The Gospel according to ConI was spending my first year in China, in a mining town with a laowai population of one.
I'd gotten my job courtesy of the Spoon (mind, back then they weren't charging schools to advertise jobs, so no one would be able to score the kind of small mom-and-pop school gig I did now), and hung around in their chat rooms- I didn't even know what a forum was. It was Woz from Oz who alerted me and my room of the Saloon's existence.
This place saved my life. My school didn't tell me much about China's reality- they'd have a couple of teachers bolt, one from the puppetry of a Chinese girlfriend- so I was a babe in the woods. Raoul signed me up very quickly, and on I went.
The place had only been up for 3 months at that point, and I believe there were fewer than 40 members at the time. But the atmosphere was terrific: I read for a day, then posted my introduction. Instantly everyone answered in droves. I asked questions, read the Library threads, and learned more in 2 days than the previous 4 months I'd been in the Big Silly. Most importantly, I now had a big stable of friends who had no stake in making money off of me, who could steer me right.
Over the years, I think if you graphed the membership by percent monthly growth, you'd get a staple rising line. There is a mortality rate to members: some don't like it here, most just leave China and trail off. But these have always been more than offset by new people. At some point the Saloon climbed onto the first page on Google, and then the number of hits exploded... as did the membership requests. At this point we have to express the rate of would-be joiners PER DAY!
I remember the Alamo period a little differently: there were nasty words, then Raoul walked- let the bitchers and moaners do it their way. The guy who took over, well, I didn't like how he was running things- many didn't- so I assured some folks who were ready to walk that a new site was under construction. I was abruptly banned for this sedition. Fortunately, Nolefan was running the ones and zeroes, so the word got out. The new site came up, the other guy left and we started over... again.
This was an amazing time. We went with the same layout, with the rooms in the same order, and everybody set to rebuilding the threads and info. We cut and pasted from the old site, rewrote the best advice spots, constructed a New Saloon TOGETHER. It was miraculous: there was no acrimony or rancour; each of us just logged on, looked through the site, found a hole where stuff should be, then started it off from scratch. The community got together and raised a barn.
The scale of the Saloon is now so much huger than that hole in the wall speakeasy I wandered into 6 years ago.
- 500 members, Jeebus!
- The Links section, already when I joined the best one on the web, is gigantic.
- Saloon policy for years was that we shouldn't bother posting too much teacher info, as there were plenty of much more thorough and voluminous sites already on it; but just through members exchanging posts, the Saloon's content grew, and now I for one frequently look through what others have posted when I feel short of ideas for class. I figure we're soon to turn a corner and step up as a major player in the free ESL resource site.
- Check out the recipe section. Some member will one day organize it into one helluva Chinese cookbook.
- The School Info site used to work in tandem with Nate's China School Review, which existed specifically as a forum to give info on Chinese schools, but the founder left China and naturally moved on to other projects. The Saloon is now the largest independent (read: answers to no school) repository of Chinese ESL school reviews online. This continues to grow.
- As a travelogue, the Saloon never meant to compete with Lonely Planet, and we still don't... much. They have the money and the scale, but we as a non-profit online board can update info far faster than a paper book ever could. As you can't ask a book a new question...
- The womenfolk requested a private room to discuss XX stuff, and got it. We XYs later set up our own. And via PM there are even more private nooks where we can enjoy communication without the peanut gallery when needed.
- Best of all, the membership itself provides a HUGE resource to everyone. When, after 6 months hiatus back home, I returned to China, then got stranded in Beijing, we set a record for most members online (since broken), as everyone checked in to see how I was getting on. We had a member in terrible condition who need to get home; we rounded up money, shepherded her from the South all the way onto a plane at Pudong Airport, handing her off through several members along the way like a mailbag through the Pony Express. We had a member stuck in a small town university being PHYSICALLY threatened by the uni's Mr. Burns, and got him safely out. There are too many examples of how we've watched each other's asses. Add to that all the couch surfing, joint travels and vacations, advice warnings, and we are
truly blessed a mutual blessing society.
Feel free to add to this list, guys.
And the future? Well, we've lost some charms of a village in exchange for growing into a town, and are in the process now of becoming a city. It's hard to follow ever post now; a few days away and the reading awaiting you is staggering. There are, not cliques exactly, but little groups that are gelling. And with a larger population come a higher incidence of conflicts.
I'm not concerned. We're getting better at labelling threads to indentify their content, so it's easy for me, for example, to skip the Fluff, Footie and Cookbook threads and horn in on the Hockey, Teaching and New threads; so I'm not so intimidated by the sheer volume of material here now. The members may have smaller circles, but we still all mix with others. Sure, there are people who don't like each other, but there's plenty of room to avoid each other, like any big-assed bar. And the conflicts get pointed out, then gentle bouncers separate the combatants until heads cool down.
The FutureI'm eager to hear ideas and predictions of what the future will hold for our beloved watering hole. I have some:
- The Links will keep us in the hub of all things Sino.
- As I said, I foresee professional rooms becoming a BIG deal. The teaching threads are a little treasure trove, and with a little organisation I could easily see us start to paste our lesson plans here, free to the world.
- Perhaps the school reviews will keep pace or even gain ground on the gigantic piles of English schools throughout China, and the Saloon will come to present an informal standard of conduct among schools... and foreign teachers.
- I'd love to see other professions- management, engineering, music, graphic design, the list is endless- establishing industry-specific areas. It could start with links and discussion, then evolve into entire rooms as teaching has.
- Raoul has long championed a Jukebox function, wherein members could play tunes right off this site. It's turned out to be a huge headache in the doing (don't ask me why- computer stuff's way over this monkey's head), but the notion hasn't died.
- 'Twould be great if a member moved to another Asian country and started Molly Hatchett's Thai Saloon. We'd sure be here for moral, technical and content support.
- We've had a few stabs at collaborative fiction and textbook writing, but so far to my knowledge no actual product has come of it. That doesn't mean it won't...
- And what about a printed Raoul? Big publishing potential...