You don't have to give this website a nickel. You don't have to make a contribution 

But we need to build our membership. It helps increase credibility of the site in the eyes of other media and others. That will help us accomplish more, more effectively.

We DO ask for and require you provide gender, birthdate, zipcode and state, all of which we keep private.

We will be asking a lot of other questions, most of which will be optional and all of which will remain private, unless you choose otherwise, when we take our privacy controls live.  We don't intend to give the info out to any other operation-- only opednews.com and it's partner website, the populum.com community will have access to it, and then still, you will control your privacy. 

We hope we don't lose many readers because of this, but we really want to be building a community-- where people comment, share ideas, blog diaries, post articles-- and the first step is to sign up as a member. One way to do it is to offer members extra services and functions, like access to emailing writers, access to the printer friendly view.... and we'll probably be adding more.

We offer events and calendars. Only members can post events.  Calendars will be very handy/ You'll be able to keep some appointments private and allow others so see some of the events you have on your calendar. All, for members only.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.