Haha, how did this ancient thread get found? Maybe jpearce4 is a professional online archaeologist?
In retrospect I should have created a FB group for the Orchid Society of Southern California. Or maybe a FB group for the Orchid Society of California. Or perhaps a FB group for the Epiphyte Society of America!? It's hard to guess the optimal level of specificity.
I ended up creating a general plant FB group for people in my area. It's got around 2k members and several of the plant friends I've had for many years participate. There are a couple annoying exceptions who refuse to join FB. I suspect they fear being found by crazy exes. But it's not like my recalcitrant friends would have to use their real names!
Sadly, now it seems like more and more of the cool plant kids just post on Instagram. Problem is that IG doesn't have a group function.
Really the main issue is adaptability. One of my fav examples is the online nursery
Mountain Orchids. The owner primarily sells Begonias, heh, which clearly wasn't his original objective. But evidently he started selling more and more Begonias. Not that there was less demand for orchids... it was probably that there were more than enough online nurseries selling orchids, such as Andy's Orchids.
I remember back in the day visiting Andy's. His workers would regularly remove the "weeds" from the mounts and throw them away. I'd joke with Andy that I'd be happy to help him "weed" for free, since his "weeds" were some of my fav fav plants... ferns, Gesneriads, Peperomias, Begonias and so on. Eventually he started selling more and more of his "weeds". Now I wouldn't be surprised if 20% of the plants he sells at his nursery are non-orchids.
In terms of forums... the three main ones I visit with any regularity are PalmTalk, Agaveville and Tropical Fruit Forum. To be clear, I'm not a big fan of palms, but the forum has
a category for non-palms that has decent participation. And fortunately Agaveville isn't dedicated to just Agaves, which I'm not a big fan of either.
Almost a decade ago I joined a forum dedicated to epiphytic ant plants.
I completely failed to persuade them to broaden the focus to epiphytes in general. They were so confident that there was enough interest in epiphytic ant plants to generate decent participation. Nope.
What about the Orchid Board? I think that, prior to FB, I was regularly participating in like maybe three or four orchid forums? Ended up getting banned from one, and another went extinct...
Way too many admins of FB groups are way too fast to ban people, but then those banished people end up creating their own groups, because it's the easiest thing to do. So now I can't even keep track of how many "local" and/or "outdoor" orchid FB groups I'm in. But if I'm going to post something about orchids I usually just do so in my own general plant group.
For me personally, I guess the Orchid Board would be more useful if it broadened the focus to include orchid companions. Who among us doesn't have at least 1 Hoya? Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if I now have more Hoyas than orchids. Ok, I guess that I'd be a little surprised. Maybe I have more aroids than orchids?
Useful for
me vs useful for
us... and which "us"? Perhaps most of the "here us" are happy enough with the status quo. But I'm sure that the "not here us" represents a much larger group.
It's incredibly easy to create polls in FB groups, but I doubt that there's a single one that's a democracy. Therefore, democracy is only better than dictatorships when leaving the group is very difficult?
As far as I can tell, the best way to make group decisions is to use donations. If the status quo side donates more money to the Orchid Board, then no pivot.
Of course in theory I should donate to the OB anyways, given that it's useful having access to my old threads. It's pretty sad that my threads on the extinct orchid forum are lost like tears in rain. But I don't donate because I gamble that the ads will keep the OB alive. It's not the safest bet though so I'd be happy for a good excuse to donate.
Flickr for Orchid Society Websites?
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