The bit of confusion surrounding the Ferret Giving Tree has been
resolved and the tree is online. It's in test mode now (though any
ferrets chosen WILL be processed) but the full loading of the tree
won't begin until mid October, if I understood correctly.

As promised, I'm including the posts about the Tree which came in over
the last couple of days, however most have been withdrawn and are thus
not posted. I hope the explanation below, while admittedly not perfect,
ties things up enough that we can put this in the past and once again
concentrate on helping the ferrets on the Tree!

Here's a short summary of what was going on for those of you who'd
like to know more:

The "old" giving tree to which Kris devoted much of his life around
the holidays for the past few years was getting unmanageable. It was
written with rather old, no longer supported tools and each time
anything at all changed, such as a ferret getting chosen, a lot of
manual intervention was required. At one point Kris had several
volunteers helping out. Two of those volunteers, Melanee and Lynn,
decided to re-engineer the Tree.

Work on re-engineering the Tree actually began by Lynn very early this
year and a couple of notices were posted to the FML on January 4th
stating that. A stripped down prototype was shown to Kris shortly after
that and he liked how it was going.

Communication seems to get a little fuzzy after that! Come September,
the tree needed to be tested, so it went "live" a few days ago "just
for a short test" in order to enroll some real life testers. Instead,
within hours, most of the online ferret community knew about it and a
surprised Kris was receiving phone calls out of nowhere asking about it.

I think everyone involved admits communication should have been better.
Perhaps the test tree should have gone up with a different name.
Perhaps more people should have known about what was going on. Perhaps
Kris needed to stay in the loop more. Or perhaps not -- I don't really
know and I'm not trying to judge. But I do know a lot of people were
left very confused.

Eventually people started talking and things are working out. The "new"
giving tree is a huge improvement. Of course, there still may be issues
since, for example, not everyone is experienced with computers. So this
is where Kris comes in. Kris has agreed to be quite involved. He will
be assisting shelters who are having difficulty posting their images
themselves, approving shelters to be on the tree, and he will
eventually be reviewing the tree reports and keeping the FML up to
date as to how many ferrets are on the tree(s), how many need Santas
and, knowing Kris, pleading for us to adopt "just one more" :-).

The road leading to any project sometimes has a few rocks in the way.
Overall, the new tree seems to be a well-written website and time
previously spent managing it can now be better spent bugging people
to donate. I'm happy to see Kris will still be so involved since his
vision and hard work made it happen for so many years. We need not try
to assign blame over what went wrong. Rather, I think everyone involved
deserves our thanks at this point.

So, thanks!

Bill

[Posted in FML 6458]