[Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Summary:

Once is luck, twice is coincidence, three times is skill.

[Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Limeyy 21 Aug 2021 21:23

Major thanks to Elenee FishTruck and ManyMeats, who laid the groundwork and did serious work to get PWRD off the ground. Also thank you to everyone who took a look at this before it went to 05, namely Pedagon, MomBun, DrBleep and and everyone in Site Crit and SCPD's #meta-scp-discussion.

Problem 1: Site crit is dead. Like, super dead. Four months ago, a proposal was put up to un-dead site crit by transforming it into a team that, instead of just focusing on giving feedback, will prioritise creating and taking part in discussion on comments pages, as well as recruiting and mentoring JS who wish to improve critique skills. Elenee put it much more elegantly than me, so I will just direct you to her post linked before regarding the benefits this will bring.

Problem 2: #Thecritters is on life support. Staff presence is minimal, as is that of experienced reviewers/greenlighters. This is because, fundamentally, the channel has not changed since it's inception in 2016, while the wiki and irc has changed enormously in that time. This is partly because stewardship and control over the channel has always been a murky mix of Site Crit, Forum Crit and Chatstaff's jurisdiction, making it difficult to push for meaningful change. The first step to fixing this is cementing authority over the channel under one sub-team, the real-time crit team, so major policy changes can be made in the future to hopefully recover real-time crit to what it once was.

Solution: http://scpdsandbox.wikidot.com/collab:pwrd3

PWRD 3.0, a combination of Elenee and Meat's proposals to entirely rebrand Site Crit with a little Limey thrown in for good luck. All thoughts, suggestions and concerns would be greatly appreciated to ensure this restructure can be as successful as possible.

This Discussion is open to everyone, go nuts. Will be open for 1 week.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Rounderhouse 21 Aug 2021 22:27

Saucy.

This is very good, and fulfills a niche that has been sorely lacking on the site for quite a long time. I like the expanded set of responsibilities, I like integrating real-time crit into it rather than informally putting it on the already-overloaded forum crit. I have absolutely no issues with the team as described.

But I've lived through no less than 3 site crit revivals in my time on the site. As you can see, none of them have been successful. I have every hope this one will succeed, but I think there's an element there we need to think about - why does site crit keep dying? I won't pretend to know the answer to that one, but I think considering elements of accountability to ensure this one doesn't meet the same fate is a good idea. Forum Crit has reviewer's spotlights; an incentive never hurts to get people up and at em. I think even just instituting some sort of internal team expectation, like a channel where people post their crit comments, could go a long way in fostering an atmosphere where people want to do crit, which I think would be a big factor in preventing site crit vol 4 from being a bust.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Riemann 22 Aug 2021 03:35

I'd like to get back to this at a later point with more in-depth thoughts, but for now -

We share the same concerns, and there are ongoing discussions on ways to materially encourage people to help out and do critique a-la Forum Crit. It's definitely a thing in our minds that we'd like to address sooner rather than later!

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

WhiteGuard 21 Aug 2021 23:54

I still like the idea, still don't love the name personally and think that *Site Crit* is still appropriate and a better name but obviously that doesn't matter too much.

I do want to mention, and don't take this as a deterrent from continuing, but it should be no surprise to anyone to realize that we are presently understaffed for maintenance roles. The addition of the Recap team will further divert current staff's attention as will other initiatives. I do fear that if this new team is rolled out right now while everything is so shaky, that its start may not roll out as well as preferred and other teams may suffer at least initially.

There aren't great solutions to this other than delaying its roll out until a time where other teams are better staffed and on better footing, but if that is not preferred now, then I hope one of your first tasks will be to start a recruitment drive so that current staff are not stretched as thin.

Last edited on 21 Aug 2021 23:55 by WhiteGuard Show more

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Limeyy 22 Aug 2021 13:41

Recruitment and self-sustainability on the teams is going to be a priority - a major role of both subteams is identifying users who would be a good fit for PWRD JS and getting them on board, rather than relying on internal recruitment. I already have several authors and non-maintenance JS who have expressed interest in joining the team, and have my eyes on a couple more commenters who would be a good fit. Rest assured I don't want to pull people away from MAST and the other important work folks are doing on-site if it can at all be helped.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

aismallard 23 Aug 2021 05:14

I think "Site Crit" is not a good name for the team.

This was a major point of confusion when I was new to the site. I assumed that it did what Forum Crit does, since well it's on the site, right? And the team that reviews posted works, well they often did so in the discussion thread, which is a forum, so isn't that Forum Crit?

While the "PWRD" acronym might change, ultimately I think there should be one Criticism team (for the forums, drafts, etc), and one Review (or similar word) team.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

gee0765 22 Aug 2021 00:18

i like it. i find it slightly odd that the real time critique team and the posted works critique team are two sub teams of a larger team - personally i'd have them as two entirely separate teams - but it isn't a massive issue.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Limeyy 22 Aug 2021 13:43

Porting part of my answer from the 04 thread here:

Why isn't real-time crit it's own independent team then? Right now, there isn't the activity or scope on the team to justify it. Real-time crit can function just as successfully, if not more (given the manpower and resources of a larger team), as a sub-team of PWRD as it could independently and can still act relatively autonomously, as can be seen by the almost entirely different mission statements between sub-teams. Additionally, should circumstances change in the future and thecritters does demand a full-fledged staffteam, the existence of a sub-team doing the same thing makes the creation of a new team so much easier.

EDIT: Following discussion, the team will remain as 'site crit' and the Published Works sub-team has been renamed to the PWRD Subteam. Changes to the sandbox will be made accordingly.

Last edited on 22 Aug 2021 15:33 by Limeyy Show more

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

ManyMeats 22 Aug 2021 03:32

As is implied by the opening line of this, I am in full support of the foundations of the PWRD Team, and can offer further advocacy as the team's admin contact after restructure.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Vivarium 22 Aug 2021 13:05

I like the idea of this team, and I want to see it succeed, though my concerns largely echo WhiteGuard's thoughts on the matter. I would recommend holding off on recruiting and mentoring JS until the team is operating in a consistent way. I fear bringing in new people onto a team that is notorious for becoming inactive due to a lack of interest will cause the same issues as before, especially since this team's newly created focus is young and untested.

I would also recommend that specific members are selected to act as mentors. JS should receive a fair amount of attention, and care when training, so you want to be sure the people training them have the time and skills to properly uplift them.

I also also think the name isn't that great. People understand what to expect from a team called "Site Crit", but I fear PWRD will have the same issues as MAST. No one will know what they do.

Re: [Team Restructuring] Published Works Review and Discussion (PWRD) Team

Jacob Conwell 22 Aug 2021 19:40

Supporting. Definitely want to see this succeed where teams before it have not, and I think that if we could both launch the team with a healthy dose of JS recruitment and an incentive measure like the reviewer spotlight we could see some real traction. I also appreciate the self-set pace so that individuals on the team who (like myself) are able to interact in sporadic bursts can organize workflow that best works for them.