Stewarding stuff

[ChiefBroom]

Before last week I was utterly clueless -- and about equally disinterested -- regarding what Stewards are supposed to do. The one or two I'd noticed seemed very nice, so I assumed being nice was their job. What I've learned, however, is that Stewards actually have some substantive responsibilities beyond acting gentlemanly. The most important of those is to tap the energy and carry forward the ideas of members with a goal to continuously improve B&B's performance in delivering fun, information, and fellowship. Per the invitation letter all of the incoming Stewards received, our role includes the following:

Develop and implement threads designed to advance discourse in the forum. Examples of activities along these lines might include threads about new products, an effort to build wiki content relevant to your forum, spearheading mod-approved contests or mod-approved group buys for the forum, polling members to see what information would be most helpful, developing a primer for new wetshavers, or development of any other ideas that you see as helpful to our goal of building a better B&B.

Please share your ideas either by posting them in the Forum or via PM to me. I've already received several good suggestions. I know there are more out there.

I spent some time today going through the Brushes-related content in ShaveWiki. Although there is a lot of great information in it, there are also many dated entries and outright gaps. I'm not sure how best to attack that. I'd welcome your suggestions and especially your contributions. If any of you wishes to provide content but aren't crazy about messing around with entering it, let me know, and we'll see what we can work out.

Thanks

 

[mblakele]

We can always use more help with the wiki. I think folks are sometimes afraid to edit it, but if you can post on a forum you can edit a wiki page. The wiki team is here to help, too.

One great way to get started is to go through your own herd of brushes and see what the wiki says about them. Are we missing dimensions? Add them! Missing photos? We have some great photographers here. Missing a page for your brush? We can add one.

 

[noahpictures]

One of the frustrating experiences as a newbie is finding quality products. Newbies want to know what the "best" shaving products are. As we all know it is impossible to answer the question, therefore we need to guide new members toward quality products (i.e. Semogue, Simpson, Shavemac) that most of us have used.
For example as a newbie I didn't know any of the quality brands so I bought a "custom", expensive, crappy "badger" brush on eBay. A $15 Omega or Tweezerman would have been a better choice.

One of the benefits of threads such as "What's your brush today?" is it gives everyone but especially newcomers an idea of the products being used by the the B&B community.

 

[ChiefBroom]

We can always use more help with the wiki. I think folks are sometimes afraid to edit it, but if you can post on a forum you can edit a wiki page. The wiki team is here to help, too.

One great way to get started is to go through your own herd of brushes and see what the wiki says about them. Are we missing dimensions? Add them! Missing photos? We have some great photographers here. Missing a page for your brush? We can add one.

Thank for the post. You're right about the wiki, but I think it can at least appear a little ominous to tackle. Finally putting up a profile page -- because I was told -- helped a lot.

That said, if anyone wants to develop content to fill gaps they see, but hangs up on input, please let me know and we'll work something out. I'll be glad to help.

An example of a gap is that I didn't see an entry for M&F brushes. That needs to be fixed. I'll take your suggestion and make a run at that myself.

One of the frustrating experiences as a newbie is finding quality products. Newbies want to know what the "best" shaving products are. As we all know it is impossible to answer the question, therefore we need to guide new members toward quality products (i.e. Semogue, Simpson, Shavemac) that most of us have used.
For example as a newbie I didn't know any of the quality brands so I bought a "custom", expensive, crappy "badger" brush on eBay. A $15 Omega or Tweezerman would have been a better choice.

One of the benefits of threads such as "What's your brush today?" is it gives everyone but especially newcomers an idea of the products being used by the the B&B community.

That's a great point. I'd never thought about it that way.

 

[vocalistbob]

Congrats on your appointment, Ken. I know you'll do a great and thorough job.