Martin: I already had an email composed and ready to go out ... : Please send me any text you want included, Dave, specifically about the Affiliates and the photo gallery. Once I have the text, I'm willing to edit them to work in the email. This is now urgent. I and the board are hoping to use this forum much more. I agree with Dave A.; we under-utilize this forum. Another area in which we need to improve on is to avoid rushing things because they are "urgent". In past years the "urgent" tag often resulted in proper procedure getting circumvented. While now less common, over the past couple of years, several mistakes can be traced back to a process being bypassed while someone acted on something because it is "urgent". My personal opinion is that in general, when someone calls something "urgent", that is often a good time to take a couple of deep breaths and slow things down. So a couple of deep breaths ....., ....... one more ......., ready. Everyone probably agrees that an email that is primarily designed as a festival follow-up should go out soon after the festival. But I doubt that we are so rushed that we don't have time to show an already composed email to the board before sending it. In general I think it far more important to send out a good email than to make sure it is sent today. Tomorrow will be fine, and it shouldn't take longer than that to review it. Or we may wish to (and I think we should) wait until Monday so that we can include references to the new web site (which won't be live until then.) As for specifics, I think Rick or Jim should be consulted to see if we are ready to make an announcement and/or request concerning affiliates and insurance. I am not the best person to speak on this, but only listed it because it is something very important to many US affiliates and it shouldn't be overlooked. My original post was a discussion about the website and a comment that we should think about sending a message to members soon. At that time I/we were unaware that an email had already been composed. I was asking everyone what they thought should be included, not composing a final product. In regards to what an email should include about the galleries; My personal opinion is that this ought to be a major component of the email. Technology today makes it possible for people all over the world to share their festival photos. A number of people have posted URLs on our forum and rec.juggling to their personal photo galleries. The gallery section on the new site should help our members share pictures who don't have access to their own place to upload photographs. It also can accept short video clips and allow members to make comments on the pictures already uploaded. I believe these are all valuable features that would help justify sending the email. As such, I would be in favor of waiting until Monday to send the email and including links at that time. Another item worth considering for such an email is a notification that we may use the photo id pictures. Martin stated that he doesn't think we have a legal right to use them. I think our waiver gives us such a right, but I am against using a picture if someone doesn't want it to be used. I mention this because I spoke with Scott this week about how it might be cool if we made a photo mosaic out of everyone's faces. I think it important to always be on the lookout for ideas that let us emphasize and reinforce our feeling of community. -Dave D.