From: "messier" Michael Linnolt > Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 1:38 PM > To: Hubert Hautecler > > > Yes, I would say this is the major problem! After moving > measure their brightness. 9. I have never heard of the AAVSO. > > So, my dear colleagues, it appears we have a mountain to > climb here to recruit new observers! Any ideas? Yeah, stop beating your head against a wall. You don't want any of them anyway. Hang on, I'm not trying to be snotty. Just bear with me here and let me thow out some ideas that may seem highly counterintuitive. It just seems to me that the high cost of trying to recruit such people would result in a marginal or nil benefit (as you actually discovered). Yes, there are a few amateurs with the potential to become useful VSO'ers who will require an effort from others to get them going and then once they're in, they're golden. We have heard from at least one such individual in this thread. I think it may be, however, that this is a very small minority for whom the benefit of developing specialized recruitment programs will be of to their necks and never look back. They will scour the Internet and the amateur literature to figure out what they need to do to get set up and get going. They will choose their own program, aggressively borrowing ideas from the many available books, magazines, and Internet sites. They will find a mentor whether someone suggests it to them or not, and they will figure out how to estimate the magnitudes of stars on their own and in combination with their mentor and the many resources that are out there. This is a very demanding activity and you have to really really want to do it. You have to be driven to do it by some internal disposition that can't be suppressed. There are plenty of people out there like that. [Like me for instance.] You run a significant risk of turning off your potentially most valuable contributors by regimentalizing the recruitment process, or by dumbing down the procedure. In some ways, it could be argued that the more obscure and difficult the organization and the activity, the more likely you may be to recruit people who have the best chance of staying with it. Does this make sense? I mean, I may be dead wrong, but do you follow my reasoning? The more challenging the activity (within some doing it. Frank Reichenbacher RFA > > Mike Linnolt > > > From: Hubert Hautecler Date: Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:56 am > Date: Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:56 am > > > workgroup are all helping the newbies. A startingprogramme, email > > between observers, even helping observing at a site. The only pity > > thing is that it is difficult to attract new observers. > > > > _______________________________________________ >