Hi all

well it's been a very busy few weeks but we're ready to announce that as from today the EOT is open again.
Below is a synopsis of the key changes.

We have acquired the domain name www.etsyorganicteam.com and this will be the new EOT site for our blog/business/forums etc. It also has a shop front that feeds back to members shops and we will have 2 items per member in there. Those items and our blog will feed into the EOT twitter as well as manually feeding in organic blog entries that members may wish to submit.

Re: the etsyorganicteam twitter and Etsy Earth.  We are aware that there has been some confusion.  To make it clear - Etsy Organic Team and Etsy Earth are two seperate teams. The EOT twitter is now being run by Stacy.

We will retain the Flickr group for photo's which will feed into the slide shows on the website.

We are going with the concept of organic teams - i.e teams by category and each team will be headed up by
Category Wizards. A key part of the Wizards job will be to approve or deny applicants for their category. You can find the handbooks that detail all the admin roles/responsibilities under the members area on the site: http://www.etsyorganicteam.com/eot-discussions.html

What we have agreed is that each category needs at least one Wizard - i.e no wizard = no category.

We are also going to be taking dues as well as having an application form that everyone will be asked to complete. The dues will be $12 for new members and $10 for the 1st year for previous EOT members. All admins will get the discount rate each year.

As we are now taking dues, and because trying to monitor incremental increases in the % of organic listings was too time consuming, we are reverting back to the original criteria of one organic listing being eligible for team membership.

Applications for B&B are being capped initially and limited to sellers who were members of the old EOT.  Wizards from that category will ultimately decide when to re-open their category to the wider Etsy community.  Currently there is only one Wizard for this category.  As this was a huge category we ask B&B applicants to be patient as there may be some delays in processing their applications.

Any questions?  Please post in the forums on the site.

Thank you all for you patience with this and we hope you will find that it was worth the wait.  Onwards and upwards EOT!