Many years ago I wrote an opinion piece to Gristmill regarding the graying
of the association and the dangers of irrelevance as younger members did
not attend meetings due to work and family responsibilities.

The response was zip. In the EAIA I was asked to create a new website. I
brought on bill Rainford to do the technical work. At various meetings I
was met with considerable pushback about why we needed something new. I
instituted Shavings being moved to a digital delivery and got flack for
going to a mailing list format for delivery. And so on until I resigned as
chair of the web committee and turned it over to Bill. I did manage to
produce the Chronicle DVD and the Jacobs Stanley book thanks to Toby Hall
running interference.

You can see where this is leading. There is stiff refusal to accept change.
That's a large reason why I moved my focus to Facebook. On fb I've run into
a generational conflict from both ages.

So what's to do? Mailing lists are viewed as archaic technology by many.
Bulletin boards are unkown to many. The immediacy of fb, instagram,
Pinterest, tumblr etc is what many want. Then there is the problem of the
cultish followings of net personalities in the Woodworking and history
communities. Either you are for or you against.

On fb I've created a number of groups, some public, some closed, some
secret. The public groups are the most difficult to manage, not
surprisingly.

My take is that it would be good to have a closed Oldtools group open only
to list membership at first. We did this when leaving rec.woodworking. As
bugs were worked out the  list was opened to new members under strict
supervision.

I run a group The Doctrine Of Handy Works that is hyper focused much as the
oldtools list is. So far so good as we are careful who is accepted. perhaps
a fb group adjunct to the list as a means to segue formats is now the most
sensible way to preserve and maintain the list?