In creating our framing questions, focus questions, and potential tools for analysis, we ran into several roadblocks. We started by trying to craft our framing question and became stuck in the object of wilderness and connecting it to our greater project as a whole. When we approached the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs website, we noticed that it was completely outdated and counterintuitive. Many of the purposes listed on their website were vague at best and our group struggled to maintain our goal of analysis instead of merely trying to create a list of things that were wrong and how to bring the website into present day format. However, these alterations gave us a good starting place from which to formulate our focused question.
We worked backwards following our interest regarding how to modernize and make relevant this organization’s website, and came to the conclusion that we were going to focus on demographics of these organizations. We posed the question: Does the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs have the networking capabilities to become/remain relevant in today’s society? As we worked to broaden our focus to a larger framing question we noticed traces of classical environmentalism in the website’s wording of purposes and aims. We decided to pit generational views of environmentalism against demographics with the purpose of helping us develop our framing question. We eventually settled on: Does the type of environmentalism focused on by an organization attract specific demographics? Once we dropped the idea of wilderness as a focus, it became easier to create a framing question. We still, however, need to edit this question so that it is more provocative.
We believe that there will be a correlation between the demographic trends among the organizations under FWOC that then speak to the larger members of FWOC. Right now, FWOC is not catering to the correct demographic group to revitalize their organization and we now have the questions and ideas for tools to help to address this problem.