WebMagic 2013 Comes To Life

This past weekend was our Associate Matron/Associate Patron workshop for all those Sister and Brothers who will be serving as the heads of their respective Chapters when I am Worthy Grand Matron next year.

Well, maybe I have to stop myself there for a second.  See, I keep saying next year because I think of my year as 2013, and that is next year, but the brutal truth that unfortunately I have to stop sidestepping is that next year is not really next year.  Next year starts in, oh my ever loving bleeeeeeep, eleven weeks.  We are under the ninety day mark, have crested the hill and are now sliding on banana peels into the finish line.  Stuff is starting to go in to the Grand Secretary to be prepared for the Itinerary that goes to print in just a few weeks, the last appointments are being done this week and next (at least that is true if the Lord loves me as much right now as he has up until now) and the last couple of calendar items are coming through to go in for processing.  Wow - it is really getting close now!  Just Wow!

But back to the workshop - where I made several comments about how much I have learned about the members and our Order and our needs and wants and things that we love and things that bore the socks off us in my last five years of traveling - Wow again, five years have really almost gone by already - well, eleven weeks short of five years to be accurate - Wow some more - where did they go?  Hey, I want a couple of months back darn it!

But really this time, back to the workshop - One of the highlights of holding your AM/AP workshop is that you get to announce to all your girls and their guys what you have chosen for your Special Project for the year.  There is more controversy about a project announcement than you might think because we have some members who are very firmly of the view that the Project should be one of our own charities and others who feel just as strongly that the Project should be something that reaches out into the community and helps others in a way that allows our members to reach out.  We had an inside charity in 2010 and 2011 and outside charities in 2008, 2009 and 2012, so in my five years, I have seen both.

My partner and I really racked our brains on what we wanted to do, and the dilemma posed by the above debate, and then realized that what we wanted to do was not a charity project at all, but instead, we wanted our members to take a year to invest in ourselves.  We decided that what our Order needs to grow and present its best face to the world at large is a professionally designed and updated web site, with a bazillion times more useful content and one click access to the most widely desired things.  We have a web site that is very pretty, but using it is very hard and lots of basic functions were never built into it. We also want to go to an online newsletter so that our members can post local Chapter news without the cost of printing and so that new stuff can be posted every month instead of just quarterly.

But to do that, and deal with all the surrounding problems of hardware, bandwidth, access, coordination with our existing databases, training our office staff, etc., etc., is going to take a lot more money than we usually have to spare.  So the only way it is going to happen is as a Special Project of the WGM and WGP.  So we decided that this was what we wanted to do, the contribution we could make to the future of our Order that would provide benefits to us for years to come.  We know that it is not a sexy, exciting project, like curing cancer or helping vets, but it is very, very NECESSARY so we have to hope that our members want to help.

So my partner got a person he knows to put together a little demo CD with some basic click functions, just so we could show some of what we wanted to accomplish and we showed it and the crowd went wild.  Everyone seemed to love the idea and anyone who didn't love it at least didn't say anything about it and several people asked me if they could contribute now instead of waiting and of course I told them how to do that.

The only place where we fell down a bit is that neither my partner nor I had thought about a name for it past just "our special project" and apparently, that is not good enough.  The next thing I know, people start shouting out names and we went back and forth on a little instant straw polling and now it is official.  The 2013 WGM/WGP Project is now WebMagic 2013.

Next weekend, I will be in Yorba Linda, Orange and Norwalk.