We encourage you to participate in the discussion and look forward to reading your ideas. The purpose of these Terms is to explain how we handle the content you submit to this site and our standards of conduct.

On this site, you can comment on our posts and share ideas.

Anyone can view the comments on the site. Your participation in this dialogue is voluntary and no payments or gifts will be made to respondents. Any content you submit is in the public domain and may be reused.

Purpose of Discussion

The purpose of the America’s Great Outdoors dialogue is to hear from you about the places you love, your community’s efforts to protect them, and how we can better support modern-day land conservation efforts happening in communities across the country.

Discussion on this website is based on the following key discussion areas from the AGO report:

• Connecting Americans to the Great Outdoors
• Conserving and Restoring America’s Great Outdoors
• Working Together for America’s Great Outdoors
• Youth and America's Great Outdoors

Posts from AGO will likely concern these four areas and will generally be open for discussion.

Registration

You don’t need to register with this site. The registration button is an artifact of the service we use to maintain the website. As soon as the contractors let us remove it, it will be gone. However, if spammers run roughshod over our site, registration will likely become required.

Standards of Conduct

Our Terms of Participation is intended to support open discussion while ensuring a respectful exchange of ideas. We reserve the option to review your ideas against these Terms before posting publicly, which could result in a delay. We will not edit your ideas or comments, but they will be removed from the site by staff if they include any of the following:

• Threatening, slanderous or obscene language
• Personal attacks
• Discriminatory language (including hate speech) based on race, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion or disability
• Sexually explicit material and other material that would violate the law if published here
• Ideas or comments that promote services or products (non-commercial links that are relevant to this web site are OK)
• Repetitive posts (for example, if you submit the same idea multiple times)
• Embedded media, such as videos or photos (but hyperlinks to such media are OK)
  Note: Using multiple links in a post will trigger comment moderation, which means the post will require review by a human being before it gets posted. Spammers often use multiple links in posts.
• Spam or undecipherable language (gratuitous links will be viewed as spam)
• Copyright infringement
• Personally Identifiable Information (e.g., social security numbers, postal and email addresses, phone numbers)

To read more about how we handle the content you submit, please see our privacy policy.

Off-Topic and Duplicate Posts

To ensure a focused and constructive discussion, our moderators reserve the right to remove comments which are “off topic” or do not address some aspect of the dialogue. Topics that are considered off topic include but are not limited to discussions of policy or program issues not directly addressed by this initiative.

If two or more virtually identical posts appear, the moderator may merge the separate submissions into a single statement of the idea – that way, comments will be kept together.

Questions about these Terms

These Terms of Participation may be amended or modified in the future. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at ago@ios.doi.gov.