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]

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.

[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.

[muccamukk]

I'd rather Comms hadn't asked if they were just going to do this anyway. What a rug pull.

[kore]

Yeah, exactly. Why ask for feedback if they didn't care and were going to close the comm anyway, apparently? And why emphasize in the first post that engagement wasn't the reason for the comment period, when this makes it clear it absolutely was? (And with RSS feeds, when the entries disappear after what is it, two weeks? the comments on those posts do, too.)

[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?

[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.

[(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?

[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.

[havocthecat]

I agree, why ask for opinions, and a 5% response rate is actually pretty good, especially when many fans who care about OTW news are fairly distracted by the other, bigger arguments.

I certainly hope that Comms isn't manually posting everything and is using something like IFTTT or some other form of automated posting to reduce manual burden off the volunteers. I'd think it would be worth the $2.50 - $5/month to get the OTW's mass posting needs set up, especially given the very distributed nature of fandom.

[trobadora]

This is an excellent point.

[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.

[alexseanchai]

also! hits and subscribers are different! I don't know how many subscribers to otw_news didn't see the thing at all but I bet it was more than none!

let's say 3/4 of the subscribers saw the post, in which case it's 55 to 900, which is upwards of six percent of readers commenting; let's say 1/2 of the subscribers saw the post, in which case it's 55 to 600, which is almost ten percent

[alchemise]

+2 I didn't comment because everyone else was saying what I would have said. If the "feedback" post was really a poll, they should have made a poll.

[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.

[tptigger]

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

[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.)

[(Anonymous)]

Right? Fandom LOVES a poll, OTW!