Whilst going through this process I looked back on some of the history of NA and how it's developed (or not) during various various points in it's past.
I'll be the first to admit, in many ways and at many points NA hasn't really fulfilled it's potential from a technical and/or feature perspective and for a bag load of reasons, some legit, some not so much, things that should have come to fruition haven't.
Sitting there thinking (and steaming at flakey software vendors) I was going over in my head exactly why all this had happened.
Some things were obvious, others not so much. But I pretty quickly realised that there's often not a lot that can be done about the circumstances that life throws at you, especially with something that's not your main income. If I were working fulltime on NA things would be very different but I'm not so you have to take whatever you end up with to a degree.
So rather than looking at where things had gone wrong I started thinking a lot more about what (and when) things had gone right.
And I came to the realisation that things worked best when I didn't over think, just did.
So in homage to the irrepressible Sir Richard Branson I'm adopting one of his favourite expressions.
"Screw It. Lets Do It"
Personally I'd say my instincts for what the site needs has been pretty spot on over the sites history. And I need to let my instincts for what's required take charge a little more.
So there'll be no more long or even medium term planning. It'll be more seat of the pants, like it was in the initial days of NA, being led by what I see and hear and trusting my instincts.
That doesn't mean, of course, that I won't be soliciting or listening to feedback from you guys, I will but rather than getting it beforehand and altering plans to suit we'll be adopting a much more "suck it and see" approach. We'll try things out and if they get used they stay if they don't they go.
We're going back to what worked best for NA at the outset of this little adventure, being smaller, faster, and more responsive to the communities needs than the big lumbering commercial behemoths.
So what this means for you is don't be surprised if you come back one morning and there's new features or the site has changed in some way. You won't always get notice beforehand (unless there's likely to be downtime).
If you don't like it, feel free to say so, but all I ask is that you try the new things with an open mind. Don't just say you don't like it cause it's different and you don't like change. Embrace change cause it's through change that we improve, and there's a great deal that can be improved around here.
So there you have it. No promises or grandiose plans just a bit of a change in attitude and hopefully execution. It's likely to mean more frequent incremental change, lots of small changes over fewer large ones. Also a bit more experimenting with new features and sections. More playthings, less polls
I don't claim omnipotence (not yet anyway) so there's a strong chance we'll get some things wrong and if we do we'll take on board all the feedback to identify what went wrong, admit our mistakes, roll back the changes and move on and try something else.
As Bullwinkle was so fond of saying....
This Time For Sure!
















