help, and quickly established for us a cheap, versatile web site, with access to lots of new tools and further enhancements coming down the line.

Here are some of the things we were able to do with the main site in a matter of days:

• Get Wordpress installed on our account at Bluehost.com. We needed some geek assistance with the server-side stuff, but it all worked out easily.
• Create a custom banner.
• Selected and customized a free Wordpress theme.
• Create a page-based global navigation system.
• Set up feeds and email alerts using Feedburner and Feedblitz.
• Set up link blogs using del.icio.us.
• Create forms on the site.

Later on we added a forum using Vbulletin, an inexpensive but versatile and usable forum software package. Again, we needed some help from a more technical person to get it installed and configured, but since then it's been working fine.

We'd certainly never knock all the great creative energies and ideas that come from making something from scratch, solving old problems in new ways, clearing a path for others. We're just saying that for many projects with limited staff, resources and technical know-how, using ready-made tools have real advantages.

One big plus with this approach is simply getting the site up quickly and inexpensively (including the cost of your time). That allows you to focus on bringing content to the community, rather than futzing with debugging your tools as you build them.

Here's one other consideration with custom design: What happens to your state-of-the-art site in year two or three or five, when advances have overtaken it and you may no longer have the time or resources to update it? Or even if you do, are your initial outside developers no longer around to help bring it up to speed?

Do you end up with a horrendously out-of-date dinosaur with numerous technical problems requiring a massive overhaul and probably no one around to easily fix it. That's what happened when the Boulder Daily Camera had to scrap its custom-built community site in favor of a Ning.com site (more on that). The non-custom tool is not only more flexible, but more sustainable and maintainable.

Other cases in point are news association sites like Poynter.org, which is stumbling over a badly out-of-date custom content management system built several years ago, or the web site for the Society of Environmental Journalists, which is limping along with a system built (for good reason, years ago) using Lotus Notes.

We'd certainly like to hear from those with more technical expertise than us about the benefits of custom CMSes, or how to overcome the kinds of longer-term problems they can present. But in the meantime ... we'll take ready-to-wear.

When we launched our project in the summer of 2007 in the wake of the city's approval of a carbon tax to fight global warming, we began with the premise that experts and interested participants from the community would have enough to say that at least some would want to become "citizen journalists," that is, frequent contributors on the pro-am group weblog we were setting up. After all, the subject of global warming was, er, hot, and Boulder had just become a pioneer in acting locally on a issue of planetary scale.

But while we got enthusiastic feedback, no one seemed to be stepping forward. We came to believe this had mostly to do with the psychological barrier of become a (capital "J") journalist, a daunting prospect for folks with little to no background in reporting and writing skills (something we hoped to address through training).

But last winter, we decided to experiment with a different approach to grease the skids for participants. We launched a series of online forums that we felt would lower the hurdles for potential contributors, making it much simpler for them to take part. They no longer had to act as "journalists" - they could simply make online comments in our forums, a pretty tried-and-true community building tool.

Since we also wanted to take advantage of online conversations already taking place, we divided our forums into half-a-dozen different specializations, such as government watchdogging, energy efficiency, business and transportation issues. By cross-seeding existing forums and our own, we thought, residents with expertise in those topics (of which we know there are many in Boulder and environs) could then also take part in just that one forum on our site, without being overwhelmed or distracted by other carbon tax-related issues.

And perhaps in the process, we mused hopefully, some forum participants would become sufficiently engaged that we could entice them into posting to the main group weblog itself, even with some regularity.

Only it didn't work. After months of trying to spark conversation in the forums, not much has happened beyond a few interesting guest posts. Now we think we understand why.

In the interest of sharing lessons learned, here's our thinking. Many of those we've approached in recent months to participate in the forums have been very interested. But at the same time, they've started to make it clearer to us that the barrier is not the technological one of having to post to a forum or blog. Rather, it's a political barrier -- there are just too many interests at stake in a small city to so publicly voice their views.

By expressing themselves on the controversial carbon tax topic in an open forum -- rather than in more private and safer listservs or face-to-face conversations - they expose themselves to controversy, possibly even career harm.

We think this is an important insights for us about our project as a whole, as well as perhaps for other sites that seek to build single-issue conversations in relatively close geographical quarters. Some topics are just more difficult to focus a conversation on than others.

But like the legendary experimenter Thomas Edison - who once said "every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward" - we continue to plunge ahead.

We welcome your thoughts, suggestions, approaches along the way. Anyone experienced similar challenges? Were you able to overcome them, and how?

But now, almost one year on, we've come to understand another important reason why our site is so needed. That's because when it comes to Boulder's publicly-funded web information site, there may be web governance for the people, but there just doesn't seem to be web governance by the people.

As detailed in a post on our web site, the city's ClimateSmart online initiative is a thing of beauty, with lots of fun animation, engaging interaction, and useful information and insights.

But what's missing? Something we believe is the most important thing of all -- the authentic voices and views of the community in a dialogue with each other and their elected officials.

The desire for dialogue is something that's central to our own efforts, and while we admit it's not easy to foster a digital democracy, we believe true success rises or falls on that one idea.

Meanwhile, the city government's site so far seems to have ignored that imperative. There's little sign of a basic online discussion forum or a comments area, let alone the more sophisticated range of online tools for user-generated content like user blogs or video and photo uploads or topical wikis.

Perhaps it's no surprise that even an enlightened local government like Boulder's would still be behind the curve when it comes to using digital media to help govern. And they're smart, dedicated people who may yet bring their web initiatives into the citizen journalism age.

But, meanwhile, we see all the more clearly why independent, journalistic enterprises like our own, supported by forward-looking foundations like Knight, remain essential as the risk-taking vanguard for democratic engagement in a digital world.

Then the Knight Foundation gave us our opportunity last May by funding our plan to build and launch our Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker citizen journalism web site. Since then, we've plunged ahead, learning as we go about what it takes to involve local citizens in such a complex, slow-breaking, but crucially important story.