Lowell, Josh and company are shutting down Raising Kaine, and good for them. I say that because of why they stopped: they’re done. It can be tough to recognize that you’re doing something just because you’ve been doing it.
Just this past summer, some friends and I agreed to shut down our website on its 10th anniversary, a Dave Matthews Band fan site. It had an excellent run, with millions of visits, over a hundred thousand regular readers, and a vibrant community. But the lot of us running it had long since ceased to be 19-year-old DMB fans. Between Wikipedia, blogs, and official band websites, fan sites just don’t fill a purpose anymore. We were all done a few years ago, but didn’t realize it.
The kids at Raising Kaine say they’re done, and they know best. Like The Police, they went out at the top of their game.
Tao 53 (9)
To withdraw when your work is finished,
that is the Way of heaven.
Here, here! The nature of any organization is not only to survive but to grow. While this is particularly true of government bureaucracies, they are by no means the only ones guilty of this sort of inertia.
I spent 3 years around the turn of the Millenium working as a fundraiser for a 501(c)(3) in DC whose original mission had been to raise funds to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It was dedicated in 1982, but with a small staff and several hundred thousand names and addresses of motivated donors there was no impetus to shut it down. Today they continue to do some good work but have obviously experieneced the kind of “mission creep” one ought to try to avoid.
The work of all the principal people over at Raising Kaine has been generally top-notch. Good writing, good research. Great organization. Personally, I stopped reading or commenting over there some months ago when the attacks against Tim Kaine became so routine as to irreparably contradict the name and original purpose of the blog. I still wish them all well and I’m sure they’ll all go on to do more interesting and useful things.