francescacoppa (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
francescacoppa) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
otw_news2009-05-09 07:54 pm
francescacoppa) wrote in otw_news2009-05-09 07:54 pm
Archive of Our Own: Collections and Challenges. It's Design Time! Please Help!
Greetings and Salutations! Calling all challenge mods, archivists, and people with vivid fannish imaginations! If you've run a fannish challenge or exchange, moderated a challenge community, edited a zine, or put together a themed rec list, we want to talk to you. If you've participated in a fannish challenge and/or have ever thought in detail about how to run a challenge, please also help us out!
We're in the process of developing the design for two essential pieces of functionality on the Archive of Our Own Roadmap, Version 0.7: Collections and Challenges.
As part of that design work we need to know how it's going to be used and understand what different people want from it.
To make this easier we're writing up a series of different scenarios describing how a person might use Collections or Challenges and we ask you to contribute. We want short stories describing ideal scenarios and we want them from the perspective of different people - moderators, writers, readers. Go wild!
Examples under the cut. Please leave a comment below; members of ADT (Accessibility, Design, & Technology; the Archive team) will be watching and collecting scenarios. (Please don't worry if your idea contradicts someone else's way of doing things! The AO3 needs to be able to work in multiple ways! And feel free to build on or respond to each other's ideas.)
Collections:
Samvara is a keen fan of the Supernatural fandom and is particularly stuck on stories where Sam Winchester grows wings, she has an account on the AO3 and creates a Collection called SamOnHigh. She writes the blurb for the Collection giving guidelines on joining the Collection explaining she loves, loves loves Sam with wings but is willing to accept stories where any other Winchester has wings so long as Sam does too. Samvara messages every author on the AO3 with a winged Sam story that she can find, inviting them to join the Collection and promotes it shamelessly on the interwebs. One day someone tries to add a story where Sam grows tentacles but Samvara removes it from the Collection and messages the author explaining that even if he can fly, it's still not really WINGS now is it. They never speak again :( Eventually Samvara gets a debilitating disease and decides to put her energies into something else and makes one of her co-moderators of the community do all the work as she vanishes off to learn rock polishing in the desert.
Challenges:
Before Samvara gets all diseased she also decides to run a wingfic writing challenge and publishes a manifesto encouraging all writers to consider this magnificent idea, submit story ideas (prompts) and sign up to write. The prompts are visible to everyone and some have to be removed because they didn't understand it was a SPN wingfic writing challenge and keep trying to insert Legolas - this spurs some heated emails and several other wingfic challenges get launched. Eventually Samvara reaches her goal of 50 prompts and 50 sign-ups and randomly allocates the prompts to writers. The due date for the stories is in 3 months and she writes the odd encouraging message reminding people of the deadline. She also has to change some of the prompts and match them up with new writers who didn't like their initial prompt or were unable to continue writing.
People start posting their stories about a month in and Samvara gloats over them lovingly until the due date is reached (which she had to extend by 10 days) and then she makes the new additions to the Collection visible but keeps the authors anonymous for another 14 days.
Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.
We're in the process of developing the design for two essential pieces of functionality on the Archive of Our Own Roadmap, Version 0.7: Collections and Challenges.
As part of that design work we need to know how it's going to be used and understand what different people want from it.
To make this easier we're writing up a series of different scenarios describing how a person might use Collections or Challenges and we ask you to contribute. We want short stories describing ideal scenarios and we want them from the perspective of different people - moderators, writers, readers. Go wild!
Examples under the cut. Please leave a comment below; members of ADT (Accessibility, Design, & Technology; the Archive team) will be watching and collecting scenarios. (Please don't worry if your idea contradicts someone else's way of doing things! The AO3 needs to be able to work in multiple ways! And feel free to build on or respond to each other's ideas.)
Collections:
Samvara is a keen fan of the Supernatural fandom and is particularly stuck on stories where Sam Winchester grows wings, she has an account on the AO3 and creates a Collection called SamOnHigh. She writes the blurb for the Collection giving guidelines on joining the Collection explaining she loves, loves loves Sam with wings but is willing to accept stories where any other Winchester has wings so long as Sam does too. Samvara messages every author on the AO3 with a winged Sam story that she can find, inviting them to join the Collection and promotes it shamelessly on the interwebs. One day someone tries to add a story where Sam grows tentacles but Samvara removes it from the Collection and messages the author explaining that even if he can fly, it's still not really WINGS now is it. They never speak again :( Eventually Samvara gets a debilitating disease and decides to put her energies into something else and makes one of her co-moderators of the community do all the work as she vanishes off to learn rock polishing in the desert.
Challenges:
Before Samvara gets all diseased she also decides to run a wingfic writing challenge and publishes a manifesto encouraging all writers to consider this magnificent idea, submit story ideas (prompts) and sign up to write. The prompts are visible to everyone and some have to be removed because they didn't understand it was a SPN wingfic writing challenge and keep trying to insert Legolas - this spurs some heated emails and several other wingfic challenges get launched. Eventually Samvara reaches her goal of 50 prompts and 50 sign-ups and randomly allocates the prompts to writers. The due date for the stories is in 3 months and she writes the odd encouraging message reminding people of the deadline. She also has to change some of the prompts and match them up with new writers who didn't like their initial prompt or were unable to continue writing.
People start posting their stories about a month in and Samvara gloats over them lovingly until the due date is reached (which she had to extend by 10 days) and then she makes the new additions to the Collection visible but keeps the authors anonymous for another 14 days.
Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.
no subject
Norah wants to run a challenge based on fanfiction based only on sources that are in the public domain. She does it pretty much like Samvara does, but because she is working with EENSY WEENSY FANDOMS she has to have triple the number of prompts and allow people to pick from among them (or at least indicate what fandoms they can write.)
...I think authors are almost always kept anonymous for an EXCHANGE, not a challenge. I'd love to be able to run an exchange off the archive, but I imagine that's several magnitudes more complex.
Norah wants to create a collection of every piece of Great Gatsby fic ever written. The problem is that most of them are not archived on AOOOO. Can she use AOOO to bookmark other sites?
Norah wants to be able to start several collections but not have them go public until they have, you know, enough stories in them to be worthwhile and not just sad empty shells that she Meant To Do Something With Someday. Can she keep them private while she adds to them and release them at a later date?
What if Thefourthvine finds a shiny Great Gatsby fic on AOOO that Norah doesn't have in the collection. Norah intentionally did not add this fic because it hits her food sex squick and she had to backbutton out of it. Norah's name is on the collection, and she does not want Foodsex!Gatsby in there. Is there an option for Norah to either allow or disallow other peoples' additions to the collection preemptively, so as to avoid Samvara's tentacle debacle? (And oh my God, that's so what thefourthvine and I should have called The Cetacean Situation - The Tentacle Debacle.)
...that's all I can think of for now.
no subject
no subject
Amy really, really likes to be inspired by imagery. To her, images can be a prompt! She'd like to run a challenge in which a weekly image is posted, and people write their responses in a period of a week. Even though Amy finds certain things icky, she'd allow het, gen, slash and all things in between to be written in response, tagged accordingly, with the AOOO's filtering powers being used to dig through the responses. She'd also like the ability to lock the prompt to new submissions (but still leave it visible) after the given week (automatically at a set time). People are still allowed to say they were inspired by prompt x but couldn't respond for whatever reason, and they can link to the prompt.
Collections:
Like norah, Amy would also like to collect off-AOOO fic into her collections.
no subject