Shepherd’s Holiday Pie!

by Joel · December 21, 2012 · Featured, Periodic Features, Shepherds Pie · 11 Comments

Lamb wearing a Father Christmas hat2012 is coming to its end and we will hopefully all make it. It has been a great year for the LAMB and I thought I’d end it on a high note by going out with a bang (maybe not but it sounds good).

These last months I have thought a lot about the future of the LAMB, mainly because I was asked in the forums what my general stance is on where we are heading. After giving it some thought (four months) I don’t have a definitive answer and don’t think it’s solely up to me what the main focus should be on but I have an idea what it could be so this post is mainly a brainstorm peace on that question.

It’s almost 11 months since I picked up the Shepherd torch from Rachel it has been a great and very creative year in so many ways. I’m not going to bore you with stats but it feels like we are going in the right direction to align ourselves as a major player in the online world of film criticism.

I have purposely chosen a reformistic approach when it comes to implementing changes rather than doing it swift across the board. I know that some of you are restless about it and want to it to go faster but I bear you to be patient with me.

In that regard the biggest hurdle has been conquered with the new site design and the improved database to easier keep the daily LAMB logistics at a minimum. Just keeping track of the new members used to take weekly hours to manage and I’m pretty sure I’d been burnt out by now if Bonjour hadn’t helped me out with these changes.

With that said the general direction the LAMB should thrive for is to continue what we are already doing and do it even better. On a personal level I’m confident how we can go about doing that. Yet again I won’t bore you with details but the general idea is to get an even higher participation level among members (especially more seasoned ones).

When we get to that point we can take the next step. I’ll illustrate it with a concrete topic just to get your minds going (as they weren’t already).

One of our biggest resources within the LAMB is the LAMBscores. After getting some shout-outs about them in general (after I have sent the LAMB link to some people just to show off my work with the site) its pretty clear that they should and definitively could be a important deciding factor for helping non blogging people to decide which film they should see.  Think Rotten Tomatoes but with regular people and not stuck-up critics.

However, to actually be able to put in the work and resources needed to create a login based submitting system (which is the key for such a feature) we need a bigger chunk of our members to participate with their scores. It’s just as simple as that. We are closing in on 1500 members right now of whom 1000 are active. I don’t know how many of those that feature reviews but my guess would be a majority of them.

For me its obvious that the LAMB as a organization has reached the professionalism level where it would be stupid to not try to get a bigger audience than our own members (in that area we definitively are leading the flock) for some of our more mainstream features.

Hopefully I kind of made my point kind of clear. If not? Here it is spelled out: Help me get people to be more involved if you like what we do! That is the only way we will develop even further (I know I sound like a broken record but I do believe its the truth).

Due the massive information overload in this post I have split it into two pages so please check page two for some general announcements. 

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