…for our future as vapers, that is!
by Stephan Didak
(The following information was originally posted on Reddit and is re-printed here with permission from the author. After reading what this is all about, click on the link at the very end of the article if you would like to participate. This is one way in which you can join the fight to preserve vaping as we know it).
If you want to get involved in more than just the act of vaping and get involved and be part of something bigger than yourself and you’ve been thinking of this but haven’t been able to find the right angle or maybe had to spend too much time finding the right information, then you are just the vaper we want to hear from.
by Stephan Didak
(The following information was originally posted on Reddit and is re-printed here with permission from the author. After reading what this is all about, click on the link at the very end of the article if you would like to participate. This is one way in which you can join the fight to preserve vaping as we know it).
If you want to get involved in more than just the act of vaping and get involved and be part of something bigger than yourself and you’ve been thinking of this but haven’t been able to find the right angle or maybe had to spend too much time finding the right information, then you are just the vaper we want to hear from.
Because I’ve been fairly active here I’ve been asked to start a little informal comment gathering process to see what your thoughts are on several of the following topics and questions. Our aim is to build a resource for vapers that is unlike any of the many resources already out there. There are some great sites out there and lots of good information but it’s all scattered, often not well maintained, and usually require a lot more effort than should be necessary. It is something that has come up quite a few times with both new and longer term vapers and something that isn’t rocket science to address in an effective manner. We have the resources, the skills, and the experience to make this happen (this is not a theory, the current “engineering team” has long standing and proven track records… and perhaps also a little ambitious).
But before we do, we need to know about you, what you need, what you feel is currently lacking, and what it is that you have felt makes it difficult for you to engage, participate, get involved in things like advocacy, activism, or just plain old lending a helping hand where needed because you’re the kind of vaper who likes to help out other fellow vapers.
With the FDA deeming regulations that going to play a huge part of many of our lives, even more so for many of us who are engaged in the “political” side of things it will become increasingly harder to keep up with everything else that goes on at the local level. The CASAA board all has day jobs and from what I heard today they’ve been running on nearly no sleep the past week and we’d like to take some of the pressure off by helping organize local groups of vapers for actions as needed. Organizing is one of the most difficult and tedious parts of any undertaking. Some form of automation and helping people to be a cohesive unit within their geographical region may become essential.
Having different smaller groups at the local level all trying to coordinate something for the same event or action wastes a lot of time. Time that is better spent focusing on the actual matter at hand. These smaller clusters of vapers need to be brought together and connected. And they need to somehow communicate and avoid all doing the same thing and at the same time avoid having their central information scatted all over the place where it becomes hard to find and ends up as an “out of sight, out of mind” situation.
The situation with the FDA is not going to stop the ANTZ trying to push for as much local legislation and ordinances as they can get away with. In fact, based on what we can tell it is likely to intensify because the FDA deeming regulations do not directly support a lot of their desires. This means we’ll all be fighting on multiple battle fields on multiple levels. And that, we believe, is more than the current coordination and activism support can handle at this time in the way it’s being done.
We have no intention (or perhaps, not the ambition!) to "replace" CASAA or take on/over any of their responsibilities but rather want to focus on aggregating a more efficient and local focused solution to what is clearly a bit of a problem within our community.
We also don’t intend to host or run discussion forums because there’s plenty of those already and duplicating those efforts would be useless. On top of that, our community is already divided between people who prefer one place over an other for whatever individual reasons. That’s great, you like a place you’re active, by all means continue to do so. What we seek is to incorporate all these other essential places into a larger and more cohesive resource, one where people from different online communities that happen to be geographically local to each other can actually stand together without having to deal with additional online communities to deal with.
What we are looking at doing is creating a unique and efficient resource that will fill the void that currently exists. Building a system like that is best done by first planning it out before jumping in head first, especially since there are likely to be some complexities that need to be solved based on what we gather as being the leading preference of those interested in using a resource like this.
Open Question #1
Tell us what kind of online resource for vaping you would like to see but haven’t found or have found but is scattered all over the place. Feel free to provide examples of things where possible.
What do you want to get involved in?
If you want to get involved, be an advocate for ecigs, vaping, etc. what would your preferred involvement be? Let us know what kind of battles you would prefer to fight and how much you think you could handle. This is not a “how far are you willing to go” question where the answer with the highest dedication wins a prize. If you would like to be involved but are extremely limited on time but still want to help out, tell us, what form do you feel would be a good fit for you?
The general idea is to also have people who are willing and can dedicate more of their time be listed as possible points of contact to coordinate local actions and events so everyone knows where to go and who to talk to in terms of having some boots-on-the-ground guidance if/when needed. We haven’t quite figured out yet how to do that because we of course want to avoid having the wrong people try and be a central local point of contact and are not sure at all how to even “define” what the right or wrong person would be or mean. If you have any ideas on this subject we’d love to hear them.
How do you like to receive information?
If there is any specific information to provide you, whether it be a specific time sensitive item or just a general piece of information because you’ve “subscribed” to a certain area of interest, would you prefer to receive that via an e-mail? Would you prefer to not receive any and just get information specifically pertaining to you/your interests “at a glance” when visiting a page online?
Your interests?
Say our system provide you with a set of features and categories that are areas of interest for you, what categories would you like to see or think would be useful to you? I know that’s a vague question so let me illustratie;
- “Letter Writing” : You’re interested in writing letters to your elected officials.
- “Face to Face Meetings” : You’re interested in setting up face to face meetings with your assemblyman, congressman, etc.
- “Physical Presence” : You’re interested in showing up in person to oppose ant-vaping legislation.
- “Hearing about new B&M’s in my area” : You’re interested in hearing about or providing new B&M’s in your area.
- “Providing Data” : You want to help us build the resources by adding “artifacts” to the system.
Go crazy. Tell us what kind of action/information categories and areas of interest you would be interested in and if possible elaborate on them.
Providing Data?
Are you interested in helping out to provide data into the system? For example, you discover a new B&M and you want them added to the resources so it will show up as a resource in your area (and for those outside of your geographical area would show up on a map as a searchable feature). Or, for example, you found some great scientific documentation that you would like to see added to the indexed list of searchable resources, etc. Would you prefer to just throw a link our way and go “here, you deal with it” or would you be interested in annotating the information with helpful information fields so we can categorize, index, and disseminate the information without duplicating too much effort?
Note that the idea of having as many B&M’s and vendors in the system is not only as a general “database” but also a way to get to interact with them if they are local to you. Interact as in, get them to help in our many upcoming battles, help them be part of the community if they aren’t already. And, of course, a way for us all to keep track of those commercial elements in our community that do not have your best interests at heart (to help avoid others in the same region from duplicating any efforts in involving them).
Final Notes
Building (or creatively hacking together) a system like this takes a bit of time but your answers are essential in refining the direction and requirements. Since we have to start somewhere with gathering feedback, this is it, this is the place. For now. Once we go through several layers of refinement a clearer plan will be presented on which we’ll be seeking feedback from the community, in a somewhat larger sense.
What do you think? If you build it they will come? Let’s build it!
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