It looked the part but it was the Jetty Tapas tee-shirt on display that started the conservation.

Keith, minus a leg and with a few more miles under his belt, was shovelling the rice, cutting the baguette. And the bit I liked, there were none of those plastics forks to be seen anywhere. You get a mussel shell, a piece of bread and if those don’t work  how about some finger food? Different. And Jetty Tapas in it’s time, was definitely different. Knysna at both its best and its worst. Times when the town was driven by imagination and an energy it appears to lack today. It was Bitou Crafts, Old Drift Chalets and the raft at the Heads. Funny Birds, Feathers, Die Oude Fabriek and Mitchell’s Draft.

And in between shovelling paella around the pan, Keith is talking about the Parks Board and doing it all again, even though the Knysna he knew has changed. Thesen Island has changed. But so what, why not? Even if it doesn’t quite turn out quite the way its intended we need to keep doing stuff, to keep dreaming and reaching for the unattainable.

And if not, why not turn to the web? It offers us, that is all of us, a cost effective advertising platform and an unparalleled opportunity for community building. Eighteen months ago we approached Find It SA with a proposal to launch Ask the Locals as a community build, personal empowerment and local marketing programme. We are now in a position to issue a challenge to local businesses that coincides with the print of our first advert and the distribution of the Find It Knysna & The Garden Route 2011 edition.

Generally when anyone starts talking about social responsibility, most people pat their pocket books to make sure that it is still there and then they start edging their way to the emergency exit. And business people in Knysna have developed a sixth sense for this sort of stuff. So we are not going to go there. Community building and a well developed sense of social responsibility is an essential part of any healthy society. But in this day and age nice ideas are just not going to fly.

Most of us whether we know it or not, are in survival mode.

But that is no excuse to stop thinking, to stop feeling and to start dodging ones responsibilities. And that is the reason we have come up with a programme that we believe offers everyone a little bit of everything. The internet is not complicated. It’s only people that get complicated. So at the out set we want to keep this simple and more importantly we want to maximise our returns from minimal or preferably zero input costs. This then is the challenge.

We would like to persuade the various business centres, malls and industries in town to challenge our local schools, the stay at home mums, retirees and would be writers. To invite and incentivise them to submit two hundred word essays about the businesses in as well as about stuff that makes this town work. A competition where the businesses undertake to choose the best articles, negotiate with the writers and to buy their work. We will then place these as posts somewhere on the web where Google can find the content. Where each article serves as an advert strategically placed where it will be found and where it will keep getting found for years and even decades to come. And found by visitors who have been identified and who are are being deliberately targetted as buyers who are looking for the products and services being advertised. An advert which feeds interested visitors directly to the businesses buying the written work produced by an emerging writer who needs an alternative source of income.

This with the objective of identifying people skills which, with the help of the local media, we can promote. Firstly to a national market. Then if thats successful why not an international market?

How do we attract more money to this town? Do we really need more tourist busses? Is it the only way we can think of to kick start our economy? Are we ever going to get the volumes we need? These are questions we can debate until the cows come home. But rather than talking about stuff we can do very little about we have put forward a suggestion which will get exposure, which will add value to the businesses that participate. And if we can get it to work, if we can start building a work from home cottage industry, a community of web content writers earning foreign currency, who knows, we might just hook a tour operator or two and a few more bus loads of those happy smiling tourists who fuel this feast and famine existance we have all get so used to.

I spend most of my time working with web sites, getting them to show up where they should on the search engines and I thought it would be interesting to see if we can’t use the web to make things a whole lot easier for local businesses. Unfortunately very few people use the net the way it could be used and whilst its not something I really want to spend my time doing, I believe we can change that.

The sites that are listed in the Site Menu could all be developed as micro-businesses, without too much effort. And if anyone is interested you are more than welcome to get involved. It’s all free, can all be done in your own time and once you have opened a few doors there is no limit to what you could realistically achieve. All you require is a bit of imagination and the determination to make it happen.