Re: [AGA-sc] Forums and questions

I only brought up the forums regarding my personal involvement, but while we're on the subject the broader subject -- I look at it in terms of markets, what there is a demand for. A number of folks, folks very involved in the hobby, urged us to have forums, repeatedly and for a long time. I supported the effort for that reason. I expected it to be more active for that reason. Most of those folks spoke well but didn't come to the dance -- actually they were busy dancing other places like APC. We are basically competing, in a sense poorly, with the others. I compare it to the books sales. We don't try to compete with books sellers; we just try to fill a hole -- provide those books that a person can't find anywhere else. The forums are like a book store with no hard-to-find books.

I don't think AGA needs to do more if more is what others are already doing very well. The conventions, TAG, the contest, the DVDs -- these things aren't likely to happen without AGA producing them, and they are things for which there is a clear if parochial demand and for which we have (more or less) specific folks that undertake the tasks involved. Perhaps, the market defines AGA -- determines what actions can succeed if we apply AGA resources and labor. I don't see anything wrong with that.

When we say we , as ome of us sometimes do, AGA should be doing more, what more? What other demand(s) needs to be filled by the AGA? And as Karen points out, who will do the more? Imo, this is the form of a real idea, such and such specific persons should do such and such specific tasks to accomplish this or that particular thing. The very general stuff, AGA should help clubs (how? who knows?), AGA should change it's mission (to what end? who knows?), isn't really productive. Show me something for which there is a demand not being met in the community and someone in AGA to do some specific tasks to meet that demand by using AGA resources, that's something real we can deal with. When AGA approaches things that way, it usually does very well -- the convention, TAG, bookstore and DVDs are great examples. Sometimes, although it approaches things that way, it does not turn out so well, such as the forums -- in which case the demand and supply workers/doers turned out to be lacking --we thought we had figured those things correctly, but we overestimated. We approached it sensibly and gave it a good shot. But it turns out to be meeting very little demand and has very few folks actively working on it.

From: Karen Randall <karenran@verizon.net>
To: Aquatic Gardeners Association Board <aga-sc@thekrib.com>
Sent: Friday, December 5, 2008 6:20:33 PM
Subject: Re: [AGA-sc] Forums and questions

OTOH, do we need redefining? We continue to do two important things that no
one else does... TAG and the convention, and we also host the biggest
web-based Aquascaping contest out there. Not too shabby. I'm not saying
that it wouldn't be nice to do more if we had more "doers". But for the
people we have, I think those are pretty impressive accomplishments.

Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: aga-sc-bounces@thekrib.com [mailto:aga-sc-bounces@thekrib.com] On
Behalf Of Erik Olson
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 4:38 PM
To: Aquatic Gardeners Association Board
Subject: Re: [AGA-sc] Forums and questions

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Cheryl Rogers wrote:

> The point of the AGA forum was to build a sense of community. I don't know
whether it has been
> successful in this regard.

Not particularly so, but I'm not sure how we expected to do this.

I think where the forum has been most helpful is in how it has allowed us
to extend what would normally be static content to include feedback from
others. The "[discuss]" option added to the main website comes to mind.

> I think the AGA needs help redefining itself instead of reacting to other
influences.

Yep. Trying to compete with things like APC or Amazon.com has never
worked well.

- Erik