Welcome to the PolicyMic editors blog! Here, we hope to introduce you to the people who make PolicyMic tick (sorry web team) and give you some more up-close-and-personal details about how we make content decisions every day. Who are the editors behind the content on the site? How do we think about creating, scanning, curating, and analyzing the news? What process do we use to come to group decisions on sticky editorial issues? How do we ensure that the quality of PolicyMic's content remains top-notch, even as we focus on growth? We'll cover that and much more (NSFW included) in the coming weeks.

As with anything on PolicyMic, this is meant to be an open space for discussion and debate, so we highly encourage you to weigh in and give us feedback below. We take your comments very seriously and we're always excited to hear from all of you.

To kick things off, we present to you the 10 Most Important Rules We Live By. This set of principles strikes at the core of how we think about PolicyMic and gets to the heart of our short and long-term goals. The newsroom is chaotic, quite simply, one crazy, fast-paced mess. But, these are the 10 core ideas which keep us grounded as we strive to become the only high-quality democratic news and media platform powered by millennials.

10 Most Important Rules We Live By

1) Our community comes first. We are building the platform to help passionate and smart users create forward-thinking discussion. We believe in a democratic and crowd-sourced system to promote the best pundits.

2) We test to solve problems. We experiment, determine what works, and implement (rather than theorizing on problems from afar). Analytics are key to every decision and to growing our audience and our impact.

3) We have fun. We enjoy what we do and we take pride in making an impact.

4) Our top priority is building a meaningful experience. If our users are happy and our audience is enjoying the site, our success will follow.

5) We work as a team. We share new ideas, feedback, problems, and questions with each other in everything we do.

6) We teach. We invest in our users and our team. We constantly give suggestions, feedback, and guidance to improve and get better.

7) We focus on the big problems. We prioritize religiously. We make a big impact every day.

8) We constantly innovate. We move fast. We’re not afraid to make mistakes and test new ideas until we find out what works.

9) Our assets are our community, our team, and our reputation. Building these is our ultimate focus.

10) We are thoughtful. Our audience demands well-reasoned perspectives and thoughtful analysis. We always push our community to answer the hard questions while giving our audience unique perspectives.