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Our Community Voices section seeks to encourage a robust discussion by providing a widely disseminated platform for people to share their thoughts. It’s part of our mission to be a virtual town square, a place where people can raise and discuss all kinds of ideas. And there is a real need these days to participate in the public conversation on a whole lot of issues.

You’ll find the basic info you need to submit an article at the bottom of every Community Voice:

But here are a few more things you should know.

• We do edit your submission. We try to keep a light touch for the most part because we want to respect that this is your view and your voice. We do edit for style (we follow Associated Press style as much as possible) and grammar. We don’t knowingly print factual inaccuracies, including misrepresentations of public events, statements by public officials or assertions about public issues or public policy.

• Fairness is important even in commentary. We sometimes get columns from people who have a particular gripe with a particular organization or even a person within an agency. We rarely publish those. Anything that cries out for a response from the other side is a problem for us, unless it is a topic of such broad discussion that each side’s views are well known.

• Length is an issue, even on the internet. Most people don’t have time to read more than 600 to 800 words. Community Voices are supposed to be essays on issues, not point-by-point litigation of topics or white papers.

• No orchestrated campaigns. Commentary must not have been published elsewhere. We don’t want to get caught in orchestrated lobbying campaigns so with few exceptions we don’t print op-eds that have been submitted or published in other publications, including other websites or circulated heavily on social media.

• We welcome your feedback — or even push back — on Civil Beat stories and columns. Sometimes subjects of our news stories and opinion pieces call to complain about our reporting. If we disagree that we’ve made a factual error, we generally invite them to submit a Community Voice expanding on or clarifying their position. However, we won’t allow the piece to misconstrue our reporting.

We also don’t want the Community Voices section to become a dumping ground for column after column on the same issue. Sometimes as a news event or political issue is playing out we’ll get numerous submissions, many of which just repeat the same points of view. In that situation, we tend to limit the Voices we run to just a few that fairly represent divergent opinions.

Chad Blair is our politics editor and puts together the Community Voices. He is happy to work with you on your piece so that it will meet our guidelines and tests for accuracy and fairness. We don’t have the capacity to fact check every piece, but you will be asked to provide documentation of factual assertions if necessary.

Chad often runs these pieces by the other editors, including me, and we sometimes decide that the submission isn’t something we want to print. That almost always is because something in the column would, out of fairness, require a call to the person, business, agency or organization in question to see what they have to say about it.

Community Voices have become an important part of Civil Beat. They are sometimes the most popular story on the site. They get thousands of page views, are shared widely on social media and draw dozens of comments.

So please keep those cards and letters coming, folks.

Editor’s Note: Readers often wonder about the reporting and editing process and other news practices. We think it’s important to explain our decisions and do so from time to time in our ongoing series called “Behind The Story.”