TrekUnited doesn't have the active membership it used to have, and the projects we take on have to embrace that change, to celebrate it rather than ignore it. We can't field the same slick and sophisticated, graphics heavy, high quality pdf magazine that HFO had become. For that matter, we needed to reconsider the content that we were carrying, to give our members something they would want to read and to give the fan production community a venue to showcase their wares. Change for change's sake is not necessarily good and what I had to work out was: what needed to change, what opportunities were out there waiting for us to take advantage of them... and could one match the other? Change can equal challenge though. Just look around you and you'll see many traditional media struggling to come to terms with new technology. This is nowhere more evident than in the printing and publishing industry where the eBook has finally come of age, bringing with it all the problems and possibilities of the digital world. We at TrekUnited see this as a change for the better and with the help of Richard Merk have started using this new technology to bringing the Roddenberry Dream to a wider audience in the form of fan fiction novels in ePub and Mobi format. However, something there is that doesn't love... change. Not everyone likes the idea that the words which they read are just a fleeting collection of electrons that flicker across a screen, gone as soon as we move on to the next page, the next screen. They like the solidity of a book, its constancy, the neat rows of paperbacks ranked in their bookcase, a collection of memories which hold something special for them. To me, the Roddenberry Dream represents this very challenge: how can we embrace the opportunities that technology offers us in a caring and humane manner? How can we explore the challenging worlds of the unknown, take up the gauntlet and tame technology for society's betterment, without disenfranchising those who don't feel comfortable at the cutting edge? Surely, I 6
TrekUnited's Hailing Frequencies Open