This is news that won't even disappoint a handful of people… I'm shutting down my “Lean Board” companion site that I started at www.leanboard.org in October of 2006. Nobody had posted anything in about two years and I was paying $5 a month to host it. No, I'm not shutting down the blog, just the message board. You may say, “What? I didn't know you had a message board….” Exactly.
I did some “Check” in the PDCA cycle and decided my “Action” was to kill the site and save $5 a month. Some of the history…
I started the site, partly out of frustration that the LEI board (the technology that was in place at the time) was hard to use and required people to log in just to read anything.
I had some active users for a while and I appreciate their participation. I tried hosting discussions about my book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction, and there was none.
Traffic and usage trailed off, especially after I had to make it more difficult to register. My board got on some list that Russian spammers use, apparently, because I got bombarded with guest users that I was constantly having to ban and filter out.
In the meantime, LEI had improved its forum/ message boards and no longer requires logging in to read (you can see their boards here and I encourage you to participate).
So, with no active discussion and only a few hundred users, it was an easy call to shut it down. There are so many more places to discuss Lean online now – including multiple LinkedIn groups.
I learned a few technical skills and it was an interesting project, but it was time to put the site out of its misery. Not a failure, but a learning experience. Oh well.
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Mark's new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
He is also the author of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, and the anthology Practicing Lean.
Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.
[…] Update July 2010 – I’ve shut this board down, see my blog post about this. […]