[jcoyier]

Finding the topics you want will be of high interest to me in using this site. I am interested in networking with others that may have interest in or experience with building hang glider aircraft. I have an Easy Riser I intend to repair and get back into the air and could use a forum titled "Rigid Kits or Projects" I suppose there are about 4-5 million ideas for forum titles and there would need to be some judgement about the priority of creating more so just take this as another suggestion. One of the more immediate interests to me is the instructional/learning aspects of flying hang gliders. It would be great to have some way to create something like I've seen in other forums where users submit questions about flying and experienced pilots then are free to send their response in an effort to help with the problem encountered. The user then would be allowed to rate the input as to whether it helped them or not and thus build a score for the responder so that others could see these scores and treat responses with the associated credibility.

[Bill Cummings]

Sounds like a good idea.

[Bob Kuczewski]

We can do some of those things using the current forum in a more informal and unstructured way. Each topic can be defined in any way that we want to use it. For example, you could start a topic titled "Rigid Kits or Projects" and outline what you think it should contain in the first post.

Normally the first post to a topic is a good place to "set the tone" and even define some goals and rules for the discussion. For example, Joe Faust has been working on the history section, and he's been starting a topic for each person he wants to have remembered. He also maintains a "master topic" which has links to all the other topics. So that's one way to set it up.

Additionally, this forum software supports multiple levels of "subforums". So if a topic gets big enough to need its own subforum we can do that. We can even subdivide that subforum into sub-subforums and so on. For example, we have a subforum which holds all of the Chapter sub-subforums. If you go to each Chapter's forum, you'll see that they can choose their own styles to reflect their club's colors and logo. We can do that with every forum or sub-forum. So we have a lot of flexibility within the current structure.

With regard to projects, we've started an on-line training manual, but so far Bill has been the only major contributor. I was supposed to be helping, but I have to apologize that I haven't gotten very far. But those are the kinds of things that we can do if you have an interest. Just let me know.

Finally, so far, most everything has been done inside the forum (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail). But if we have a pressing need for some other kind of tool, I can invest some time to add it. I've been thinking that a Wiki would be a good addition, but I just haven't found the time to install one yet. If you try working with the forum and find that it's really not up to the task, please let me know and I can increase the priority on adding other software. At this point, my big concern is whether there will be enough participants to make it successful. So the best thing you can do is post and post and post. Please help grow the site ... and the software will follow.

Thanks again for joining us, and please contact me any time if I can be of help!!