Hello to our FAR-West family! We wanted to send you an update and some reminders!
Update: No, our registration is not yet live. We met a couple of problems in the recreation of our new registration site, so we are delaying early bird registration and hope to go live on May 5th. Celebrate Cinco de May0 by registering for our 17th annual conference in San Jose, CA! Stay tuned for those details as they become available.
Reminder #1: Though registration is not yet live, Official Showcase Submissions ARE. Here’s the link to guidelines and the application: https://far-west.org/2020_conference/official-showcase-guidelines/. Please make sure to read the guidelines and the linked Showcase Advisory carefully before filling out the application and hitting send. Official Showcase submissions end on May 4th.
Reminder #2: FAR-West Board Elections are now in progress. Ballots were emailed to FAI members who are affiliated with FAR-West on March 20th. If you did not receive it, make sure to check the email address you used when signing up for FAI membership. If you still can’t find it, please email Jerod Rivers at membership@folk.org. The election slate, dates of the election process, and FAR-West Board Guidelines can be found at this recent blog post: https://far-west.org/far-west-board-of-directors-election-slate-for-2020/. Voting will continue until April 20th. Election results will be announced on May 1st.
The FAR-West website is something new! It’s been live for a few weeks now, so we could safely move it into our farwest.org address and add safety features like https, but we didn’t want to announce it till it was mostly done. And mostly done means that a website is never really done; there are always updates and news and things to add. In our case, all of the current known bells and whistles are added; but some back end stuff still needs transferring. Please visit us where you could always find us at https://far-west.org/.
We want to thank our web-tech, Matthew Moran, as well as our esthetics team, Julie Zipperer and Carey Appel. The updated FAR-West logo and banner and 2020 brochure come from Tom Pickles. The website will continue to be updated and looked after by Matthew Moran as webmaster, and text/pages added and updated by Jeanette Lundgren.
We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge and thank Mark Kaufman for the many years he oversaw and updated and took care of our old website on Typepad. The Typepad website was created for us by our good friend, whom we miss very much, Carl Gage, who passed away in March 2017. Prior to Carl creating the website on Typepad, Russ and Julie Paris, part of the team who originally created and oversaw FAR-West, ran the website on their server. We thank all of these poeple and more for the time and patience it took to get us to this point.
There’s a lot of history there; all of it still in the archive on the typepad site which is slowly and carefully being transferred over to the new wordpress site.
Also on the new website is a Resources page (https://far-west.org/resources/) to hopefully help us all through the challenging times we are currently living in. The Resources page is also not finished, because there are new resource sites being created all the time which we want to link there for all of you to use. We want it to be as wide-reaching and comprehensive as possible. Currently linked are portals for connection, streaming sites, health resources pages, places to connect and listen on Facebook, Artist Management, Coaching, Lessons, web design and tech. If you come across any sites or businesses or resource links that should be there, please reach out to us on our contact page and we’ll make sure to include it. Thank you.
Where to connect in the meantime:
.And Storytellers! Come share your stories and open words discussions on Facebook at FAR-West Open Words.
Help Still Wanted! Not quite lastly but hardly leastly, we still have a handful of open Movers & Shakers positions to help put together the 2020 conference in San Jose, CA. Please contact coordinator@far-west.org to find out where we need your help. All positions come with training.
We hope you are all staying healthy while also finding ways to stay afloat financially. We look forward to seeing all of you very soon … our goal is October 2020!
#farwestconnects at #farwest2020 and beyond!
