Member's Input Area - Discussion of Group Issues

[Derek]

We've already got far more members here than I had expected, and very few rules. I, for one, want to keep the rules to a minimum, but we do need to have a mechanism (or multiple mechanisms) for choosing the books we want to read.

If it's left up to the moderators to choose...well, I'm not likely to pull my weight! Part of the reason I'm here is for you people to tell me what I've missed :-)

As noted by one member, "If you select books by polls, the results are in the hands of the majority of people who think 'oh, I might want to read that'. And then they don't." Not only that, but quite a few people, in my experience, vote because they don't want to see certain books in the group discussion.

However, I don't know a better way to get a consensus. It's all very well to suggest that members should promote the books they want to read, and be willing to lead that discussion themselves, but (a) how do we prioritize that? (personally, I'm not interested in more than one group read/month here) and (b) how do we ensure that, having chosen a book to read, we actually have participants in the discussion?

[Traveller]

Derek, I was going to suggest that books narrowly missed in polls, will still get at the very least a thread of it's own in the SIDEREADS folder, or, come up for discussion at some later point in time.

For example, with our current poll, City of Saints and Madmen and The New Weird is running pretty much head-to-head. So, I was thinking of making the 'winner' the 'main' discussion for March, and then we could always have the 'runner-up' either as a full discussion later, or a 'Sidereads' discussion with its own thread there.

[Derek]

Well, we already have 37 books on the shelf. There will certainly be more books that many of us want to discuss before we get through all of those. So, we still need some mechanism to prioritize our reads. And I'm OK with the idea that polls aren't necessarily the solution.

[Traveller]

Please see my PM. :)

[Traveller]

There's already a folder and a thread for people to suggest books in - plus i have added many of the books that people mentioned in the "My interesting books thread", to the bookshelf with no dates attached, so that we'll remember to keep them in mind for potential future discussions.

In addition, members are urged to make use of the "Buddy reads/sidereads" folder.

I imagine that there will indeed be books that neither of the mods want to lead, or for which we'd want to bring an "outside" person in, or that one of our members might want to lead, for which that member might want to require an entire folder with x amount of subfolders. ...but that will still have to be set up at least minimally, by a mod, otherwise we're going to end up having loose folders all over the place.

Well, how about we just start off with things slowly - let's go with what we have for now and maybe in a few weeks time, we can start bringing in discussions completely led by "other" people, if there is indeed someone that we know and trust to take the discussion to completion. I do want to avoid a situation like with Kraken - the person initiating the discussion must be motivated to do the whole thing properly. :) I had envisaged this all happening more organically, - I don't feel one can force this kind of thing. You have to go with your group's feeling, otherwise you end up with empty walls. ;)

That we need a thread for group <--> moderator feedback, and a long-term discussion schedule thread - yes of course. We did have that previously, but Rome wasn't built in a day. Please let's not rush into things before we need to. Our Mievillians discussions are not even concluded yet. There's nothing wrong with having a transition period. Let folks all come in the front door and get their bearings and -then- we build up steam. That fair?