Proposal P13.02.03

P13.02.03 A proposal for increased club visibility
Author: Gabriel Weckesser
Proposal:
There are numerous reasons for the dwindling of the ASR organization {lack of TV show, changing lifestyles, etc.) and I won't rehash them. However it is my opinion that the biggest core issue is deeper than all of these, and it is this: INVISIBILITY. Trying to explain what ASR is to an acquaintance is hard enough. Explaining where ASR lives, and where someone can go to see what it is, is even less clear.

Would you send such a person to a Yahoo group? To the BOI wiki? Would you show them your email box? All of the above can show them only a portion of the whole. And none of them, to be completely frank, are all that aesthetically welcoming. None would answer the questions of a potential fan (someone who wants to read what we've written) or a potential writer.

As such, I propose that a 3-5 person commission (heretofore to be known as "The Commish") be formed to explore the technical feasibility of creating a website to house the "fruit" of ASR, i.e. the actual writings, and return the findings for a yes/no vote during a special RT session before the end of this calendar year .

This website, as I see it, would encompass but not be limited to the following requirements:

1) The home page would highlight the recent posts of the organization.

2) The navigation (menu tree) of the site would categorize all the posts according to the requisite Units and Fleets.

3) The site would make it as easy as possible for writers to submit their posts, whether it be via:
a) the site being set up to accept the posts from the Yahoo Group email deployments and automatically convert it into its own page, filtering/sorting it into the correct category, or,
b) Have the initial submission of the post be directly on the site itself, and then have the site be the one that would forward the post on to both the unit's Yahoo group and the ASR group.

4) The site would have all the needed social media implementation to provide "one-click" submission of a person's post to their Facebook (or other) site if desired.

5) The site, while still providing the links needed for current organization writers, would be specifically geared to welcome and guide those who are interested in joining.

And above all it would need to be appealing to look at and easy to use - otherwise our visitors would likely go back to watching their cat GIFs, reading their failblogs, or playing their "Doctor Who"-themed Angry Birds (actually, I'd be willing to play that last one).

Rationale:
Now that I've made my proposal, allow me to preemptively answer some questions.

Q) Why do we need a new website? What's wrong with the BOI wiki?

A) There is nothing wrong with the wiki, but its use (when used at all) is as a tool for writers. There may have even been attempts to make it new-person friendly, but that had never been its purpose. And in all honesty, making changes to a wiki page requires looking at code-view, which is not a skill set of the average writer. Whether this would mean supplanting the wiki entirely, or pulling just the pertinent info onto the new site and linking back to the wiki as "the library" would be a decision of the commish.

Q) If the website would now be the go-to place for all the club's posts, would that mean that we'd be moving away from the Yahoo groups?

A) That would be a decision for the special session RT vote based on the findings of the commish. Perhaps the two systems would work in tandem for the foreseeable future, perhaps the new posts would only be housed on the website and the archived posts on Yahoo, or perhaps all the archives of currently open units would be imported to the site. It depends on what can technically be done, and what we, as an organization, are willing to do.

Q) Isn't moving to a website-based format a drastic change?

A) Not at all, in fact there's historical precedent. When I (and many of us) first joined ASR, it was during the Newsgroups era. (Jeff Jenkins can provide history that predates that.) But over time, and as technology advanced, the newsgroups ceased to be the "home" of ASR in favor of the Yahoo Groups. Is it possible to even access newsgroups anymore? Or more to the point, does anyone even use Yahoo Groups anymore? Or to further push the point, is anyone finding us via the Yahoo Groups?

I believe it is time for the paradigm of what ASR is to shift to a website based home. If the only people who ever read my posts are a) the ones who receive my group email, and b) my longsuffering wife, then no one will be able to appreciate my goofy sense of humor or critique my slipshod scifi writing (in hopes of getting me to do better).

But imagine our writing being indexed by Google - or being able to easily tweet out "Hey I just wrote this funny Star Trek post" with a link so your friends can read it if they choose.