Tiptoes is a small general-interest blog. It covers the kinds of decisions people make a handful of times in their lives and usually make without much help: hiring a contractor, working out what a dental procedure actually involves, deciding whether a symptom is worth a phone call, looking after an animal, sorting out a lease, or keeping a volunteer group going. The subjects have little to do with one another. What they share is that a reader normally arrives at them cold, with one specific question, and wants a plain answer and has little use for a clever one.
The site is edited by Ryan Pierre, who writes most of what appears on it now. Older posts carry other bylines and are left as they were published. Nobody writing here is a doctor, a lawyer, a tradesperson or a financial adviser, and nothing on the site is professional advice. A post describing a procedure is describing what the procedure involves, not recommending that anyone have it.
How a post gets written
Posts usually begin with a question that keeps coming up, often one a reader has asked, sometimes one that turned out to be surprisingly hard to find a straight answer to. The research behind them is ordinary: published sources, official guidance where it exists, and, where a subject is genuinely technical, what the people who do the work for a living have written down about it. Where a figure is disputed or the evidence is thin, the post says so.
Posts are updated when something in them stops being true. They are not rewritten to chase a ranking and not deleted for being old, which means some of the older material reads as though it were written a while ago, because it was.
The section on volunteer communities
The pages collected at how volunteer communities actually work are different in shape from the rest of the site. They set out what the research shows about groups that run on goodwill: why newcomers drift away before they ever finish anything, how a group decides things when nobody is in charge, what determines who can actually attend an event.
That section came out of a plain observation. A great deal has been measured about volunteer organisations, particularly open source software projects, which keep unusually complete public records, and almost none of it reaches the community gardens, sports clubs, mutual aid networks and neighbourhood associations it applies to just as well. Those pages are longer than the rest of the site and name their sources, because the claims in them are the sort a reader should be able to check.
Corrections and getting in touch
Corrections are welcome and are made quickly. If something here is wrong, out of date, or missing a piece of context that changes the meaning, the contact form is the fastest way to say so, and the fix is made to the post itself.
Posts sometimes link out to businesses and organisations whose work is relevant to what is being described. The site is written in English for a mainly Canadian readership, part of which is French-speaking, and a small number of French-language resources are linked from it for that reason, among them aide dissertation and payer pour faire ses devoirs, both aimed at students.