I want to open a thread asking for constructive suggestions and ideas to improve or expand Ganoskin and the Orchid Forum.
For instance, some folks recently suggested putting together a book highlighting the best of Orchid.
Please do your best to be concise and constructive.
I’ve been an Orchid member from the early days and have witnessed the forum grow and evolve over the past decades. Personally, I think this is a great phase of Orchid, where members are incredibly wise, talented, patient, kind and supportive. There are hardly any snarky comments like what happens in many other forums.
A forum is always evolving. Here’s a place to put your suggestions and ideas.
I’ll start with one idea. Way back in the early days of Ganoskin/Orchid there were member meetups at places like the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. I thought they were really fun and a chance to actually meet folks. Obviously, there’s no way to get everyone together face to face, but it is possible to create regional meetups. Do you have any interest in that idea?
Maybe a more formal way to figure who might be nearby. Obviously this would be optional as some of us may not want our location made public. I would love to get together with other “Orchidians” nearby. I am also a member of the Syracuse Gem and Mineral Society. They, and other gem clubs hold shows all around the country. We could get together at their show locations and even get a chance to see and buy lapidary material from the maker in some cases. Just a thought, I am sure that I will have more…Rob
I have found this site to be a remarkably friendly, informative and useful forum.
I would love to have a way to apply for mentorship where someone with much more experience would work with me privately for a period of time on a project, or to review my processes and improve the small details of my work.
I would also love any way to connect with other folks in the real world. I’m in Portland Oregon and don’t know how to find other folks offline to meet concerning silver/gold smithing.
I read a lot of comments referring to “best practices” (especially when talking about health and safety) and then talking about local regulations. Obviously one has to adhere to local regulations, but that is not the same thing as “best practice.” Ganoksin is probably the world’s largest single collection of metalsmiths and jewelry makers. I would think that we are in a better position to determine “best practices” in our areas of endeavor than anyone else in the world. If we established a repository of “best practices,” eventually local regulatory bodies would start using them, instead of inventing their own. Not only that, but it would be a great resource for our members.
That would be great, but what a job! There are literally hundreds of thousands of messages, and to make the job even more daunting quite often the body of the posts differ from the Subject description.
It would be a monumental job just to sort through and bundle posts for a downloadable file, let alone a printed book.
On the other hand, an intrepid editor could just select one topic at a time.
i love to leave “tips and tricks”…!…things not ysually found in books…things that people do without thinking…but that i dont think about…
for example…i kept burning my setters shellac…when looking for instructions, the books all said “be sure not to burn the shelkac…if it gets too hot it will bubble and become brittle…”
i have a little torch…i kept burning the shellac…
one day while i was in San Francisco, taking a setting class at The Revere Academy, the instructor picked up his little torch to warm up the shellac…he only lit the propane side…but not the oxygen side…light bulb moment!…oxygen makes the flame hotter…i needed a less hot flame…
Hello JeffG and All,
Since I was the one to propose the book, I expect to see my name in the acknowledgements (LOL) and I offer my services as a copy editor and/or reviewer if anyone is brave enough to write the book!
Another idea which requires an editor or some kind of mechanism for separating chat and transient request for info and daily comments from stuff that is useful to many going forward. Some forums use stickies and other places to put essential content. If someone edited the forum daily or if posts had an identifier on them which allowed filtering, it would be possible to isolate the pithiest content, or some such. Just thinking out loud here. There are committees which edit and organize open source software, so there must be some way that committees can do this stuff, if there’s enough interest.
-royjohn
What do you think about adding in an “events” section to the forum? In the US, pretty much every region has a jewelry guild, club, school, makerspace and other kinds of organizations. Most of those organizations have events. I don’t know about outside the US, but I’ll bet it’s similar.
For instance, on Sept. 29 & 30 SNAG is hosting an online African Jewelry Symposium. The Seattle Metals Guild is hosting their annual symposium on Oct. 7th. Metalwerx, the jewelry school outside of Boston, is hosting their 25th anniversary celebration in a local museum on Oct. 27th.
I’m imagining this section would be a part of the Orchid Forum where members could post info about local jewelry events. This could also be a way that regional Orchid members potentially connect with each other.
I was looking at the discourse website, and I think there is the ability to add tags to posts. You can also automatically tag things based on keywords in the post. All of this has to be set up on the backend, of course but it could be a nice way to search through topics for people, arriving to the site and wanting to take profit from other peoples previous contributions.
Everyone so far has made some very good suggestions.
I would just like to start with where we are… if there were a way to categorize the forums to make navigation to them easier it could be an easy start. For example, there were forums of torches, gases, and oxygen concentrators… other forums were about annealing, soldering problems and fluxes. and gemology… If thre were a way to subcategorize these topics under “torches”, “solldering” and “annealing”. “gemology” etc. with a search box, that brought up categories it could help for questions directly related to a given topic. Maybe I just don’t know how to use your searches, but I;m just throwing out as a suggestion to make the website more user friendly.,
