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Seven weeks so far…
454 emails this week of which 303 are labeled OTW - !General and 134 are labeled OTW – Board. The proportion of emails to IM chats is moving towards more chats. My calendar says ~15 hour week. I didn’t make it to a single official committee meeting which kind of blows my mind because it feels like this whole week has been All-OTW, all the time. *reads transcripts*
One of things I couldn’t talk about last week (Six weeks so far…) and the week before (Five weeks so far…) was Meta and you're lucky I only joined the board recently or I would have been not talking about it for over six months. if you're interested, my personal decision making process went a lot like this:
I would like to emphasise that this is a Board decision, and while AD&T, Support and Comms are receiving the feedback, they are not the instigators. Keep communicating, this is important. Be kind, this is important too.
I am also open to continuing discussing it, this is an invitation to comment or PM me if you want to talk about it with me.
ETA: Also! HUGE thank you to J. who got up when I called him at 1:35am his time because the AO3 was down for logged out users. THANK YOU!
One of things I couldn’t talk about last week (Six weeks so far…) and the week before (Five weeks so far…) was Meta and you're lucky I only joined the board recently or I would have been not talking about it for over six months. if you're interested, my personal decision making process went a lot like this:
I would like to emphasise that this is a Board decision, and while AD&T, Support and Comms are receiving the feedback, they are not the instigators. Keep communicating, this is important. Be kind, this is important too.
I am also open to continuing discussing it, this is an invitation to comment or PM me if you want to talk about it with me.
ETA: Also! HUGE thank you to J. who got up when I called him at 1:35am his time because the AO3 was down for logged out users. THANK YOU!
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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!