A box pass means that one box will travel from person to person. It will take about 1 week at each stop, depending on how fast that person is at tasting tea and moving it on to the next person. Typically you add tea to cover the tea that you take, and hopefully of similar quality (or you add more if you're feeling generous). The box pass would be limited to people who have been around TeaChat for at least 3 months, maybe 6. A box typically starts to get a very large number of samples (30+), and can sometimes be a dumping ground for unused tea (should be less of a problem for pu'erh). The list is continually updated to try to avoid deadbeats. This method runs a high risk of losing a box forever to "that one guy" (or even just the Post Office).
A tea swap would involve breaking all participants into small groups of 3-5. Each person would then send 3-5 tea samples to the other 3-5 people. Depending on how people wanted to organize this, we could organize people into groups based on experience (either trying to keep people of similar experience together, or purposefully mix groups for education/training) or a variety of other ways. And organization could be based on preference of person, if we have enough people. Benefits to this include shorter wait time (ideally everybody gets tea in the first week). Probably a bit more time intensive to set up 3-5 packages, and then put in the time to taste upon receiving. We could probably open this one up to people who have been to TeaChat for 1 month.
In either of these cases, it would be nice if people posted their experiences with the tea. In the case of the tea swap, the group should try to post their experiences with their teas and compare notes. This is probably as close to an in-person tasting group as you'll get via the internet.
Please vote how you would like to participate. I think I have written the descriptions so that they favor one of the methods of the other. If you have counterpoints or pros/cons, please post. Or if you have an idea for another method, please describe it.
Oh, and I'm just stepping up here to start pushing this forward into reality. If somebody else really wants to organize this, just say the word, you won't hurt my feelings.
