As was discussed during the Blue Feather known-world meeting this past Pennsic and the announced on the website shortly after, some new additions to the Blue Feather online presence are in the works. The goal is to make collaborating online easier for our Blue Feather family so that we might better keep in touch when are not face to face, and offer a place for our new members to join in.

I am happy to announce that an important part of this goal is now complete: the Clan Blue Feather Known World Forums are online

You can access them via the “forum” link on the website: www.bluefeather.org

My goals in implementing this forums are the following:

Bring together our online communities: Much as the new website was redesigned to consolidate the many and varied blue feather “homepages” previously on the web into one central, easy to remember, place (bluefeather.org). The new forum is there to do the same with our discussions; bring together the varying discussions taking place in many smaller, fractured communities. Some of these communities have fallen into disuse, or have a scope so narrow that they are unknown. With one centrally-located, well-organized forum, broad enough to cover all topics of discussion, we have a place where we can all gather online, and get a true sense of the scope and people of our community.

Better organized online discussions: Email lists and free groups such as Yahoo or Google have some inherent problems that can make browsing, searching for, and participating in discussions difficult. The biggest of these is that messages are organized chronologically, with no regard to the topics of each individual message. Our forum uses phpBB a popular forum software that organizes our discussions into easy to follow topics and threads. This way, you can easily browse all the discussions going on, but also follow specific ones and be notified of replies via email. More robust search options also make it easier to see if a discussion is already underway, and join in. Image and file attachments, polls, private messaging, automatic archiving, and member profiles are just some of the many features that hosting our own forum offers. If you have used webforums before, chances are you’ll be familiar with ours.

Encourage a living online presence: A newcomer who happens upon a sparsely populated, outdated or rarely used blue-feather discussion board may wrongly assume that the Clan is dead. With one central forum my hope is that we can gather ALL of our members to discuss clan issues as broad as our yearly encampment planning, to historical research, to arts and sciences, to new events and more! (indeed, categories for the above topics have already been established) Not only can these discussions help generate content for the webpage (event announcements, images for our upcoming new galleries, etc.) more importantly it shows prospective members (and the world at large) that we as a Clan are alive and well.

So it is in this spirit that I encourage you all to do two things.

First and foremost, sign up for the forums by clicking the “register” link in the top left and participate! A great place to start is the “Introduce yourself” topic under the “General Discussion” forum.

Secondly, if you know of any existing Blue Feather related message boards, email lists, yahoo, Google groups or the like please encourage their membership to do the same! Post a link to bluefeather.org/forum or just forward this email along!

A quick note: Thanks very much to Carson, whose help was integral in implementing these forums, and to Joshua for helping organize them.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to meeting many new folks on our forum.