Comment Period Closure and Results

[otw_staff]

Hello OTW News readers!

As we mentioned in our post on June 10, the OTW Communications Committee has been reviewing usage of this community and getting responses from subscribers about potentially following OTW News via a feed account instead.

We have now compiled the responses we received to both the original message and the follow-up message, and we have decided to turn this account inactive and to direct users to follow the feed accounts instead.

Several factors went into this decision.

Amount of Response

Although there was a quick response to our initial post, and some additional comments to our follow-up, overall only 55 people replied to one or both posts out of 1206 subscribers. (An additional 16 accounts have added the community since then, but these users were either not following OTW News before, or were doing so elsewhere.)

Although it wasn't expected that the majority of people would respond, this amounts to less than 5% of subscribers.

Availability of Current Options

OTW news can still be found here on Dreamwidth via the otw_rss_feed and there is a separate account for the AO3 News blog for anyone who wants to subscribe to both. Dreamwidth makes it just as easy to subscribe to a feed as to a community.

Our second post discussed the pluses and minuses of the feed display (and reliability) versus manual posting. Although we asked for people's interest in seeing a change to the feed display (which had been remarked upon by a few people commenting on the first post), none of the respondents to our second post mentioned a preference. Due to the lack of response, we'll let the feed remain as it is for now from our end.

Given that we will be relying on the feed to offer people news, we will be monitoring it regularly to ensure that posts continue to arrive here.

Availability of Future Options

We mentioned in the second post that we are considering an email newsletter which would send our news posts directly to people's inboxes. One of the reasons we'd like to do so is that this is considered both more convenient and reliable to many people than the way they are getting the news now.

What's more, such subscriptions would allow us to reach fans who normally use locations we have never posted to and at which an automated feed can't be set up. There are obviously many places fans use online and it would not only be impossible for us to post to all of them, but their varied formats might also be a poor fit for our news posts.

The newsletter option would also simplify things for fans whose fandoms are changing online locations. With a newsletter, fans would keep getting delivery regardless of where they were active.

Although the Communications Committee is currently occupied with recruitment and training, we expect to address this option in coming months and will be evaluating providers. Should anyone have experience with or a preference for newsletter services, we will be glad to hear your recommendations. Just comment on this post!

Notifications of Board Meetings

As mentioned in our follow-up post, there was almost as much concern with notification of OTW Board meetings as there was regarding methods to get news here. In response to that concern, we will be making posts to the OTW News blog with Board meeting announcements, which will then get delivered here via the feed.

Some readers took note that this new practice began last week.

Reader Preferences

Although there was a strong preference for receiving news here at Dreamwidth as opposed to other sites, and understandable concerns (which we addressed) about the reliability of feeds, various commenters expressed a willingness to use the feed account. There were also various comments to our second post that a newsletter option would be desirable.

What Happens Next?

If you have not already done so, click on this link for the otw_rss_feed (and, if you want AO3 News as well, the AO3 News blog) and click on the Subscribe link. You will begin receiving the news post links in your reading list as each one goes out.

In order to allow time for people to switch over without losing news, we will continue posting here for the next few weeks. Then, this community's profile page will be changed and a pinned post will be made which will offer directions to any visitors on how to keep viewing news, see all past news, and how to contact us.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I'm pretty disappointed by this. You asked for input, got pretty much universal request to keep doing it one way, and have decided to do the exact opposite.

What would have been enough to convince comms that keeping this community was worth it?

[kore]

overall only 55 people replied to one or both posts out of 1206 subscribers

Maybe if we had hit that magic 5% number? I don't know. It sounds like they wanted a response from everybody, which is pretty unlikely since a lot of people said they didn't know they were supposed to comment on this comm, but OTW seems to be pulling away from DW anyway.

[kore]

Wow, this is very disappointing, but I'm not really surprised you got a bunch of feedback and decided to do what you were going to do anyway.


Re a newsletter: I am really not interested in that. I get way too many invitations for newsletters already and there's no guarantee here that my information wouldn't be sold or passed on to other parties, which is typically what happens when I sign up for newsletters nowadays. Instead of using an actual asset, this community, you're going to try to start up a newsletter when there was no indication people wanted one instead of a DW comm? It looks like most of the people who responded to the post floating a newsletter ranked that as a definite second choice.

[trobadora]

Well, this is extremely disappointing. You got a very clear response from the community, but it seems like you were determined to shut this down anyway. Why bother asking, then?

This is not giving me any confidence the OTW is listening to what its members or users want.

[(Anonymous)]

Seconding (thirding, fourthing, etc) the above commenters' disappointment.

Almost every single comment in the original thread expressed a preference for keeping this community, not to mention A) the ones that explained why a community like this might not be particularly vocal in 'feedback' or 'engagement', and B) the ones that also explained why most if not all of the posited alternatives were either non-viable or unreliable.

That said, it was fairly obvious that you were only asking for feedback as a courtesy and had already made the decision to shut this comm down, so... disappointed, not even remotely surprised.

[(Anonymous)]

Great!! Great time to do this!

[alexseanchai]

Five percent is a high enough kudos-to-hits ratio in enough fandoms—not even comments-to-hits! one-click-feedback-to-hits!—that I am confident in saying five percent of subscribers commenting is a fantastic feedback ratio. And y'all saying it's not a high enough feedback ratio to listen to us?

[(Anonymous)]

+1000

The need to cite ratios from their own archive as evidence that the numbers they're quoting are high enough to warrant listening really does push this whole thing into the realm of farce, doesn't it?

[olivermoss]

I almost didn't comment the posts because I figured all the good points had been made, but then I realized I did have something to add. That is a pretty bad metric to decide things. If you wanted an activity you should have asked for that.

[kore]

+1 I lost count of all the comments that said basically "We didn't know you wanted us to comment on these posts." Especially since most of them are just pretty much links to the OTW posts! Of course more people are going to comment there if that's the case. What they should have done in order to gauge interest that way is a well-publicized poll.

[beleghir]

I'm very disappointed in this decision. I appreciate the transparency about the number of comments you received being a very small percentage of subscribers, but considering the unanimity of responders in asking for this community to be maintained I'm surprised by this move.

I'd rather access OTW updates through the mechanism of cleaning up cat vomit (if such an option were available) than sign up to a newsletter. Every email I receive is a miserable burden and I deserve better than subjecting myself to that.

[sheliak]

Speaking as one of the people who subscribed to the comm recently, I'm very disappointed by this decision. Also, boggled by it, because commenters nigh-universally wanted you to keep the comm.

[hokuton_punch]

Same. What a baffling decision.

[vriddy]

That's pretty disappointing, I wish the 5% limit or whatever the goalpost was had been mentioned from the beginning... It could have encouraged more "I'm here" type of replies, even if people didn't have anything else to add to the existing comments. Looking at the retweet+likes+replies numbers on the OTW Twitter account, it doesn't seem like the "engagement" ratio is all that much better over there with 23.9k followers either, but the account is staying open.

I added the feeds and would likely subscribe to a newsletter, but I feel let down. It was nice to see that so many people do actively pay attention to the dreamwidth comm, and now that it doesn't matter. Happy the feedback about board info was taken on-board though, that is good news.

[tptigger]

And Twitter puts money into the pockets of a racist jerkweed. Dreamwidth does not.

[scissorsevered]

It's pretty obvious you were going to move exclusively to the RSS feed anyway, regardless of our feedback. What was the point of asking us and then doing the exact opposite of what pretty much everyone wanted?

But yeah, it's becoming more and more clear how little the OTW is beginning to care for how its users and members actually feel about their policies. Nice job shooting yourselves in the foot once again.

[tptigger]

Look, if you need to make volunteer's lives easier, we get that, but maybe just say that rather than have a comment period, get a pretty good response for Dreamwidth (5% of all subscribers or active subscribers? Not that that's not a huge amount for online, really) and then shut it down anyway. This is just.... not the way to do that.

[ratcreature]

As all other comments already said, it seems your asking for input was disingenuous.

I certainly won't subscribe to any newsletters. Also if you wanted more engagement a newsletter seems quite the odd choice.

[bluedreaming]

...there was almost as much concern with notification of OTW Board meetings as there was regarding methods to get news here. In response to that concern, we will be making posts to the OTW News blog with Board meeting announcements, which will then get delivered here via the feed.

This is critical.

Also by the way I fully support keeping the Weibo running and supported, even though I don't use that platform anymore myself. (As a side note, if anyone has tips on how to best maintain a passive Weibo account I am all ears please.)

Like others, I'm disappointed in this news, and especially the way it felt like we were being listened to only to have the rug pulled away.

I would like a newsletter anyway, but that's just personal.

The feeds noted above (otw_news_feed and ao3_news_feed) do not contain all otw news, (though fanlore does exist and is updated very sporadically) so I've assembled some feeds below (some may appear in otw news, in whole or in part, others do not):

• Open Doors https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/en/feed/
• Fanhackers https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/rss
• Fanlore https://fanlore-wiki.tumblr.com/rss
• OTW board minutes: https://www.transformativeworks.org/board_minutes/feed/
• Election news: https://elections.transformativeworks.org/feed/

There was a pinboard mentioned in the Comment Period Update post: https://pinboard.in/u:otw_news. Here's the rss for it: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:otw_news/

There was no built-in feed for the Press page (https://www.transformativeworks.org/press/) but it is likely worth keeping tabs on. I created one via fetchrss if anyone has any interest: http://fetchrss.com/rss/617d595b2c19355d0e1685926498b96639515e41136ff1c2.xml

Transformative Works and Cultures doesn't have a feed, but you can sign up as a reader and get a table of contents emailed at https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/information/readers. I also created a feed via fetchrss of the journal issue archive page: http://fetchrss.com/rss/617d595b2c19355d0e1685926498c520c6072d73e64831d2.xml

There's also a fan studies bibliography connected to the journal, which is a group you can find at https://www.zotero.org/groups/11806/fan_studies_bibliography. The feed is https://api.zotero.org/groups/11806/items/top?format=atom&sort=title (though items open to the zotero web app's record for that article, which then has the source link and other metadata).

Also, while I was combing through the OTW website, I discovered that there's a "Fan Video and Multimedia" page: https://www.transformativeworks.org/vidding-index/
There's also a roadmap https://www.transformativeworks.org/vidding-index/vidding-roadmap/
I don't think that any action has been taken recently (I'd be delighted to be corrected) but it may be worth reading for general awareness. Included: mentions of "A Dark Archive" (a digital vault?), and "A Torrent of Our Own (TO3)" which have the status "in progress".

(I've also posted this comment to my journal for my reference.)

[kalloway]

You definitely also want ao3newstumblr_feed if you're subscribing via DW - the AO3 News Tumblr actually posts a lot of content that's not posted anywhere else, including on AO3's actual news page. I've asked before why this is, but never received an answer.

and fanlore_tumblr_feed is the fanlore tumblr rss feed over here. I made it for someone who asked on holiday_wishes because they wanted more people to see what fanlore is doing.

[ilyena_sylph]

This is very disappointing and infuriating.

[rhi]

I do get that a lot of the volunteers who're involved in the ongoing issues are probably tired, too. This is still a poor decision. It's also not a good look to shift over to something with built-in obsolescence.

[slybrarian]

You can say that you "only" got five percent feedback, but that's both a lot and it was universally against this change. It feels like whoever is in charge of the Comms Committee, or possibly even higher, made this decision before the consultation and decided to go on ahead despite the feedback. It certainly doesn't change the suspicion that someone in charge decided to cut off Dreamwidth posts just to spite the owner after she pointed out the organization's glaring management issues.

[muccamukk]

I'd like to believe it's not that last point, but it's not easy right now.

[runpunkrun]

I'm disappointed by this decision. The OTW needs to be doing more to reach fans right now, not less.

[kore]

Well, and then some people gotta go and be all pithy! Absolute +100.

[dhobikikutti]

Hi Comms,
I am reposting a copy of the comment I had left on 11th June in your Comms Public channel on Slack, as a current volunteer who also uses the dreamwidth account.
I will note that Comms chair replied to my comment with "I'll add this to the other comments we've received".

Hi Comms,
I'm commenting here as a reader of the dreamwidth account you run, since you asked for feedback from subscribers to the account. (https://otw-news.dreamwidth.org/1080331.html?nc=29&style=mine#comments) I've been a subscriber of the OTW account since it was created, and it is my primary source of information regarding the public posts on OTW and AO3. I agree with the other commenters that the RSS feed is unreliable and ephemeral, and that you should not stop posting to the account. I also agree with them that you should be posting the announcements of upcoming Board public meetings to the community - its a suggestion I had made to Comms myself several years ago (in this channel I think, though I will need to search the archives to find a citation to be sure.)

I would also like to provide feedback that the way you have framed your post places a burden on the dreamwidth subscribers to feel responsibility for the OTW volunteer workload. I do not think that asking our user base the question "Is this useful" should be accompanied by "because we're too overworked" as implication. If this committee is short-staffed, it should recruit more volunteers. You could, even, make a post exclusive to dreamwidth, asking for a volunteer who is familiar with the site.

I want to also point out that the metrics you have cited as "there has been little to no engagement here on Dreamwidth" are a logical outcome of the OTW comms policy to discourage engagement on almost every social media platform it has an account on. Like the other subscribers commenting on that post, I click through to the actual site post to read the comments there, because there is a clear culture of not talking in the comments to the dreamwidth post. If you have no way of measuring how many people are clicking through to comment on the site, then your review of engagement seems incomplete. I see that the community has, as of today, 1,210 subscribers. Have you noticed that number dropping down from previous subscribers? Increasing?

Finally, I see that both the community OTW_News, and the two admin accounts OTW_Staff and OTW_webmasters are all free accounts. I would suggest that you make at least one account a paid one, so that you can do periodic public searches of dreamwidth and its comments, to proactively listen to what is being said about OTW amongst its user base, and share that feedback, when relevant, with Board and other Chairs. With a paid account, you can subscribe to the individual thread that FFA uses to discuss OTW and AO3. If the org is serious about doing a better job listening to its ex-volunteers, like Azarias, it would, I believe, be part of Communication's remit to monitor one of the few spaces where current and former volunteers feel safe enough to speak up.

[dhobikikutti]

And this is a copy of the comment I left in their public slack channel today, the 26th of June:

Hi Comms,
I see from your latest post on Dreamwidth that you chose to ignore the universal feedback you got from subscribers to maintain the community, and decided to stop posting to the comm there.
You cited a metric about how "5% of subscribers" responded.

What percentage of responses were you holding as a benchmark for continuing the community, and why did you not communicate that to the users before?

Why did you not provide a poll so that users could leave a +1 or otherwise engage in a way that is less stressful for those with social anxiety or shyness?

If you look at the 38 comments from users so far, there is a unanimous sense of disappointment, and also of betrayal that your exercise in asking for feedback was hypocritical since you had already made up your mind to close it down.
https://otw-news.dreamwidth.org/1082477.html

I share the commenters' opinions, and further more, I would also like to state that your actions demonstrate the same pattern of contempt for OTW's users that influenced Comms policy regarding the Weibo account.

[coprime]

I'm disappointed to hear the news that this community is being shut down.

I didn't comment on the initial post or its follow-up because I felt like everything I would have said had already been said by the other commenters. If I had known that the primary factor in the decision on whether to keep this community open or not was going to be the number of respondents rather than the unanimity of their opinions, then I would have made sure to comment and bump your number of commenters up to 56.

[coprime]

I've gone through all three posts about this closure (the initial post, the follow-up post, and this results post) since number of respondents seems to have been your biggest metric for whether to keep this account open or not. As the fate of this account was decided by someone going through and counting how many people commented, I was curious how that number had changed since the decision criteria had been made clear.

There are now 72 named users who have commented, of the 1219 current subscribers. This makes for a 5.9% response rate. If you include the 11 anonymous comments as separate users, that bumps it up to a 6.8% rate. This is now over the 5% cutoff talked about in the amount of response section of this post.

Would that have been enough to keep this account open? What percentage of people were you hoping would respond and where was the line for "enough" to make it worthwhile for this account to stay open?

[(Anonymous)]

Getting an overwhelming response from 5% of your subscribers here (which, on DW of all sites, is a HUGE response) asking to keep the DW comm, only to shut it down anyway, is really not helping the impression it's only be shut down out of pettiness WRT Denise's recent, reasonable critiques of the OTW.

Whoever in Comms has been handling this? Please get better at communicating to a userbase without making the entire organization look worse in the process.

[meinterrupted]

As other commenters have pointed out, 5% of subscribers engaging with a post is relatively high. DW is full of inactive accounts from people who haven't logged in in years. I'm adding my voice to the group who didn't have anything to add that hadn't been said, and so didn't comment on the initial or followup posts. If you wanted a poll of users, you should have run a poll, or at least been clear about what you were looking for.

I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that this decision is not motivated by pulling away from DW entirely, but the timing of closing the comm after getting the feedback you asked for is pretty suspicious.

[lunabee34]

Y'all are making it really hard for me to justify forking over ten bucks to become a member. I really believe in voting for change, but I'm not convinced that doing so will be effective if deliberately solicited feedback framed as feedback intended to be implemented is ignored. Feels like taking my money and setting it on fire. I've already got doctor's appointments and house maintenance filling that slot in my life.

[folk_melody]

The previous commenters have already brought up all the points so I am not going to reiterate them but this is very disappointing to hear.

[queen_ypolita]

It's been all said in the comments already, but this is a disappointing decision