to the online PTG people I have been very tied up the past couple of week with my mother in the hospital and moving her to a nursing home. I have to say that I was as surprised as the rest of you about the notice in the PTG newsletter. The text in it made it look like I and the ECC were proposing that Pianotech be closed and that everyone move over to the Google+ community. Once again, I find the total lack of communication from the Board to be astounding. My report suggested leaving the email Pianotech running and starting an experiment with Google+. Next thing I know it is being announced as the new thing and that people should contact me for instructions. The G+ community has better options than the Google group and it less likely to get spam since the membership has to be approved and can be blocked. I called the G+ community Pianotech just to get that name in case we liked G+. If I had a clue that the Board was going to promote this as the replacement for Pianotech listserve I would have prepared some instructions for using Google+. This change could not have occurred at a worse time for me. I also suggested that the ECC committee be eliminated since all its past functions are now taken over by staff. I don't have admin rights to any of the web sites any more. I have pretty well lost my interest in dealing with PTG, but still love the community created by all our online communities. The listserve will probably be closed, even though there are some functions it provides which will be hard to duplicate. I am no fan of my.ptg.org and almost never use it. When I do, it is through email. It could be OK for some committee work. I do think G+ works better than my.ptg.org, and I imagine G+ will grow over time at a much faster rate. G+ integrates with Gmail very well, and that is the way I follow what is going on there. Also the G+ iPhone app is excellent and easy to use. It is unknown how long G+ will archive items, and we won't have much control over that. I think it is reasonable to transfer the archives over to my.ptg.org to integrate them with that community just to save them. I told the Board when they first were looking at my.ptg.org that the most important thing was to maintain the Pianotech archives. Here we are, years past that, and they are still in question. I"m still dealing with selling my mom's house and the stuff in it, so I don't have much computer time. I have faith in the community that created Pianotech and know that it will survive. It would be much better if it could all come together in one place rather than four. I think Google groups or G+ make sense as the place to have it. The google group is more like the current listserve and the G+ group offers some new features including Hangouts which are like Skype conference calls. I leave it to the groups to decide. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ronald Berry Piano Service Indianapolis, IN 317-255-8213 ron at berrypiano.com http://www.berrypiano.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ask me about Healthy Chocolate! http://www.BerryGoodChocolate.com <http://www.berrygoodchocolate.com> Public Key http://www.berrypiano.com/key/Ron_Berry.txt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20130302/c33002f4/attachment.htm>
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