I know, Bruno, that the Expediters Hall of Fame has been a favorite project of yours for a long time. Ideas for your consideration are respectfully submitted below.
Have you thought about simply proceeding on your own instead of trying to enroll people in a larger and more complex collaborative project? I think you might find that to be a more effective course -- effective in the sense that things can get more quickly done.
Years ago I cooked up the idea of a collaborative project to produce a history of expediting. The idea was to use the magic of the internet to assemble a group of people who would contribute and/or collect historical information about the industry. In the interests of objectivity, what would be included and excluded from the final product would be determined not by me but by the group. The project was abandoned because I quickly learned why history books and articles are produced not by committees but by individual authors.
Creating a group of people to vote on who should be in or out of an Expediters Hall of Fame may seem like the politically correct and fair thing to do, but someone still has to decide who will be in and out of the voting group and what the qualifications should be. Identifying any expediter, truck, vendor, fleet owner or carrier for inclusion in the EHOF, no matter who decides, will raise questions and criticism among outsiders about why that entity was selected when another was not.
Proceeding by yourself does not avoid these issues but proceeding with a group does not resolve them either. Given the level of response you have received to your prior attempts to build a hall of fame board, advisory group, voting body or whatever else it may be, it seems to me that proceeding on your own will get the job more quickly done.
When it comes to things that do not yet exist, people do not know what they want, but they do know what they don't want, but they don't know what they don't want until they see what it is.
I suggest that the best way to proceed is to build your hall of fame yourself. That will give people something to see and react to. You can then modify and expand the project as people offer suggestions and criticism.
That is if people react at all.
You are running a risk here, Bruno, that you will pour countless hours of time and effort into a project that people simply won't care about. You have seen it happen to people who have written books about expediting. They bring a book out only to see it ignored. You have seen it happen to people who built web sites that were intended to be as good or better than EO. They came nowhere close and then faded away. The same thing could happen to EHOF. You could put a ton of time and effort into it only to see it evaporate before your eyes.
Note also what happens when people leave expediting and move on to a new career, retirement or the cemetery. Even among prominent expediters who are widely known in the industry, when they leave, they leave. It is no different than any other job. People stay in touch with a few industry friends while they are still alive but that's about it.
There are millions of people who worked for the railroads, for example, but only a tiny percentage of them remained interested enough in things railroad to get involved in railroad museums or subscribe to a railroad magazine.
Expediting is a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the trucking industry. So tiny that FedEx Custom Critical executives once mentioned to me that many people at FedEx headquarters in Memphis do not even know the expedite division exists. Even if interest in EHOF was high among expediters, the numbers would be small because expediting is small.
The Open Forum provides further evidence of people's transient interest in the people of expediting. You can go back into years-old posts and see people who were once very active here and recognized as leaders but have since disappeared from view. I am an active member today but know that all notice of me will cease after about 30 days of inactivity. I know that because I have done that experiment. When I stop posting here, it takes about 30 days for a thread I started or posted in to disappear off the front page. After that, it is rare for anyone to refer to or post a link to anything I wrote.
Yet another indicator of people's disinterest in the people of expediting is the contractor of the year program that FedEx Custom Critical used to run. I don't know how long it ran but do know it was dropped early in the 2000's. There are people working at FedEx today who were around when the contractor of the year was recognized. I doubt you could find six people in the building who could name even one contractor of the year if asked.
Expediters who pass away live on in the memories of other expediters who knew them, but when the people who keep the memories also die, the memories die too. A hall of fame might give an expediter's story a longer run but only to the extent that the web site itself persists and others care. Frankly, most people don't.
Look at the larger trucking industry. It goes back much further than expediting. It involves millions more people. Its contribution to and participation in the history of the U.S. and Canada is huge. But is there a trucking hall of fame? Is there even a list posted somewhere of America's (greatest, most infuluential, noteworthy, famous) truckers?
I know of a trucking museum and trucking history magazine but there is no hall of fame (at least none that I have heard of). I invite you to think about why that is and then to re-think your project.
Perhaps an easier way to recognize and honor the people of expediting that you want to recognize and honor would be to establish an expediter profiles web site or a journal or blog in which you profile selected expediters, trucks, carriers of historical interest, etc. on an ongoing basis.
Another thought might be to get involved with the truck museum at the I-80 Truck Stop in Walcott and support them as a contributor of information about expediting.
