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Hal,
First, in terms of any commentary of ownership/donations/etc. I've never really thought about "ownership" in terms of financial ownership, nor do I think its really a question. You pay the bills, you put in the organization to support the board - essentially, you run the place, it's your house. In terms of conceptual ownership, I think snowy sums up my basic feelings, and I doubt very seriously that you'd take any distinction with her point - developing a sense of community, and thus a certain feeling of communal ownership seems to be something you've been pushing since I've been on the boards.
In terms of direction, it seems to me that a useful question is whether a pure "discussion" board will ever be an entity which substantially drives up more traffic over a sustained period of time. I personally feel that if tfp is going to become a powerhouse, and if its not going to be a centrally themed board...the question I keep returning it is whether or not tfp can be a content-based resource board across a diverse set of genres, and whether tfp can compete with established boards that already serve this purpose. The function I see where tfp could be unique in this regards is the ability to facilitate cross-genre interaction and cross-germination of concepts and interactions. It seems to me that we have a diverse set of members, many of whom have specialization in their knowledge sets. Would it be possible to give members a certain amount of conceptual ownership over some subsets of the board, where they could post personalized content which might serve as a resource. For instance, I know that we've got fly, divagirl, quadro and many more who have specialized knowledge of music theory, recording equipment, musical instrumentation, and the like. What if they had a section, perhaps similar to the journals, but not really for "blogging" in the community - but where they could post tightly-controlled resources on instruments, home recording equipment and techniques, reviews, etc. Perhaps solicit content from experts in the field, etc - that would enable other members to record, play, learn etc. That type of content might appeal to others across the net, and serve to drive them to tfp. The same could be said for roach in philosophy/economics, maybe dc_dux in politics, etc. I don't know if we have members with a critical mass of knowledge and drive to make such a thing reality, but I just don't see how "drive up traffic" can be a primary goal. That seems secondary to me. The first goal seems to be a necessary "what role can tfp fill that would naturally drive up traffic." I simply don't see how tfp can function as it currently does, and at the same time drive up traffic. I think the current membership pretty much fits what tfp currently does, and has to come to this state naturally. I think in the hay-day of tfp, there was more creativity / content-generation - in terms of original photography, and in particular in terms of creative exhibitionism / member sharing / critique of content. I just don't see that happening as much these days.
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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style
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