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Several months back, a few of us announced the rebirth of LEGOFan.org and
brought a new site online. We outlined a charter and a mission statement. We
worked aggressively to make things happen, and we were very excited by the
acceptance in the community. Since that time, we have continued to meet
regularlyand try to move forward as a group to continue to meet the needs of the
community. We have rolled out a new home page that hopefully is easier to
navigate and get to what you need. We want to continue to make this site a
portal that helps ANYONE interested in our hobby able to get to where they need
to and to be conduit to bring all factions of our hobby together, including the
AFOLs, the newbies and members of the LEGO Group.
There are also several areas that we know we have needed to improve, but have
not yet done so. It would be easy for me to throw out a couple of excuses, such
as “we all do this for free in our spare time,” or “what do you want from us?”
but the truth is that we underestimated the amount of work that would be
required for us to keep things moving. We have developed a clear set of rules we
need to work within for the site, but we have not grown our group, or organized
it in such a way that we can execute on these rules and needs. For that, I take
the blame. I have been trying to drive short term needs and thinking that the
long term goals would work out. I have also been stretching myself thin on the
tasks.
I have been working with a few of the core team members to restructure the way
we run, and to make way for more people from the community to get involved. This
new structure should allow us to act more efficiently and respond to
problems/needs faster. The restructuring also includes the moving of our site.
For those of you who do not know, the site has been hosted in the Business Data
Center of one of our core team members. This arrangement has been beneficial
because of low cost, but we cannot continue to operate this way. Our “free ride”
is slowly coming to an end. We were able to generate some revenue from the
auctions we participated in at BrickFest, and are investigating the best use of
that money. We are looking at establishing a permanent home for the site in a
professional hosting provider’s datacenter, as well as the business model to
support those costs.
Things we know we need to address and are moving on include:
- Updating the version of the forum software we are running.
- Working more closely with people inside TLG to get more interaction on the forums
- Getting the entire site moved to a dedicated location
- Restructuring the management of the entire group to make things more efficient
- Making it much easier to get feedback to us
There are some other items that were brought up at BrickFest that we have not
forgotten about. Thank you to everyone who has brought up publicly, or
privately, things we need to look into. We are trying to consider everything,
and will evaluate all of them against our charter and mission statement, and
implement what we feel will make the most impact across the board for the users
and community. We may not always show it, but we have heard you.
We have not yet formalized any of the changes, and I know this posting may be a
little premature, but I have seen concerns in several posts, and felt that we
should let you know that we are aware of the problems, and are working to
address them. I will keep people posted as we move forward. In the meantime, if
any of you have any questions, please send me email directly (since we still
have not gotten our feedback mechanism implemented). You can reach me through
GEOFFGR (at) COMPORIUM (dot) NET. I welcome any comments and feedback. I may be
slow responding, and I can’t promise we will be able to accomodate all feedback,
but I promise I will read every email sent to me. We want this site to flourish,
and we believe that it can be a great site to help all people in the community,
if it is run properly. For the next short while, my only focus with this group
is to make that happen.
I firmly believe that LEGO Fan continues to grow better, and that is due in no
small part to the interaction and feedback of you, the users. The LEGO Fan team
encourages you to continue to offer feedback and ideas. Remember that this site
is for all of you: “A site, run by fans, FOR fans”
Sincerely,
Geoff Gray - President, BrickPortal, Inc. LLC
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