Kaiser Research Online has begun a trial designed to foster greater interaction between John Kaiser and KRO members as well as between members. KRO has set up a Slack workspace called KaiserResearchOnline.slack.com. All paid up KRO and SVH members will receive an invite from Slack to the email associated with their KRO account. Getting Started with Slack is a short presentation as to what to expect. The KRO Slack workspace membership is available only to paid up KRO or SVH members. If the KRO or SVH membership lapses the Slack membership will be deactivated. It is a free bonus to a KRO or SVH membership which a member can ignore or accept, and which KRO can deactivate at its discretion. Slack members can deactivate their Slack accounts any time but will need to contact KRO to reactivate it if they change their mind. When you accept the invite we recommend that you choose a pseudonym for your "Full Name" and "Display Name" and make it the same for both unless you want everybody to know who you are (your email is your login name and is not visible or accessible inside Slack). If you are not a KRO member, Register Here, if you are a lapsed member, Renew Here, and if you want to learn more about KRO, Learn More Here. Check out the Slack Help Center to find out more about it.

A Slack workspace is similar to a Facebook closed group but without the advertising clutter and "like" based popularity culture. It is designed for collaboration and discussion which is why Slack workspaces are becoming very popular for businesses and other organizations whose members are not in one physical location. Slack offers both free and paid versions. Ours is the free version. In another sense Slack Workspaces are public forums such as Stockhouse or HotCopper, except that any individual can create one and retain complete control of its membership and content. In addition the Slack workspace is closed from the public and search engines, which is why they cannot function as marketing gateways to pump or bash stocks to an open-ended audience. It is thus the perfect vehicle for "investment clubs" or any aspiring member fee-based "newsletter writer".

We suspect that as word gets around how easy it is to set up and operate a Slack workspace there will be an explosion of private clubs focused on resource juniors or niches within the sector. This will not harm Kaiser Research Online because in 2019 we will be shifting to a single annual fee based membership model based on KRO as a resource sector information portal with a very powerful search engine, though John Kaiser will still publish comments about companies and offer favorite picks. (All new memberships expire on December 31, 2018 to allow us to offer a new membership package to everybody.)

A Slack workspace has 2 basic dimensions. One is the "channel", a topic to which comments can be posted. In the KRO Slack workspace only KRO staff have the ability to create channels. The channels "bottom-fish" and "SVH-picks" would be devoted to discussions about those companies. Slack allows you to set up alert access on both your desktop or mobile phone. When John Kaiser publishes a new KRO comment he can also create a new post inside Slack with the link to the KRO comment. New Slack members automatically join most of the channels when they activate, but they can unjoin those they are not interested in. Members can also control which channels send them notifications of new postings.

The current collection will change overtime and certain channels will be archived. The "errors" channel is where members can report a web site glitch or a company data error. The "news-clippings" channel is where JK would place links to interesting articles, which other members can also do. The "live-sessions" channel allows JK to schedule a time when he will be online to engage in chats with members. The "kro-search-engine" channel is to discuss ways to use the search engine as well as the KRO site in general. Other channels such as "Nevada", "diamonds", "Pilbara" and "scandium" are devoted to specific topics. If there is popular demand for a channel devoted to a particular stock, KRO will create it.

The "share-collective" channel is intended for discussions about The Share Collective (TSC), an online portal similar to KRO but an interactive one where its members can create and share outcome visualizations, "follow" companies, projects and members, and post comments. It will eventually be a fee-based membership system but because it is still at beta-testing stage anybody can register their interest and when they receive their full registration invite email become a free active member during the beta testing stage. In the case of TSC disclosing one's true identity is prohibited, which makes sense given the disclaimer that "anybody who shares anything within The Share Collective is assumed to have a conflict of interest and the goal of influencing the market and everybody else in order to benefit from that conflict". The ban on true identity is required because everybody starts with zero reputation within TSC and can only evolve this ability to influence others through their sharing activity within TSC, all of which is available for TSC members to study and judge. When fully operational TSC will be a complex "wisdom of crowds" based eco-system that will revolutionize how the market thinks about and bets on resource juniors. The KRO "share-collective" Slack channel is a forum for John Kaiser and KRO members to discuss activity within TSC. John Kaiser is present in TSC with the user name JohnKaiser because his role is to act as a tutor and guide rather than a predator trying to evolve an influential reputation.

Below is an example of postings in a channel:

The other dimension is "direct messaging" which allows members of the Slack workspace to send private messages to each other. They can even create direct messaging groups. In the free version nobody, including the workspace owner, has access to those messages other than the parties to the direct messages. Since a Slack member can direct message any other Slack member, this is potentially a great heap of trouble for John Kaiser. Of course, if they get so fed up that they let their membership lapse, that's the end of the water cooler gossip. KRO plans to use direct messaging mainly for dealing with membership issues which are currently dealt with by phone and email. An important inspiration for setting up the Slack workspace is that John Kaiser often gets emails or phone calls from members asking about a stock. Giving an intelligent response uses up a lot of time which benefits only that member while not responding probably does not make that member want to renew. A much better solution is for the member to post the question to the relevant Slack channel where everybody can see the response from John when he gets around to answering it. Sometimes it will even prod John to publish a formal comment through KRO. It also allows John to gauge where member interest is currently focused. KRO Slack workspace is an experiment and we request patience as we learn how this will work out.