Re: GWA Awards, newsletters

**D* G* <g*@gmail.com>**

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Amy Stewart <amy@amystewart.com> wrote:

> This is a great discussion.  A few thoughts:
>

You're right Amy  - it is a great discussion...

Lois - less than 2% of the millions of people who come to my network are on
dialup.   And I regularly get notes asking me to "dumb down" the information
for them (like I'm going to eliminate pictures or videos or make the ebooks
smaller) ;-) - but at some point, you have to move forward.   If you still
have dialup in North America, it's out of choice - not out of a ready
solution.  I ran my network for 18 months using a Satellite hookup that
provided almost-dsl speeds (having moved down the road I can now reach the
wi-fi tower on the mainland).  Satellites reach to all everywhere you can
see sky. :-)

Now, if a "writer" in the electronic age decides they don't want or can't
afford satellite or other fast connection, my very politically incorrect
view is that this is their choice but I see no need to reduce the advantages
of the Net for the other members who are in the majority.

Want to read it offline - feel free to print it out.  Individuals who want
this off-net pleasure can easily shoulder the cost of printing out 28 pages
rather than the group.

Re newsletter: cost advantages aside - the issue isn't whether we have a
newsletter - it's "how" and "what" we communicate.  For example, want to
make it fast and easy - set it up on a blog.  Want to limit access - use
software such as amember.  Want to do it in a newsletter - use aweber (for a
lot of technical reasons, mass email should not be sent from your own
servers) and set up auto-responder courses on all manner of subjects
delivered via email.

Newsletters are "old thinking" when we needed to control information from
the center - when we needed to mass-distribute and this was the easiest way
to do it.  The Net changes all that.  What we need now is timely data-flow
rather than "newsletter"   It might be blog - or it might be Wave, or next
month's innovation or even something as boring as a listserv :-) or more
up-to-date as a Ning community. But rather than newsletter - think
information flow and how to do that.  Move forward.

Amy - the advertising thing is indeed a puzzlement.  When we had the
nursery, I used to include all the competitors greenhouses and local
restaurants etc on the map-side of the flyer.  Give the 100K or so we'd send
out a reason to come out to the country and make a day of it.  We'd get "our
share" of that and it worked really well.  What you're talking about is
advertise to float the boat a little higher and we'll all win if we promote
individual projects (if I understand and have summarized it properly)  In
theory, I'd agree with you - and social networking is a working proof of
this.

I see the networking many folks are doing as accomplishing exactly that -
floating individual boats - pushing books out there that promote others and
you're right - when you get to the front page of Amazon - it helps me as
well (helps all of us). The more publicity that's out there about gardening
- the better we all do.  So yes, doing it is a great idea.

The question is whether we ask an organization such as GWA to do it for us.
This opens up all manner of can-of-worms time stuff and institutionalizes a
process that will be changing regularly as the Net changes.  Promote
gardening? Sure.  Promote garden writers as a group? Sure.  Although I
confess I don't even see them doing either of these two things because of
the vast amounts of money national campaigns take.   This may be an
interesting project for the regional groups to take on - promoting gardening
within their individual regions (with some kind of support from the center
but control at the regional level)  Give each region 5K for regional garden
promotion and let them at it kind-of-thing.  But given that GWA is
controlled from the center and not from the regions, this isn't likely going
to happen either.

I guess it comes down to how you see GWA and what you see the role of a this
kind of organization.  For the majority of members - it's social networking
and a good tax-deductible holiday once a year. :-)

And that indeed comes down to my crunch question - define the role of GWA in
the modern tech-writing world and you can answer most of the above issues.

Doug

-- 
Doug Green
Editor-in-Chief,
SGF Publishing
http://www.simplegiftsfarm.com
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