My colleague Michael Conlon and I would like to discuss with you all tomorrow (Friday) afternoon, via the chat feature here, our plans and ambitions for the new and improved TheWildGeese.com (which we lovingly call TheWildGeese.com 2.0). We are investing tens of thousands of dollars into a new site design and development of new features and products. Needless to say, we want these enhancements to help make our venues for exploring the Irish experience worldwide an inviting, more accessible, convenient place, one that will forge lasting ties of friendship and shared knowledge. 

These new benefits on offer are to include a membership option that we envision bringing exclusively to members:

1) substantial discounts on a wide and varying number of Irish heritage-related products and services, including travel, books, family-history tools, music, film, DVDs, live performances, food, lodging, and drink.

2) highly focused and guest-curated immersion experiences each week in this members-only community, tied in to new content on TheWildGeese.com.

3) conferences and other kinds of engagement with newsmakers and subject matter experts.

4) access to select long-form historical narratives, always a staple of our 14 years online.

5) support for historical preservation -- exploring and publicizing within our pages looming threats to the survival of Irish heritage, and earmarking 10% of membership dues to groups that YOU will help us select, groups working to preserve the history of the Irish worldwide.

6) the opportunity for those with special interests within Irish heritage to more readily share and focus on their particular common passions. Ning, the provider of this platform, facilitates the creation of communities within this overarching community, so we can build communities within communities here -- for those here in a particular locale, say Chicago, Dublin, or London, and those with particular interests, say, in the American Civil War, the Irish Brigade of France, Female Goddesses in pre-Celtic Ireland, the life and times of 'Speranza,' finding bargains in Irish-heritage related travel, The Freedom Struggle, Medieval Ireland. Whatever the Irish experience of interest.  we can create a group to explore and inform it. 

7) anyone who visits the site will have access to more than 100 of our most popular features, featured on up to a dozen content channels (sections), which will incorporate multimedia, video and audio that our team of subject matter experts and writers will create ourselves.

8) creation of TheWildGeese.com Hall of Fame, which will allow our members to nominate and select every year new entrants, spotlighting those extraordinary historical figures throughout the history of the Irish who have brought the most luster to the heritage of the Irish worldwide.

The time for our discussion here is 4pm EDT (9pm Irish time), 1p PDT. Please RSVP here if you can. Thanks. We deeply appreciate your support for our work. We want and need your feedback as we go forward.  Gerry Regan (My partner and WG Managing Editor Joe Gannon won't be able to join us for this session, unfortunately, due to previous commitments.)