This was an awesome comment to the engagement effort, so I "pushed" it up from the Comments.   My responses are in bold and underlined.   Thanks Channing and Sean!

Building engagement you can see

Hey James! I'm one of the co-authors of Social Ch@nge - we're a brother/sister team that blog on NetSquared about how non-profits can use the internet for social change. Has anyone brought up NetSquared's format as limiting engagement? N2 have discussed this topic, however we have discussed the blog-as-tool as limiting engagement, not N2's format overall.   For example, the comment tool is hardly ideal for continued and menaingful conversation amongst members; however, the project part of the site works well and engages users in an efficient, and appropriate manner.  

I find I spend time on the site filtering out information - like, the "latest comments" feed box on the right often features comments I'm not at all interested in (because they're contextless, and often spammy). The blogs dashboard also tends to feature stuff that runs together because it's uncategorized - it also tends to be very one-way since it appears to often feature announcements instead of questions.  

These are great points.    Considering my limited view inside the overall Net2 Project, I'm going to have someone on the team respond to your suggestions.  

To grab our attention and show us where stuff is happening that we can contribute to, can NetSquared make a visual tool to categorize our blogs a bit and make us more obvious to eachother?  

This sounds like a terrific idea, we're going to add it to our Features Wishlist.

For example, what if you replace your comments display so that instead it shows a couple of blog categories - social change, tech advice, creative ideas - and then shows a line from blogs that have recently updated in that category. This will help us figure out who to follow for content that really gets us going, and where conversations are happening that we want to be a part of. Looking forward to seeing other people's solutions and good for Net2 for asking users.  

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.   We recognize that members are the lifeblood of our work, and we're looking forward to delivering on a number of improvements to the site in the coming year that helps to provide more context for our diverse set of stakeholders.   Your continued guidance will help us accomplish that, so thanks again for taking the time to weigh-in with what you're thinking.