Ocala over 55 community bulletin board.

The following is an idea from Bob Melzer:

I have look at the blog a couple of times to see what ideas have come up. As with any endeavor communications is a basic ingredient and we need a way to get people to join in and communicate with us.  I think we need a form (like this blog) that encourages communications and from this form could come a lot of community involvement.

Getting communications started, as we can see, is rather hard. A good part of our audience does not even know we exist. Thus I think we have to give them a way to find us as we do not have the resources to find them.

To make the project manageable and of more interest to us, I think we should start out with something like the “Ocala Over 55 Communities Bulletin Board”. (No membership requirements so all could join, just getting a target audience)

We have to use the internet. It will let people that are interested in Ocala and over 55 communities find us when they are searching on the internet. Thus we will be able to start to build a network of individuals that are interested in our community.  Might think of it as the old yellow page phone book where you would go to your heading to find out who might be able to help you.

Of course we need to have heading of interest to the people that find use or else they will not continue to visit the site.

What I am thinking is a bulletin board that is broken down into a number of segments. People could pose questions in a segment and hopefully someone else could provide some insight into the problem.

For example we would have a major bulletin board heading for each over 55 Community. Within that heading items of interest to each community could be sub headings. These could be clubs, upcoming events, trips etc. Since some topics would be of interest to all communities we would also establish major headings covering Home Maintenance, Travel, Medical Services, Helping Hands, Computer etc.

As part of the overall bulletin board it might be easier to find the people that both need the help and the people willing to provide the help in this format as opposed to a group meeting in a room some place in Ocala that most people do not know exists.   What I am basically saying is we use the internet search feature to let people find us and once they do they can easily join in from the confront of their couch or maybe get more involved and start working a improved solutions to the problems presented in our on line community.