The Bay Citizen went live at about 1:00 in the morning last Wednesday - with the virtual switches being flipped via a cell phone connection because our office Internet had gone down. It always feels miraculous when something you have been working on for many months suddenly comes to life, and other than the ultimately painless glitch with our local connection, it was all very smooth.

In online media, though, the first day, or the first week, or even the first month, are always no more than a start. Launching the website is an important milestone, but the real test for all of us will be how well we execute day in and day out, and how quickly we can respond to feedback and new ideas.

The most complicated aspect of the execution, in turn, has to do with how we engage the community. That's not to diminish the challenges inherent in our staff journalism, or in staying on the cutting edge technologically, or in working the business model to assure our long-term sustainability. But in those areas we can build on experience and well-established best-practices. The community side involves a lot more uncharted territory.

There are a number of ways in which people can be part of The Bay Citizen, and each has its own dynamics. There are comments on stories, and we decided to require real names for comments in the hope of engendering a more civilized and useful conversation than is often found in the discussion threads of news sites. Already, though, we have had people register under fake names, so we may have to spend more time policing that than we had hoped.

We've made it possible for people to be "Citizen Bloggers" on The Bay Citizen; if you have something to say about a public policy issue or another topic of broad interest to local residents, this is a good place to do it. (Think of it as a freewheeling op-ed page.) You can send us an email at info@baycitizen.org if you'd like to have a blog - but please bear with us if we don't respond right away, and if there are still a few kinks in the system.

We're also working hard to build strong partnerships with independent media sites and reporting-oriented bloggers, and we have about 15 partners signed up so far. We think we've found at least the beginnings of a formula to make these relationships mutually beneficial and thus help strengthen local journalism across the board. But there will undoubtedly be many adjustments to be made here too as we see how it all works.

We invite you to send us tips, suggest stories, and ask questions of the community. In the future we'll be developing stories in which people can interact directly with the underlying data. We'll be creating tools for contributed photography, and enabling location-based submissions from mobile devices. We'll be doing live chats on the site. And we'll listening closely for good ideas in all of these areas.

Hopefully we've already begun to make a contribution to quality local journalism in the Bay Area. We're excited about collaborating with all of you in that process.

(Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the type of cell phone used to launch the site.)