The Orchid Source - Orchid Forum

Most orchid societies have AOS magazines so there would be no need to distribute the articles to the societies...no need to worry about the original articles being damaged...and no need to worry about shipping costs.

Work load per society...well...I wouldn't assign articles to societies. Not all articles are equally important so I would just let the societies decide which articles they wanted to digitize. Somebody's more likely to digitize an article covering a topic that they are interested in. People could look over a webpage containing a list of articles that had already been selected, e-mail me the articles they wanted to digitize and I would then add them to that list.

Hardware/software...people could type up the article in Notepad, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, in their e-mail...pretty much any non-apple word processing program. Then they could e-mail me the document or I could create a web form for them to use to submit the article. The photos for the article could be uploaded with the article...I'd probably set a max photo size of 500k.

I wouldn't set any deadlines...the webpage that contained the list of articles being digitized would be public so everybody could see which societies were digitizing which articles and when they started digitizing them. If somebody was really interested in reading one of the listed articles they would be more than welcome to contact the society and convey how much they were really looking forward to reading the article.

Given that the articles would contain links back to the society that digitized them, it would be a great publicity opportunity for the societies. It would also be a great publicity opportunity for the AOS and would help to strengthen its connection with the societies.

you seem to forget about the copyright law. The AOS magazine and the books you are encouraging people to scan happen to be protected by copyright.

Kathy-SFlorida, no, I did not forget about copyright law. According to Jim Jordan..."the AOS does not own the copyright's to articles that are submitted. We have permission from every author to use their materials as AOS feels fit. i.e. Orchids, web, reprints etc. The doctrine that we operate under is very similar to academic institutions and is referred to as Fair Use. We need to give credit to any copyrighted materials and make sure that anyone else who uses the materials gives the AOS and the copyright holder credit."

The articles that I'm encouraging people to digitize would only be available on the AOS website...and nowhere else. Besides, no one had any issues when I digitized the article on Growing Orchids Outdoors in Southern California

Something I didn't expect to happen too soon...
Internet toll booth

Here's a decent response...
The Folly of Paid Online News

It's interesting to compare the newspaper model to the American Orchid Society model. How are they the same and how are they different?

Similarities

1. Plenty of alternatives. The AOS is not the only source for orchid information.
2. Both receive revenue from subscriptions and ads.

Differences

1. Newspapers are for profit while the AOS is non-profit. The AOS does not pay its contributors and it's mostly run by volunteers.

The goal of the AOS should be to disseminate information...not make money. Given that the AOS has lower costs than newspapers and is a non-profit...there is really no good reason for it to be considering the pay model.

Right now the only thing that the AOS has going for it is that the quality of its content is higher than that of the competition. That's because the people who contribute articles to the AOS are more loyal to the AOS than they are to what the AOS should stand for. If they were more loyal to what the AOS should stand for then they would submit their articles to this forum instead.

Here's an interesting passage from the Tampa Orchid Society website...

"Things have changed over the past 49 years. Initially, dues were established at twenty-five cents per month and there was some degree of exclusivity to membership. The membership committee would visit prospective members to inspect their house, greenhouse and orchid collection. Sometime later, this was replaced with a system requiring sponsorship by an existing member and acceptance by the board of directors. Today, anyone with an interest in orchids is welcome."

For comparison, here's a passage written by Frederick Boyle in 1893...

"If every human being should do what he can to promote the general happiness, it would be downright wicked to leave one's fellow-men under the influence of hallucinations that debar them from the most charming of quiet pleasures. I suspect also that the misapprehension of the public is largely due to the conduct of experts in the past. It was a rule with growers formerly, avowed among themselves, to keep their little secrets."

If Frederick Boyle were around today would he vote for the AOS to offer its articles for free on its website or to continue to charge $60/year for access to its articles?

While Frederick Boyle was interested in promoting the general happiness...my interest is certainly less altruistic. It's a fact that when it comes to accessibility of orchid information....a rising tide lifts all boats. Orchid information is instrumental in helping people be better orchid growers...it's why we join forums and local orchid societies. The greater the availability of good orchid information the greater the quantity of expert orchid growers in our local orchid societies and forums. It's a virtuous cycle.

I think this is a little unfair. The 'magazine style' publications I’m familiar with are the Australian Orchid Review, Orchids Australia, the Orchadian and the NZNOG Journal. I don't read Orchids but I would hope the quality of articles is akin to or better than those I've mentioned. No doubt I'll cause offence to forumites in saying this and I am by no means claiming myself to be anything more than a hack grower but I urge you to read through an issue of any of the journals I've mentioned, compare them to the quality of the average discussion on and internet forum and tell me where the incentive is to entice the "experts" to engage in contributing to internet forums. It’s a bit like those fantasy dinner party guest lists that were popular a few years ago. You can invite Einstein to your party but if you’re not Kip Thorne, why would he find the conversation riveting?

I disagree that the average “article contributor”-level orchid enthusiast has no loyalty to the ideals of disseminating orchid information. My experience is that if you seek these people out at society meetings or shows they are happy to talk and offer advice. I suspect their choice of which media to share their experiences has more to do with the perceived value of their advice vs the effort to contribute. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. Forums are full of people who will pay 2 or 3 times (at least) retail price for orchids but won’t pay half that for a society membership or a book on how to grow them. Why would they? People will give them advice on how to grow them for free online. It’s not good advice but who cares, it’s free. Is it in the interests of maintaining the AOS’s integrity (if I can use those two terms together without inciting Andy Easton’s wrath) to prove to those people that what the AOS can provide is worth forking out the membership fees for or should the AOS give in and cater to the “something for nothing” parasitism that the well meaning “open source/open access” culture has spawned. The former is the harder option but I just don’t see longevity in the latter.

Andrew, the very fact that you don't read Orchids and I don't read the publications you mentioned is really all the evidence we need that the current method falls way short of ideal. The cost of shipping magazines to and from our respective countries is prohibitive. Yet, even though you are in Australia and I am in the US, here we are easily sharing ideas.

If the writers in Australia and in the US contributed their articles to this forum then the orchid growers in both countries would greatly benefit.

Regarding the issue of quality...there are two methods that we can compare....the print method and the internet method.

The Print Method

Let's say that an orchid publication has a panel of 12 orchid experts. They receive 1000s of article submissions that they read through and select the very best articles to publish. Orchid growers who value their expertise subscribe to the publication.

The Internet Method

Let's say there are 12 orchid experts who have blogs on orchids. They read through 1000s of articles on the forums and select the very best articles to blog about. Orchid growers who value their expertise RSS subscribe to their blogs.

The internet method would provide the exact same filtering function as the print method...minus the constraints of cost and magazine size. No matter how many orchid experts are on the panel of a publication...there is a limit to how many articles will fit in their magazine. Given that the print method is supported by subscribers and advertisers...there will always be the inclination to publish articles on the most popular subjects.

Those same constraints do not exist on the internet. With RSS you can customize exactly which subjects will appear in your "magazine" aka Google Reader. Your "magazine" can be as general or specific as you like and as big or small as you like. No matter how many articles are in your "magazine"...Google Reader is completely free.

And for the 25% of the people not on the internet? Well...that's where Magcloud comes in.

Regardless of how much expertise of the editors have (I'm assuming these are the 12 edtors you refer to) the real quality of the articles in orchid magazines comes from the contributors. You still haven't answered how to get these people contributing to such an online resource, particularly when you've stripped away the society to remove any sense of community/supporting the community that supported you. How do you get from the current "can you ID my Phal" state of online forum discussion to a detailed article on the influence of "species X" on modern breeding programs. It's not simply a case of getting experts online. The Orchid list serve subscribers include (or at least did include) a lot of very influential orchid figures in the orchid world but for the most part it's basically one member's RSS feed of orchid related news articles, intermittant complaining about the AOS and the occassional barrage of peronal attacks between a subset of members. Even when the experts are online there's no guarantee of meaningful orchid discussion.



Isn't Magcloud purchased online? Even still, the 25% of people not on the internet probably contains 80% of the orchid knowledge base at the moment. In 20-30 years time when the stalwarts of the orchid community have died off, you may be able to gather sufficient net-savvy orchid expertise to make an online society work but you'd struggle to do it in the next 10 years or so.

As this thread currently stands, I still don't get your objection to paying for information and doing without information you refuse to pay for.

Contrary to popular belief...the American Orchid Society is not a magazine...otherwise it would be called the American Orchid Magazine. The question is, which tool is more effective at providing a sense of community...a magazine or a forum? As a member of numerous forums I'm sure you've seen that when somebody introduces themselves on a forum usually there are several people who welcome them to the forum. On a forum it's easy to connect with other orchid growers in your area. Members of the AOS could live on the same block for years and never know it. You can't strip away something that doesn't exist.

Your question was regarding how I would encourage the contributers to post their articles on this forum. The first step would be to create a demand for Google Reader. If I was the AOS I would write an article explaining how Google Reader offers a format considerably better than the current magazine. Then I would e-mail that article to all the members and publish it in the magazine.

But the AOS would be loath to do that because it has created a bureaucracy around its magazine. Once a bureaucracy is created it becomes a sentient being that will fight any perceived threat to its existence. Now the AOS puts the interests of the bureaucracy above the interests of its members. Alas.

Earlier in this thread I mentioned that Magcloud is planning to offer a subscription service where the AOS would give them the addresses and money and Magcloud would do the rest.

Sure, that 25% might represent 80% of the orchid knowledge base...but it also represents 0% of the future of the society. How often on the forums do people reference articles in orchid publications? The AOS needs to make the 80% of the orchid knowledge base available to 75% of orchid growers...which represents 100% of the future of the society.

I have no objection paying for relevant orchid information. The keyword being "relevant". I've paid for over a 100 orchid books and 100s of culture sheets. Would it be logical for me to pay for culture sheets on terrestrial orchids when all I grow are epiphytes? Would it be logical for me to pay for a book on hybrids when all I grow are species?

I wouldn't mind paying for relevant AOS articles...but I do mind paying for a middle man when none is needed.

Addressing how to do it is a no brainer. It's convincing the contributors why they should do it that's the challenge.



It's a big call to discount the experience of the older society members. If you disbanded all orchid societies today and relied on the current wealth of online knowledge, the orchid world would be thrown into an absolute dark age. Yes, there are people on forums, including this one, that you would have had to have had your head buried in the sand no to have heard of but they are a fraction of the experience that exists outside of forums. You may not respect the importance of catering to the older, non-computer literate orchid personalities but if you put all of your effort into the online education of new, inexperienced growers and leave the offline experts behind, who educates the new comers? You can't tell the experts that you think they're not worth supporting and then expect them to support the newbies. Look at all the complaints AOS got over the last few years when older members perceived Orchids as being dumbed down for the box-store orchid growers.



Looking through the books you've paid for in the library you posted, I notice there are a lot of Australian books on the list. These books contain 50-90% of species you are unlikely to come across in the US and probably won't find as parents in the hybrids available to you. I suspect a number of the other books also contain sections that are not relevant to you. How is this different from paying for a subscription to a society who's journal contains articles that are and aren't relevant to you're interests?

Why do the contributers write the articles in the first place? If their intention is to share their knowledge with the orchid community then why not post their articles on this forum? Surely we can agree that an article on this forum will be read by more orchid growers than an article in the AOS magazine? So either the contributers are unaware of this fact or their primary intention is to donate their article to support the continued existence of the AOS magazine.

For all the orchid growers on the internet, Google Reader is a completely customizable, free online magazine. For the orchid growers not on the internet, Magcloud is a reasonable substitute for the current magazine. Even if there was no substitute, should the 25% of orchid growers not on the internet hold back progress? If they stopped receiving their Orchids magazine would they stop growing orchids or hybridizing orchids or attending their local orchid society meetings?

Can you explain to me in detail how the older AOS members help to educate the newcomers to the AOS? In my opinion there is currently no way to tap the experience of the older AOS members...so why would I have made the big call of discounting their experience? The only way a new member of the AOS would be able to tap the experience of the older members is if all the older members were on this forum...which is, if anything, actually a point for my argument.

When you join the AOS you have no access to any of the articles written before you became a member and you have no access to the experience of the older members. When you join a local orchid society you have no access to any of the presentations given before you became a member and you have imperfect access to the experience of the older members. When you join this orchid forum you have access to all the posts written before you became a member and you have access to all of the experience of the older members. The AOS costs $60/year, a local orchid society costs $20/year and this forum costs $0/year.

It's in the best interests of the orchid community if the AOS encouraged its contributers to post their articles on this forum. Orchid experts could start blogs in their areas of interest and highlight the best orchid information on the internet. Orchid growers could then RSS subscribe to their favorite orchid blogs.

Not sure where you got the idea that I want to disband any orchid societies. As I have said numerous times, the American Orchid Society is not a magazine. A carpenter using a nail gun instead of a hammer is still a carpenter. A mathematician using a calculator instead of an abacus is still a mathematician. A society that uses Google Reader instead of a printed magazine is still a society.

Regarding my Australian books. Well, one time I was tricked, but it was completely a fault of my own ignorance. I purchased a book titled something like the Orchids of South Australia. Based on my research I knew that there were some epiphytic orchids all the way down to Tasmania. However, I did not know that there is a state actually called South Australia. South Australia does not extend as far South as New South Wales or Victoria and unlike those states, does not have any epiphytic orchids. So I gave the book to my orchid society.

But most of my Australian books have a greater emphasis on the epiphytes which are by far more popular than the terrestrials. Between Andy's Orchids and the SBOE I'm pretty certain that nearly every Dockrillia species, all the major Dendrobium species, at least half of the Sarcochilus species and numerous other Australian epiphytic species are available here in Southern California. Andy doesn't list all his available species on his website and there's a few other local orchid nurseries which import orchids from Australia.