As a nonprofit dedicated to spreading and archiving Indiana music, Musical Family Tree strives to make this website the home base for all things related to the Hoosier music community. With that in mind, we're excited to launch a new forum where musicians, producers, concert promoters, videographers, and all of the other various branches on the Musical Family Tree can interact. 

To celebrate the launch of this new space, we sat down with Justin Shimp - Chair of MFT's website committee - to better understand what the new forum is all about. If you're a regular MFT reader, you're undoubtedly familiar with Shimp's work as one-half of the arts duo (and regular MFT contributors) BrainTwins. Shimp dishes on his hopes for the new message board, and drops a little MFT history in the process. Check out the interview below, and register for an account ASAP!

MFT: What is talk.musicalfamilytree.com? 

Justin Shimp: It's a new forum where users of MFT can talk about everything related to MFT. We have many topics already created for discussing new and old releases, finding collaborators/equipment, etc. Our goal is to give the community a centralized place to discuss everything MFT and to archive those conversations for the future.

MFT: How do you register for an account? 

JS: Registration isn't required if you just want to browse the conversations happening but if you want to post or comment to a thread, go to talk.musicalfamilytree.com and hit the register link. Pick your username and password and provide an email address and you will be approved to start posting on the forum.  If you have any issues please contact us at support@musicalfamilytree.com

MFT: Aren’t message boards a thing of the past? What makes you think this type of platform will be useful to the MFT community? 

JS: While some may believe that message boards are the thing of the past, having a central location online where many different topics can be discussed can help us keep organized and archive conversations in the community about local music. From my experience Facebook, and Reddit message boards are not very organized and only the most recent/most upvoted/liked information posted is available at any given time. There are many potential conversations that could benefit from not being buried in someones news feed. Having this forum will allow us to document and preserve the conversations that we have about all things MFT and use that information to improve the services we offer the community. 

MFT: How will a local concert promoter benefit from talk.musicalfamilytree.com? 

JS: The forum will keep our conversations organized, so if you are looking to promote a show or looking for a show to go to, you can easily filter out the other conversations our organization has (blog posts, playlists, album reviews, etc) by going directly to the Live Music topic in the forum. Since we are new I don't recommend the forum being the only place to promote your local show, but as we grow I hope that we can help attendance/awareness of local shows. Also I hope that the forum gives a voice to a lot of house shows/less promoted shows to help attendance of those shows as well.

MFT: How will a local musician benefit from talk.musicalfamilytree.com? 

JS: We hope that local musicians will benefit from the forums by simply having a focused place where they can talk specifically about what interests them within the MFT community. Some people want to talk gear and recording techniques, others might want to get critical feedback on their newest release. Our goal is to provide that platform to have those conversations and archive them so that everyone in the community can benefit from them in the future.

MFT: I understand “talk” has a staff-only component. Why is this necessary, and how do you think it will serve this organization internally? 

JS: Having a staff section to the board was an idea that sprung from the many conversations with multiple people that contribute to the organization only in person and via email. I personally was getting frustrated with having to search my inbox for conversations I had months ago and wished to have a central hub to quickly find the information I needed to reference for meetings/events/etc. We now have many committees that delegate the actions of the organization and staying organized is a top priority to be successful in everything we do. I hope by having a localized place to go that also is attached to the public community side will help us gain perspective on where we should focus our efforts and discuss how to better serve everyone in the community.

MFT: A message board seems to align with MFT’s original vision as a user-generated site. Talk a bit about the history of the MFT archive, and how this new platform speaks to both our past and our future. 

JS: Musical family Tree started as an FTP sharing site that morphed into an online community on the Ning network (a technology that operated and functioned very similar to myspace, but focused around one community or topic)

Ning stopped supporting the structure we had in place, and started charging for their services, so a couple years ago, we dropped ning and switched to just the archive/blog which is what you currently see now as musicalfamilytree.com. After this happened we noticed that the conversations we were having on ning were silenced or had moved to Facebook/other social media sites.

Since that time I have had many conversations with people who remember the ning site and also new people to the organization who have expressed the need to have a forum to discuss all of the various topics that our organization tries to facilitate. The creation of the new forum is an answer to that request. It's built upon one of the most popular forum software on the internet, phpBB, and will hopefully help us preserve and document the conversations about MFT that we had before. 

One big goal that the website committee has is to migrate/archive many of the conversations that happened on the old MFT ning network and put them into the forum/separate website so that everyone has access to the rich history that we have already created over the years before we had to get rid of ning. 

MFT: Our digital attention spans are already so divided between social media platforms and apps. Why should your average MFT listener invest time and energy in a new space like “talk”? OR: Why should “talk” serve as the one-stop-shop for local music communication? 

JS: Mainly, I see the forum as a place where you aren’t likely to get distracted and stay on topic. Conversations on Facebook other social media sites can easily get ignored or derailed just to the nature of them catering to all . Also we hope that this forum will exist for a long time and will be able to be preserved and archived in our growing library of all things related to local music. One great thing about phpbb is that its continually getting updated and is currently supporting a responsive website design structure which will allow anyone with any type of internet browser (mobile,desktop, tablet, etc) to access and easily read and post.

MFT: How would you advise a user to begin getting acclimated to “talk” after registering for an account? 

JS: Take a look at all of the topics and sub topics and if you have a questions or need any assistance, go to the support topic and post away! One nice feature of the forum is to get email notifications when a user posts on a topic or thread you want to follow so our website committee members have done that for all the forums and will get back with you ASAP if you encounter any issues. 

MFT: How will the moderation/management of the various threads work? 

JS: Right now moderation/management is run through MFT's website committee which is composed of a handful of people that meet each month. If you are interested in joining the website committee meetings each month or becoming a moderator of the forum, please email support@musicalfamilytree.com and we can get you the info you need.

MFT: A year or two from now, what do you hope “Talk” will have accomplished, if successful? 

JS: I hope that we start have a focused dialog that isnt currently happening on the main social media networks and that we expand our online engagement and serve our online audience better by being able to "hear" what they have to say. I also hope that it becomes the place to hear about local shows that you may not have been able to hear about otherwise because of the difficulty of piercing through the "noise" of current social media feeds on Facebook and Twitter.

MFT: Anything to add?

JS: I am very grateful for anyone who goes to the website and participates in our community online. If anyone has any ideas or wants to see a certain feature enabled please let us know in the forum or contact us at support@musicalfamilytree.com. MFT is a community service and we rely on the community to tell us what they want to see us do as an organization. We also are very open to people becoming a part of MFT and we have various committees that anyone can join to help out. This project was conceived and built because of the feedback we received from people involved with MFT, and future feedback will determine our actions in the future. Thank you!