maia_bob | Seven weeks so far…

wow - that's an impressive map! Nicely demonstrated.

I just wish, on reflection, that a certain post made it more clear some of the reasons we're considering it in our wheelhouse, and that this _is_ the start of the public discussion for implementation, not that it's a completely done deal and already planned.

/sigh. Alcohol and caffeine.

We could have done this better :(

I can only say I am making detailed notes for the future handling of things.

*offers Irish coffee*

I think, "We could have done this better," is a t-shirt I need, because it describes accurately something like 90% of what every organization ever does.

Yeah, we could print them for a lot of people.

I finally wore out my "Be REASONABLE, do it MY WAY" shirt that I bought because one of my SSOs sniggered uncontrollably when I pointed it out.

My headstone is probably going to read "I just make this shit up."

The past board president at one of the nonprofits I manage, who is...er...a very strong-willed person...well, at the other nonprofit SHE was involved with, they have a road going straight up a hill. Their board has a running joke about how they should name it the [Past Board President] Way.

I am in training (and have been for many years) to not leave that legacy behind me.

Yeah, me too. *G*

A certain post could only have made that clearer if that was, er, true. But since the communication from Board made it clear that this was a done deal, there was only so much that could be done vis-a-vis external communication.

I was wondering about that. Why the decision not to have more input from elsewhere?

(Not attacking here, I can think of several reasons for such a decision. But I find it odd that absolutely nothing was mentioned about it.)

First up, I will never assume I'm being attacked and thank you for asking the question :)

Second, the Board is drafting up a post so you'll get an official response.

Third, me rambling... I think there were a lot of factors, some of which were apparent to me as a new board member, and some are slowly emerging as I follow all the reactions.

Apparently last year there was a lot of discussion about what the role of the Board actually was, and whether it was a 'lead and guide' kind of thing or more of a 'serve the wishes of the community' kind of thing - not that they are mutually exclusive :p One approach does lend itself to a little more in-Board decision making over community-consultation though - not that they don't both happen, it's a sliding scale.

There was also a metric ton of discussion about Meta (of which I have read much of the past discussion but by no means all of it) and some very heated views about whether to include or exclude. That paired with said lack of clarity about who could actually make that decision, made this an exhausting and difficult discussion.

When we convened as a board for 2013 we revisited (or visited in my case) the issue, and the history, and found that we didn't have conflicting views. I think that came as something of a relief after the months of debate. There was also a stronge sense that this was a policy issue: whether meta fell under transformative works as we defined them for AO3 and that setting this kind of policy is a Board level task.

I think this is where we could have handled it better - we were clear that we wanted the decision made, that we were in agreement on the outcome, and that we felt it was reasonable for the Board to make it.

What we didn't do, is the next level of organisation / communication where we got all the affected committees together and jointly worked out what the next steps were going to be RE: implementation.

Now this is just my opinion and it's early days, which means my analysis is still developing so I'd really like to know what other people's perceptions are (I always want to know). Please let me know if this doesn't in any way match your experiences, and help me (and the Board) do better by the OTW and the fannish community.

Edited (typos breeding in my comments :() 2013-02-18 13:32 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed explanation, that makes sense! I don't see any problems with the Board making a reasonable decision after extensive debate. We all want to have our say all the time, but there also comes a point where you have to trust the people you elected to make intelligent decisions on your behalf.

FWIW, I agree with the decision about meta so I obviously don't mind too much how we got to it. But if I'd been of the opinion that meta doesn't belong on the AO3, I imagine I'd be a lot more cranky now. Maybe it would have been nice at some point to see a list of the issues the Board was considering, so that everyone could feel assured that their Important Personal Opinion was already among the things under discussion - or make a comment if they had an objection or argument that wasn't on the list yet.

I guess for me, it was just a little weird and frustrating to hear "We're talking about it" for months and months and months and have absolutely no idea on what part the Board was stuck ;)

My pleasure, I'm glad it seems to make sense.

...a list of the issues the Board was considering... that's a good idea. I'll talk to the Board and see what we can do. While we're past the decision-making point, we can strive for as much transparency as possible in our comunication.

I wasn't actively part of that months long discussion so I may need to be corrected here but I would say:

Performance - what if the AO3 gets swamped
Functionality - we don't have it (yet)
Resources - who is going to code said functionality?
Policy - how do we define and manage Meta?

Certainly they are things I am concerned about!

Edited 2013-02-19 01:18 (UTC)

I could be wrong, but I got the impression Sam was saying it's a done deal in that we're explicitly allowing meta, but it's not a done deal in how that will be implemented.

This. I was actually even confused by the original message from Board: until all this elaboration (and elsewhere), I had received that the message was along the lines of "we shall welcome everything you call meta, starting tomorrow!" Having had that clearer in the first post...ah, well. Learning experience for Board, and for us: howl louder, next time! ^^

...first they come in twos and yea shall build an ark!

Learning! Promise!

One thing we've already noted that needs doing from a Communications perspective is putting together clearer guidelines for major announcements like this. We haven't had one of this scope since I've been on Communications (that I can recall) and our regular guidelines for committee posts don't seem to quite cover the scope of this - which requires more advance notice and collaboration in crafting the announcement, anticipating responses (and either integrating them into the post or making note of how we'd like to reply), and clarifying who is responsible for responding to feedback (or different types of feedback) ahead of time.

*sends all the love* Just so you know, Support adores Comms so much right now.

Yes, this :)

I'm not sure I can plus one this emphatically enough.

Hi Curtis, I hope you (and maia_bob) don't mind me dropping this comment here, but frankly, trying to find official contact info for OTW people makes me cranky. I wanted to give you some feedback on the form of the post, not the content.

When I read the post the first time, I got to the line, "use of our resources is consonant with our purview and mission," and I burst out laughing. Sorry, but I did. Then, because I'm a bit cynical, I started wondering what truth you were hiding in the jargon weeds.

Today, I stumbled across a readability tool today: http://www.readability-score.com/

It uses the standard formulas most writers are familiar with and gives instant results.

So I tried the post in that readability test and it came out with a grade level of 11 and a reading ease of 56.

I tested the most recent news post about the support chat and it was a bit lower grade/higher ease.

Then I grabbed the first fic I could find on the AO3 with more than 1,000 kudos and 30,000 hits. Grade 5/Ease 86. I tried another and got Grade 3/Ease 87.

I think this a real problem with official communications. The posts are long, complex, often shy away from making points bluntly and plainly and do hide things in the jargon. Posts are also written like the expected audience is a US anglophone college grad.

I believe this is contributing to the form and amount of angry pushback you're getting sometimes, and this time in particular.

There are varying levels of language skills in your audience, non-anglophones, people like me who are very much not college grads, young people, etc, and I don't think this post hit anywhere near even the median reading level of AO3 users.

Put that together with the Hi! So glad you commented!! Here's some boilerplate text in response!!! replies and the post is bound to piss off and alienate people who are much less cynical than I.

I'm saying, therefore that not just straight talk, but some straight-sounding talk is needed by users.

Thanks for your time Curtis, and I wish you all the best.

That's a cool tool - thanks for sharing it. I get 7.3 / 77 for this post but less for other posts, I need to work on that.

...and now I'm reminded of xkcd's up Goer Five again.

Hm, so to me it looks like the cons still outweigh the pros in sheer... weight, but even if they don't, then some / more consideration should have been shown (as in outspoken acknowledgement; as in formal, not private) to those most affected by the cons. Instead, in-org communication has... glossed over the affectedness of some of the committees most affected by the cons.

I'm not even sure how much I *can* comment? And how much we're actually *supposed* to only do in private messaging / rants?

(Yeah, I thought I was done after ranting at you in private, but it seems I do have ~feelings spilling over.)

You are welcome to feel at me in public or in private :)

Yeah, for me it came down to a strong sense that the line between Meta and 'pure fanwork' was not so much a line as a sliding scale - and I couldn't honestly draw a line where one started and the other ended.

After that it felt like an ethical decision - why include some fanworks and not others?

I am deeply sorry that some committees are feeling the affects so negatively. Comms (who are doing amazing work) and the Board are answering public questions, and Board is working on more communications which I hope will help.

I understand AD&T are feeling particularly hard done by right now :(

Edited (darn typos breeding in my comments) 2013-02-18 12:36 (UTC)

I am selfishly extremely glad that Wiki doesn´t have to care about the meta-on-ao3 discussion at all. Whew. I only looked at it from a safe distance, but it seemed like such a messy discussion. It looks to me like principles (our mission includes meta, meta is cool, let´s have meta) vs. practicalities (what does that mean for the committees involved, how do we define it, can the archive handle it, can we handle it), and while I´m fine with principles winning, I wish there were some better answers for the practicality concerns.
A discussion about what the role of the Board is would fall directly into this and of course make it much more difficult.

Your time will come!

Ahem. I sincerely hope not, and yes, we're a messy bunch it seems. I think we'll improve rapidly though, this is a hangover issue with a lot of history riding on it.

*hopes*

I love meta, and I've certainly written a lot more of it over the years than I have fanfic, but I'm really, really worried about the sustainability of the archive at our current rate of growth, and I'm concerned that "we don't have the resources to do this" can be trumped by "we want to", especially without staff or users having input. :(

...I'm really, really worried about the sustainability of the archive ... - that's a totally valid concern and I agree it's an important one.

If it helps, I would not have agreed to this if we weren't in a decent financial position re: throwing tech at it, and I would not have agreed if I thought we would suddenly have to produce a massive amount of code. I do think we can manage this without radically changing the AO3 roadmap. We already have an active art, podfic and vidding posting presence despite not having the functionality to support it.

Yes, meta will add to that, and it will add to the pressure to resolve it.
No, I don't think this means we have to resolve it immediately.

I'm unhappy with the perception that ...we don't have the resources to do this" can be trumped by "we want to", especially without staff or users having input. :(..., is there any way I can address this with you?

Edited 2013-02-18 23:30 (UTC)

We already have an active art, podfic and vidding posting presence despite not having the functionality to support it.

This concerns me: the larger the presence of art, podfic, and vids on the archive before the archive has the functionality to support them, the more issues I see down the road. IMO, meta will be easier to fold into the archive than art, podfic, and vids simply because it is text based, but the fact that those have already been welcomed without the functionality necessary to sustain them long-term is a concern to me.

I'm a vidder, and just yesterday I was looking at if I want to put my vids on AO3, and I decided not to because the archive just isn't set up with anything but fic in mind. It becomes really obvious when you go to "post new" and everything is tailored to posting fic. I sent a message to support with feedback -- a vidder wishlist really -- about what I'd want before I put my vids there (which in retrospect maybe wasn't the best timing if they are currently getting slammed with support tickets regarding meta), but the whole thing makes me nervous if AO3 becomes the place to post everything before it's been tailored to fit the needs of anything but fic writers.

(It also doesn't help that, while I know that the Torrent of Our Own is somewhere down the road, it's never been clear to me if the OTW/AO3 had any plans apart from that for making the archive vidding friendly. Not to mention, "somewhere down the road" is a timeframe without reference.)

Anyway, I know that you guys are working hard and dealing with a slew of other issues right now, and while I'm concerned about it as a vidder, I'm also not angry or upset with the OTW/AO3/you/anyone about it. It's just that I hope that the OTW/AO3 is aware of the issues moving forward and is working to find ways to actively fix them so that everything that isn't fic doesn't continue on the archive in this weird out-of-place limbo.

And, for the record, I'm happy that meta is allowed on the archive (my concerns above, aside) and I'm finding your posts very interesting. Sometimes it's hard to get a sense of how and what the OTW is doing from the outside, so I really appreciate it when people commit to making posts about their work in the org and their experiences with it.

Thank you commenting, it's good to know people are reading my posts - helps keep me motivated to continue :)

I agree with everything you've said, we don't have the support for non-text fanworks, the AO3 interface is heavily biased towards text-fanworks right now, and we don't have a precise time-table for how/when we can change this.

I love vids, and live with a vidder myself. I'd dearly like to see more progress on this and hope to be more involved with the project now I'm back to being actively involved with OTW. I certainly plan to be a seeder if we can get a Torrent Of Our Own (TO3) up and running.

May I assume you've seen the Fan Video Roadmap? Hosting vids is not in our immediate future (that's part 5. Integration of the TO3 into the AO3), but in the meantime the AO3 can be tweaked to provide an interface that means embedding vids doesn't have a bunch of text-specific fields.

The updated AO3 Roadmap is currently in draft and under review (not AD&T's fault it's taken so long, Board is bottleneck right now). We've got very limited coder resources so we can't commit to timeframes but at present Review and rewrite of existing code to prepare for fanart and multimedia posting is scheduled for the current version or phase (0.9). You may have noticed the AO3 footer currently reads otwarchive v0.9.4.2 - we're already neck deep in some of the stability and performance improvements planned for 0.9 \o/

So yes we're aware of the issues, we're working to fix them, we (and I) appreciate them being brought to our attention. It keeps us focused and reminds us they are important.

*grins* ...if you're interested, we could probably do with people who want to propose designs for the new posting interface... *waves temptingly* ...no obligation, I tend to try and recruit people who show interest :)

I hope I've answered your questions, if I haven't let me know and I'll keep trying!

Edited (missing word :() 2013-02-20 00:34 (UTC)

I've definitely seen the vidding roadmap. That's part of my frustration, actually. While embedding (#4) and resources (#1) are available, the other steps seem to be entirely in limbo, at least from my view on the outside. Additionally, I haven't seen any official discussion of tweaking the AO3 interface to make it more accessible to vids, though I have seen it in the periphery in discussions of both art and meta on AO3. I also haven't really seen any official discussion of updating/revising/keeping current vidding resources (#1), though that doesn't surprise me, as the resources deal with only a limited number of vidding concerns (legal, technical as related to the AO3, academic) that largely won't need constant updating.

As for volunteering ... it's not that I would be opposed, I've definitely considered it, but at the moment it looks like volunteer intake is paused indefinitely. In the past I hadn't tried to volunteer because I didn't have the time and then, later, because there were so many stories of volunteer burnout that I was pretty wary of getting involved. (Plus I don't really care about all parts of the OTW equally and many of the parts I care less about seem to be at the forefront.) By the time the OTW seemed to have gotten a better handle on the volunteer burnout situation, the intrest form was closed. Soooooooooo. That's the story there.

And, for the record, this is the wishlist of things I sent to support:

1. I'd really like to be able, when I go to "Post New", to be able to first choose if I am posting a fic, a vid, or (though these don't apply to me) podfic/art/multimedia/other.

2. After choosing "Vid" I'd love if there were some different options that are tailored to vidding instead of fic. Since vidding includes both visual and aural stimuli, it's a pretty integral accessibility feature to have an option under warnings for "Physical Triggers". There are certain things that are epilepsy or migraine triggers that can appear in vids. Festivids, which is a vidding exchange similar to Yuletide, has a warning system that is basically what I would want (http://festivids.livejournal.com/profile/ -- scroll down it's at the end of the rules in the bio section)

I would also want a field for the song/audio source, a field for the length of the vid, and possibly a field for additional/outside footage. The current "add co-author" check box could be modified to say "co-vidder". Content notes also often take the place of ratings in the land of vidding, so I don't know that the ratings would be necessary (unless they are there for legal reasons).
This would also mean that someone posting Art could get a set of art fields, someone posting Podfic could get podfic fields, someone posting Fic could get the current fields, etc.

3. So this one is much much much less important, but I'm mentioning it anyway. I've gone to at least one page on AO3 where the embedded vid no longer worked. I'd love if there was a system -- similar to the kudos system perhaps? -- where you could click to let the vidder know that the link was dead. The same could be true for art that is indexed on the archive but is hosted elsewhere. There would probably be some false positives, since a person's set-up could stop the video from playing back properly, but as a vidder it would be really useful to know and as a vid-watcher it would be great if I could see that the link was dead before I clicked. (Of course there would also have to be a way to reset it to show that there was working link after it was fixed.)

The first two points are really the main ones; right now this just isn't a place that is set up for posting vids. I know that I could use tags to demark what is a vid and what is not, but I'm not really a huge tag person and the lack of user consensus on how AO3 tags are best used* makes me wary of relying on them as a way to mark out something as important as vid vs fic (vs something else), especially since right now it seems like there's quite a bit of user confusion over filters. (Not to mention that only using filters to sort out fic vs vid vs whatever isn't something that makes sense to me anyway.)

*I want to be clear I'm talking people who post things to AO3, not about the work that tag wranglers or AO3 coders do re: tags. I just find it frustrating that one writer will use them like tags on tumblr and the next will use them like pinboard (or delicious of old). /personal issues with tags

Thanks for taking the time to answer -- I know that the org & board has a lot on its plate. On the one hand I think it's totally understandable if vidding or what-have-you has fallen through the cracks amidst the rest of the stuff that's going on; on the other I don't think any part of fandom -- particularly not my slice! -- is less important which is why I said something.

Double-check: your wishlist made it to Support? Because otherwise I'll sneak it in somewhere useful...

While embedding (#4) and resources (#1) are available, the other steps seem to be entirely in limbo, at least from my view on the outside. I can't say anything official, but we're doing 'stuff' which will be announced hopefully soonish. It's not THE answer, but it's starting that particular ball rolling.

Additionally, I haven't seen any official discussion of tweaking the AO3 interface to make it more accessible to vids, though I have seen it in the periphery in discussions of both art and meta on AO3. That's our bad, it's in the new Roadmap but that's not visible yet.

As for volunteering ... recruiting will open again soonish. I can't announce an official date but I do know it's coming :)

Burnout is an issue. I could write several essays about the specifics of it within OTW (and other orgs I've worked with) but I'm not sure it would help you make a decision. I will say there are also many people who are not experiencing burnout and getting a lot of value out of volunteering with the OTW. Huh, I wonder if VolCom would let me map ppl's 'career paths' in the OTW if I anonymised the data...

I don't want vids to fall through the cracks. We started work on the thing we knew we could do (text-fanworks), knowing we could add to that once we had a codebase (AO3) and a solid support infrastructure (Funding and Hardware). It was always going to be a long-term plan but I'd love to see it progress more.

Thank you again for your input, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts, and poke me for mine.

Edited (removed wrong bit :p) 2013-02-20 05:24 (UTC)

Yes, I sent the wishlist to AO3 Support on the 18th under the Feedback/Suggestions label.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on the volunteer recruiting form, but I plan on going in cautiously. I know that many people have great experiences with the OTW, but there are several things that make me want to take things slow -- burnout, my doubts about some parts of the OTW, my issues with some of fandom-at-large outside the OTW, and just general time management in life. It would be great if my caution ended up being unnecessary, but juuuuuust in case, you know?

Anyway, thanks again!

I think one thing that would have been of benefit had there been more internal discussion among staff before the Board decision was announced is that staff across the org could have been better prepared to step up as part of the public announcement. Right now since many staff and committees are still reacting to the announcement themselves, the responding and public face of the decision has fallen to those who can't pass the task onto anyone else, even if they wanted to, with limited knowledge about some of the technical aspects and possible implementation avenues.

But, at the same time, I'm so glad a decision is announced and we can move onto determining implementation steps and going forward as an organization.

I agree, and I'd like to work to make sure this doesn't happen again.

I do wish that we would have taken things more slowly. I know I've been bugging people about the decision for months, but once it came there was no time to get a handle on things internally before everything went public. I am a big fan of involving the users in decisions, and wish we could have done that here. (mostly because support gets less tickets that way!)

However, my main focus now is moving forward and getting things figured out so we know where we are going from here!

SO MUCH LOVE

Hi, can I link this at metanews?

Absolutely, thank you for asking :)

Seven weeks so far…

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