The ultimate measure of success will be when we can draw a line from online engagement to policy impact. We're still working on that on the big scale, but on the local scale, we've seen it in a city planning project in Cleveland and the schools sustainability plan in Cleveland Heights. I believe it's coming on a bigger scale, but all of these things take awhile to get traction.

I also believe there's a lot to be gleaned from basic web analytics. If we get 1500 unique page views on a given conversation page over three days and people are staying on the page for an average of 4:30 minutes, that's pretty good, even if most of those people aren't actually participating visibly in a conversation.

Also, success is when public agencies start contacting us and saying, hey, we want to engage the community about the future of X. Can you help us? That's happening, too. (And, incidentally, it presents a source of revenue for us.)