Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to FogottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum,
and as some of you longtime viewers may remember, Forgotten Weapons didn't always have a video every single day.
In fact, when Forgotten Weapons started it was not a video channel at all. It was ForgottenWeapons.com,
and it was intended to be an archive for historical firearms information that was otherwise
at jeopardy of being lost, or if not lost, not easily accessible. And I wanted to take this information,
make sure that it's preserved, and make sure that it's readily available for people who are interested.
Either, you know, on the whole scale of interested from a very serious research academic perspective, or just curious.
So, I started off this blog almost ten years ago now, with photographs and manuals and trial reports and this sort of stuff.
And then I also had occasionally video, and video was a fantastic, still is a fantastic, medium to explain how a lot of things worked.
And video has overtaken the project to the point that I do a video every day now, and I love doing it,
I don't plan to stop, I don't plan to reduce it.
However, it's been nagging at me a bit that the website that I started as an archive, it is still a video archive,
but I wish that it was possible to bring it a little more back to my original vision of it as a data repository.
And so what I would like to announce today is my intention, my hope, my desire, to get back to that.
Now the problem is I can't do that and also continue to do video. I simply don't have enough time.
If we could magically add a couple days to the week, maybe, but obviously that's not gonna happen.
So what I ... would like to do is actually hire a person full-time, a qualified person whose job will be to
oversee ForgottenWeapons.com as a website archive database,
and provide them with a budget to actually pay researchers, many of whom are out there
doing research, digging up really interesting documents and archival gems.
And they're doing it out of just passion in the subject, the same reason that I started doing this.
And Forgotten Weapons has grown to the point that I would really like to be able to kind of spread this around
and help support the people who are doing a lot of this primary source research.
Because it's not the sort of thing that I do myself anymore, to the extent that it ever was.
Now, I'm kind of violating one of my own core principles here, I have always gone with the theory of
do the work, provide the value, and then ask people to support it if they think it's worth it.
I think that the reason that a lot of crowdfunded projects fail is because they ask for support first,
before having produced anything to stand on. So I've always tried to bootstrap Forgotten Weapons as much as possible.
The problem is I can do a little bit of that ... with this new project, but I can't do all of it.
Bringing on a full-time employee, especially one who has real credentials and experience and expertise.
I don't want, this sounds bad to say, I don't want an amateur enthusiast.
I want someone who I know can do this professionally and well, and I have a couple people potentially in mind.
I don't want to name names because I haven't discussed it with them yet.
But this requires being able to offer them a competitive salary. It's not something that I can really just bootstrap.
And on top of that I need to be able to provide them, or I want to be able to provide them, with
a monthly budget to go out there and support the other researchers who are actually doing this research.
Give them a way to, really to monetise the work that they're doing, which is the sort of thing that you just can't monetise in most systems.
So I would like to be able to use the the size of the audience that Forgotten Weapons has to make that a possibility.
I think it's a fairly noble plan spreading some of this around,
and using this to help preserve the information that's out there, but lost or locked away.
We'll have some discussion in a little while, at some point, about the differences between
publicly accessible collections and museum collections,
and how a lot of official formal archives, they do a great job of preserving documentation,
but at the same time they make it difficult to access easily. So that's something that I would like to try and help fix.
And of course, the reason that I'm saying this on video is because it is all dependent on you guys.
So this can't be funded with advertising; I guess maybe it could be, but advertising I find relatively obnoxious online.
I don't want Forgotten Weapons to become this myriad of banner ads and click baity junk.
And at the same time the major ad servers out there, basically Google AdSense,
are not willing to run advertising on firearm-related sites.
So advertising is not an ideal model. I would much rather support it with you guys. I'd rather have you guys support it directly.
Hopefully you guys have the same opinion on the viability of advertising,
I would love to ... continue to have Forgotten Weapons to be an oasis of ad-free content on the Internet.
So, to that end I am going to be adding a specific goal on Patreon
for where I think the funding needs to be to make this financially viable.
I'm going to be tweaking a couple of the perk levels,
I want to find some perks that can really help kick back to those of you who support this project.
At the same time, the whole point is that this information is freely, publicly and readily available.
So I'm not gonna put anything behind a paywall,
I haven't yet figured out exactly what the right balance is, how I can reward the people who do specifically contribute,
without infringing on the core principle of the project.
So I'm probably gonna put in like a placeholder perk level or type on Patreon for that.
But making a few tweaks with the idea of making this a reality. I would love to have it happen in the next couple of months,
if that's possible. It would begin with finding the person who can be an administrator and run this site,
someone who can do some of this work themselves, but also largely work to coordinate with other researchers who are out there.
It will almost certainly involve revamping Forgotten Weapon's site to make it a little bit less of a blog, make it more of...
give it a good foundational archival system, a relational database back-end,
to allow networking and access of this information.
Probably also add more to the blog side of it, so it's more than just my own video posts.
But also, of course, posting when new material gets added to the archive,
and also aggregating some of the other content of this type that's out there on the web.
Even if it's not actually being hosted on Forgotten Weapons, I would like to make this a site that is the hub for
archival firearms information that right now is really scattered around the internet.
So if this all sounds like something that you would be interested in, that you would like to support
with a couple bucks a month, I would love to have your support.
If this just completely fizzles and goes down in flame,
it will make me quite sad, but I will continue doing what I do right now.
This is something I would like to add to Forgotten Weapons.
So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Of course I have a link to Patreon in the description text below.
You can head over there and take a look at what's been changed and sign up,
if you have not at this point, or change your pledge level if you think that this is worth contributing more for.
Totally up to you guys, whether this can happen or not will depend on you.
So I will be checking back in with you guys with some updates on this when things happen,
it won't be immediately. Again as I said, this isn't something I can quite just bootstrap entirely as much as I would like to.
So, that's it. ... I've got actually a particularly cool gun for you guys coming on video tomorrow,
so we'll be back to our regularly scheduled work.
Thanks.