This is your community. You tell us what you're most interested to see & learn.
What you've learned that inspires you, what was a revelation to you to discover?
Learning and discovery should be fun. And it's a family show so the younger generations are the ones who'll be travelling to Arnhem & Oosterbeek each year.
It's as much about enabling and inspiring their enthusiasm as much as feeding ours.
So to that end I'm incentivising. On the right hand side of your page under the Arnhem Banner is a Leaderboard for 30 day engagement. Underneath that is a link to more Leaderboards for 7 day and all-time engagement. How do you get points for engagement? Writing posts which attract likes from other members of the community. Subject matter appropriate please.
The 30-day Winner of this Competition will be announced each month, (on the 1st, so that September Winners have a slim chance to make arrangements) and all monthly winners will join me (with their plus 1 upon request) for a dedicated tour around all the major Arnhem and Oosterbeek landmarks* over the course of 2 days of each Airborne Weekend in Arnhem, every September.
If the weather is good and the group is happy, we'll do it on hire bikes. It's fun that way, cycles have right of way over cars, cyclepaths are segregated and there's an additional fitness element to it, and the beers at the end of the day are all the more welcome.
Klein Hartenstein is a well-heeled posh restaurant directly next door to the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek; the Pancake house is considerably more relaxed.
Both rated well.
Good wine at the former, good beer at the latter.
* Reasonable restrictions & conditions apply, but in particular:
+ Each winner person will only get one spot on the tour (with a plus-1 on request) and one Dinner expense covered. Your plus-1s will have to cover their Dinner expense themselves, or you will.
If it's the same winner each month, the second place spot will take the Tour prize, and so on so that we endeavour to give as many people who are contributing the chance to be shown round in a fairly small group, approx 24 people max.
There's quite a bit to see and it is better to slow it down rather than cram it all in to one day. The more people on the trail the longer it takes as well.
We won't cover travel expenses to get you to Arnhem and home again, nor accommodation - not until we put a modest subscription paywall on the community and only then if there's enough subscription income to enable it. You want a bigger, more thriving community, bring people in and get them engaging.
Special guests joining us for Dinner will be subject to availability, health etc.
This platform over all others that are out there to build and host courses is that skool is designed promote engagement with me/us the curator and with each other.
Many of us have been on battlefield Study tours where you just get talked at. I want to turn that around: There's a precedent too Arnhem is one of the most community-driven WW2 commemorations in the world. It is both Arnhem local and British School kids who are given the honour and privilege of placing flowers on the gravestones of an adopted soldier each September Sunday service at Oosterbeek War Cemetery.
The Dutch drive the importance of the commemorations each year and have done since 1945. It was the Dutch, including Jan ter Horst who began reinterring the dead from his own garden in the South East sector by the Church, and placing them in those fields where we gather each year for the Remembrance Service.
WHAT TO SAY? Ways to engage and things you might want to consider contributing:
I'm still figuring more ways to encourage and enable that. Your suggestions are welcome. Or just take the initiative
Wondering whether you guys would be open to doing a book/podcast review of an Arnhem '44 connected book that you read and then you write that review up and people can pick *your* brains on that particular book/podcast.