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.
no subject
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.