chrish wrote:I think this is a case of if it aint broke don't fix it!
It's not broken, and the weakest link is up to it's task and strong enough: (namely me
) The only thing which concerns me is that we need to give tmc the power-boost it needs. I think this could be done by: first of all: patience (as we don't want it to be just for everybody), second: endurance (a bit of a Zen-alike attitude: enjoy what we do, while we do it the best we can... and the good (as far as they aren't present at the moment) things will follow automatically), and third: more newbies, which means People who are interested in coffee (with the restriction that they are friendly too), but do not know that much about it...
And the last point especially is crucial, as we don't want to be a bunch of people agreeing with each other all the time. We need new flesh as some sort of motor to keep things going... (as you can see on the two best visited sites about coffee in the world: alt.coffee and cg (created/owned and screwed up by my good friend mp
... it's the 'newbies' who give... by putting aside their ego's and really wanting to learn something... In the mean time giving the 'seniors' the oportunity to 'really' help somebody - while disagreeing with the other 'experts' at the same time...)
Michel
P.S. To stay in tune with the original poster, I think we need to put more weight to roasting too. It's a topic covered nowhere very good (not even in the homeroast mailinglist from Tom - Sweet Maria's - although there's a lot of info to be found there and people really know what they are talking about... But not being an open forum (and a forum visited by experts only), I think TMC can develop (over the months/years) to become thé site about home-roasting and/or roasting in general...).
P.S.S. We need to take a look at our weak points (not enough members... but that's mainly due to the fact we don't want goofball's disturbing the place, which is a strong point in itselve... imho) and our strong points (a lot of expertise on roasting and of course our kindness and friendship...). Furthermore/concluding: we need to eliminate our weak points (which means opening up the site, or at least open some forums - btw, is creating a guest forum a possibility Phil?-) and strengthen our strong points (more coffee-reviews - I'll start myselve filling in the roasting-forms next sunday - more roasting reviews in general, also about the hardware 'as we need to cover the whole procedure'... So, More content and less agreeing (and even if we agree, which we most of the times do, we need to keep the 'chatting' going on, and explore our imagination, trials and errors, to the far most point...).
To conclude: We need a 'devil' or a 'lamb' in the house...
(preferably more than one...) - as a devil or a lamb (which is necessary in any 'company' too function well - giving ideas, tighten friendships, explore new horizons aso-) is just as important as the manager, or the toilet-madam to make things work and worthwhile in the long term...