April 6, 2026

An idea came to me last week, years after I began pondering how to trim the Forum Announcements load to a manageable task that was sustainable before I, like the Cheshire Cat, slowly fade away.

From late January through today, more than 200 e-mails to the Forum contained material previously archived on the website. Fewer than 10% announced events. The rest were newsletters from officeholders, governments, nonprofits, community groups and companies. All had stories to tell. Some of those stories could be of vital interest to a few Forum website readers. All could help the community by becoming readily available today, and maybe even in perpetuity, to anyone.

But since the announcements were suspended, crickets. Not even the most vigilant officeholders have protested this reduction in the reach of their messaging.

To trim the announcement workload, I’ve now narrowed the task: Event announcements in JPG-JPEG-PNG formats will be posted. The who-what-where-when details provided by the sponsors will not longer be checked. The provision of web links for additional information will no longer be chased down (That loss is now increasingly covered by sponsors’ use of bar codes readable by smartphones). As months in the announcements column on the website front go by, that month’s material will be taken off the front and placed in the archive.

I don’t yet have an idea of how much time it will take to keep up with this revised workload. In the meantime, anyone interested in taking ownership of the newsletter piece, or turning spoken announcements at the end of Forums into JPGs, volunteer here.