Reply To: Dedicated JoCo Cruise Crazy Shadow Cruise website
@SapphireMind I’ll reply once more, but my experience of these forums is very different from others’, and other people did all the cruise planning this year, so I’m reaching the point where my feedback isn’t as helpful as anyone else’s would be.
Instead of being “JoCo Cruise stuff here” It would be “Special dining/fixed seating” “Games” “concerts” “book clubs” “knitters” “new monkeys” “Child free” “parents” “minions” etc. it would encourage people to interact in their subgroup throughout the year, which will help people get to “know” each other better before even setting foot on the ship.
This is of limited use to me personally, so I’ll defer to those for whom this would be beneficial.
I got reprimanded for too much stuff on the wiki – that was enough to kill my enthusiasm for a while.
Just for the record, we’ve had some discussions with the wiki folks before, and I recall trying to grease the waters a few times. The concern from the wiki folks has historically been around organization rather than quantity, though I’m not sure about your specific case (and regardless of the reason, I don’t want people to be reprimanded for trying to help). This might go away if we dedicated some attention to organizing the wiki.
But we would need buy-in, and I think that’s not impossible.
From what I’ve seen, the Home Office has been very, very receptive to suggestions from cruise people. What I really mean is buy-in from users, not the Home Office. This website won’t be useful until we’ve got a critical mass of people there. How do we convince people to migrate?
There’s a huge group that is cruising, and while the FB page I think should still be there for socializing and sharing, it’s not easy to plan things on there.
But if people are already congregating and socializing in some centralized location, they’re going to do their planning wherever they’re talking. Are we going to have to cut in on those discussions and say, hey, stop talking about this here on Facebook, let’s move this discussion to a different site (and lose the conversation history, etc.)?
There was no a capella group this year. colleenky usually arranges the music, but I bet there are tons of other monkeys who could do it too, and might have been interested if they had realized there was no one else to do it.
I can sorta see how a new website would make it easier to join up with groups that exist already, but I’m not clear on how it’ll make it easier to tell that a group doesn’t exist and remind people to create it. I’m not saying I’m a typical user here, but I can’t picture how that would work.
There are a lot of the shadow cruise events (like speed meeting) that people know they want to do next year, and now they can have a dedicated forum and wiki section just for their purposes of developing their idea.
Well… yes, but they also have dedicated forum threads and wiki pages today. I agree it might be useful to subdivide those threads a little more, but is there really so much going on that any one of these events needs its own subsection of a site? (That’s a legitimate question, as I haven’t been involved in organizing any Shadow Cruise events.)
I guess to stretch it a little, I could see having different threads for gauging enthusiasm, brainstorming, actual planning/organization, and post-mortem — but those are also generally relevant at different chronological points, so there wouldn’t be more than one or two active threads at a time.
Thoughts from event-runners?
Especially since we’ll be on the same ship, we will know what the timing of things will be (not the official performance, but we can make educated guesses) and figure out how we can schedule ourselves to make best use of our time and space, without waiting until the end, or relying on the home office to do it all for us.
This seems like a good idea in general, but it’s still not clear to me that this wouldn’t be possible by improving the forums or something, or having threads specifically to discuss scheduling.
Doing something like this, we could actually potentially print out a guide to shadow cruise events for new monkeys (returning monkeys too 🙂 ) so people can know what to look for and how to find what they want.
In my mind, this is equivalent to “everyone update CruiseMonkey ahead of time and someone handles the data entry/creating a (physical?) guide”. Is there more to this I’m missing?
Oh, and if you would like to be the Lord of the Forums on the new site, you can do that too – I am totally serious in that I don’t care who does it, just that it gets done.
Heh, appreciate the offer, but let me re-insinuate myself into this forum’s good graces first 🙂
Let me wrap up by reiterating: I can see the benefits, honestly I can, but everyone still needs to convince me that this is worth what I believe would be an immense amount of effort, as opposed to pouring that effort into improving what we’ve got.
I’d really like to hear from others, though.