melannen | I feel like I'm posting a lot but I have things to say. :P

I feel like I'm posting a lot but I have things to say. :P

I guess my first two yuletide nominations are going to be Madelyn and Liberty/Justice. But you have been unhelpful with the third. :P Thanks for keeping third place almost exactly tied since I posted that poll, it's helped me so much.

(Seriously if you didn't vote or you voted for less than three fandoms, help break the tie? I don't care if you don't know any of the other fandoms, you probably at least have vague memories of me wittering about them, and at this point I'm thinking about flipping a coin. You have until it gets too dark outside for me to rollerskate this afternoon.)

Poll #8536 Yuletide nominations

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

For yuletide, I should nominate:

View Answers

Isaac Asimov - Adventures of Lucky Starr (Bigman, Wess, Conway, Henree)
9 (20.9%)

Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective (Madelyn, Nora, Ariel, Jacqueline)
26 (60.5%)

Daniel Pinkwater - All Works (Shep Nesterman, Rat, Borgel, Rolzup, Worldbuilding)
11 (25.6%)

Daniel Pinkwater - Lizard Music (Shep Nesterman, Henrietta, Walter Cronkite, Victor)
4 (9.3%)

19th Century Monumental Civic Allegory (Liberty, Justice, History, Victory)
22 (51.2%)

Nancy Drew RPF (Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Nancy Axelrod, Mildred Wirt Benson)
4 (9.3%)

HIGNFY RPF (Paul, Ian, a Tub of Lard)
1 (2.3%)

QI RPF (Stephen, Alan, Sandi, Sue)
15 (34.9%)

British QuizComedy RPF (Paul, Ian, Sandi, Stephen)
5 (11.6%)

Also you know that Supernatural AU not!fic about Jess and Dean going hunting together that I posted a couple of years ago and linked to the other week? Well,

kittydesade actually started writing it! She has the first few thousand words up on AO3! And it is excellent and way better than it would've been if I'd tried to do it. You should all go read. Especially people who like female SPN characters. :D

Juke Joint Jezebel by

kittydesade

ETA: And, oh, fine, I keep reading this stuff, I might as well say it here, RE the OTW elections, there are three things I maybe want to add to the discussion right now:

1. The main RL non-profit that I'm involved with is in the middle of undergoing self-destruction-by-Founder's Syndrome right now. Actually, it underwent schism-by-Founder's-Syndrome about two years ago, has accomplished exactly nothing since then or in the two years before, and the schismed group is having its own problems with the people who initiated the split making it all about them already. Right now, in fact, even though I'm technically still on the "leadership committee", I have stepped back far enough that pretty much my only involvement is being one of the few people who doesn't flee from the room when the people I know who haven't gotten out yet need somebody to vent to.

And this is a group that has decades of history, does things like institute large-scale economic change and help get presidents elected, and gets grants in the millions of dollars.

The best sign of long-term health for an organization is if the people who started it step down as soon as it's established and let it run on its own. Seriously. I truly believe that the only thing that stopped the American Revolution from going the way of the French one is that Washington quit.

Even if none of this discussion had happened, even if none of these problems had come out, even if everyone was entirely satisfied with their work, I would be suggesting that people vote the founders off the board just because they are the founders. Because if the org can't function without the founders, it isn't really functioning as an org at all. And if the founders can't serve the org without leading it, then they aren't really serving the org, either.

2. Early in the election Naomi Novik kept missing major election events because she was "too busy". She is currently "too busy" to moderate comments on an elected-related journal post. Why are we supposed to think she has the time to do a good job on the board if she can't even make it to an election chat, again? (I am almost starting to think, yes, let's put her on the board, she'd probably do great work there, instead let's ban her from touching the archive code for the entire 3-year term. That might acutally do more good.)

3. OH GOD I THINK I MAY HAVE JUST OFFERED TO SERVE A TERM ON THE CHURCH COUNCIL. God help us all, especially me.

ETA2: Okay, I officially hate the way the nominations process works. I cannot think of any reason it couldn't tell you whether any of your nominations were already in the system, and then give you a chance to change them, because, in fact, if you mess up the fandom name, it does tell you which of the characters you nominated are already in the system and then give you a chance to change them! But only if you misspell the fandom name. That, for the record, is a stupid way to do things.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So, founder's syndrome... I'm reminded of parenting. The goal of parenting, in my not-so-humble opinion, is to enable children to grow into fully functioning, well-adjusted adults. If adults can't function without their parents because their parents can't let go, that's a parenting fail. In general the same is true for founders of organizations: the goal is to get the organization functioning independent of the founders.

Yeah, exactly. And it's not that people who do that are evil or anything! It's just that they don't want their children to get hurt.

And you know, there's nothing wrong with starting a project and saying, "This is my project, I want total control over it, when I die it will die with me," because projects aren't people, but if that's the goal, you don't start a nonprofit org run by an elected board.

Actually there were two big projects started in this community, at about the same time, in response to the same issues: OTW and DW. DW was started by a couple of friends saying (okay, I'm paraphrasing slightly) "We are sick of dealing with other people's politics and shit, we are starting something where we own it and we can do it all Our Way, and we are going to set things up so nobody can ever run it but us or our Chosen Successors, and if you have a problem with that setup you can just leave." It's working great so far!

But I do kind of live in dread of the day when DW's last founder can no longer do the work, because there's nobody else who could do what she does.

OTW was founded by people explicitly saying "We need someplace that is owned by the community and run by the community and doesn't depend on the commitments of any individual person or small group of people." If they do end up depending on one or two people (and at the moment, I'll be honest, they do, because the way they're running the software project, if the lead developer quit right now it would be disastrous, because nobody else knows how to do what she does. Probably it would be good in the long run but disastrous in the short.)

It's the difference between benevolent monarchy and chaotic democracy! Monarchy's great as long as your monarchs are extraordinary people and all your transitions of power are smooth, and terrible otherwise. Democracy's a lot harder and you have regularly scheduled periods of vitriol and wank, but if you do it right it's a lot less of a crapshoot in the long run. And if your goal is true democracy, you shouldn't keep re-electing the leader of the revolutionary guard year after year. :D

Right. It's all about making clear what kind of thing it is. Saying one thing and doing another... not cool.

OH GOD I THINK I MAY HAVE JUST OFFERED TO SERVE A TERM ON THE CHURCH COUNCIL

THERE IS NO WANK LIKE CHURCH WANK. Not even fandom wank. Good luck! *g*

Our church is actually a lot lower on wank than one might expect. Or, well, our church is what gets euphemistically called a "family" church, which means in this case that there are fewer active members than I have cousins, and I know all of them better than my cousins, and all the wank has been so well-wanked out by this point that we can have entire, detailed, kerfuffles which encompass decades of doctrine and backstory through the medium of one person saying a name and everyone else either shrugging or rolling their eyes, and done.

Actually the main reason I dread it is that Pastor is one of those people who's completely wrapped up in Dysfunctional Nonprofit and if I got more involved in church management he'd have a lot more opportunities to corner me and vent his trauma all over me at length. (also it's a three-year commitment and that feels like a long time right now?)

...I am now imagining what a church populated largely by my cousins would be like. OMG EPIC WANK 4 EVAH.

C. did about a year on the vestry at our church, at the end of which we quit going to church entirely.

(Also, bwahaha, I have been known to start e-mails to Dee with sentences like, "I know you're our benevolent feudal overlord and all, but [insert current bitch here]." Good to know I'm not the only person who thinks of it that way.)

A church populated mostly by my cousins would consist of half of them failing to show up entirely, a few of them anxiously trying to DO EVERYTHING AND MAKE IT PERFECT, a few of them that we just don't mention certain things around, and the rest of us just going, "eh, whatever you guys want is fine as long as I don't have to do anything but show up."

Which is incidentally how the family reunions are run too! ...and my church. Actually.

Founder's Syndrome is pretty much inevitable, and inevitably invisible to the founder in question. Toward the end of my running Shousetsu BangBang I was convinced I had to step down, not just because I was burnt out, but because I was vaguely aware around the edges that the majority culture of the submission pool and readership had developed in a way that wasn't fully aligned with where I'd originally intended the thing to go, but that 1) I wasn't going to compromise on what I felt were my key principles and 2) no one was going to confront me on this, because 85% of the community didn't feel like they could contact me directly. Not because I wasn't nice, but because I was the Founder, and I gave the impression that I Had Things Well In Hand(tm). Which is something I needed to do because uncertainty in communication never comes off well online, but at the same time it intimidates people. Probably. I STILL DON'T REALLY KNOW. XD; I do know for a fact that the timeline of the thing was always subservient to my personal schedule, and that I never even tried to introduce transparency to the decision-making process (which isn't the same as communicating clearly and regularly - I think I did that, and that the tradition continues).

Yeah.

I mean, the one community I started and am still moderating that still going, I don't think has founders sydrome, but that's mostly because I let it run itself, only pay minimal attention to it and wouldn't particularly care if it died. Which isn't really what you want in your founders anyway.

(Although tbh it's possible my lurking presence is still silently inhibiting people from doing things they'd otherwise do. I don't want to turn it over though! What if the new moderator actually gave a damn and tried to change things? MUST KEEP CONTROL.)

Eughuaghaaaa. Can you link someone who is way, way, way out of the loop but still intends to exercise her voting rights to an explanation of the OTW kerfluffle?

Agh. How long of a one do you want? You could try the latest post at unfunny_fandom at journalfen (or amadi's super-short summary for beginners in the comments there.)

Um... in terms of getting a quick overview that will let you exercise your voting rights fairly... gah. Have you read the candidate profiles that are up on the OTW site? That's probably as good a place as any to start.

TBH I'm not sure that much of the details of the kerfuffle is that relevant to voting? Basically as a result of some early stuff with the election, plus bad blood around the latest AO3 update, everybody in all of fandom, and particularly everybody who ever had a bad experience working for OTW, has been suddenly airing all of their grievances about the internal workings of the org - many of which are justified, and are making a lot of people go, "Oh I thought it was just me! But maybe it's actually systemic problems within the organization?" This is different from previous rounds of OTW wank, because instead of anti-OTW outsiders saying "OTW SUCKS I HOPE IT DIES" and insiders defending it, it's insiders saying "OTW SUCKS I HOPE IT DOESN'T DIE" and anti-OTW outsiders making popcorn.

I'm not entirely sure how much picking certain people for the board will matter as regards all the many revealed systemic issues, as opposed to just this sudden awareness of exactly how much is screwed up, and people post-election (hopefully) continuing to talk vocally about it regardless of who gets in, forcing changes to actually start happening.

starlady has been doing comprehensive linkspams with some pretty good, and not epically unbalanced, commentary, if you actually want to start getting into it all.

Election-wise: I honestly haven't been paying attention to the candidates themselves in detail, since I can't vote, and haven't even bothered to find out their fandom names. But nearly everybody seems to be endorsing Jenny Scott-Thompson and Julia Beck. Most people are endorsing Betsy Rosenblatt, who made a bad first impression but has been improving (and I kind of agree with the people who say that having a lawyer on the board is probably a Good Thing.) That leaves a choice for fourth between Nikisha Sanders and Naomi Novik.

Nikisha has... been doing a not-very-good-job at message control or appearing professional, which is to say she seems to have the kind of personality that draws wank around her and gleefully feeds it, which does kind of bode ill for her being effective on the board? On the other hand that's partly because she hasn't separated her candidate journal from her existing fandom journal the way most of the others did, and partly because she deliberately uses an "angry black woman" style of commentary sometimes, and because some of the criticism of her has been pretty blatantly and pretty horrible push-back against social justice stuff (on the other hand she and some of her cadre are still in to their eyeteeth in some of the SJ modes of discussion that can get really unhealthy really fast - see above about wank-attractiveness.) And having someone to shake things up and let the wank out might not be bad anyway, and she has the same sort of position statements as Jenny and Julia.

Naomi is

astolat, and you have to balance whether her being

astolat and therefore incontrovertibly amazing in many ways balances out founder syndrome and the fact that a lot of people involved in the org think that her being around has a chilling effect on anybody else being able to exercise authority and the fact that a lot of things people are pointing out as being badly set up are things she had a hand in. And the bit I mentioned in my post about her consistently saying she doesn't have time to talk about elections stuff, despite being a candidate. (Also with the fact that she hasn't been on the board the past year, that most of the recent problems with her authority happened while she was just chair of AD&T, and that she will still be chair of AD&T and presumably continuing to keep an iron hand on all things about the Archive even if she's not on the board, so maybe we should just elect her anyway and give her the authority in name as well as fact.)

...um. or I could just say IT'S COMPLICATED YOU DECIDE.

Edited 2011-11-15 03:10 (UTC)

Naomi is actually not currently chair of AD&T, either; she's just a Very Important Voice as well as being one of the project's more experienced and ambitious coders.

Ah. I didn't realize.

...she seems to at least be Project Lead regarding anything about the Archive code, according to various recent posts.

(I am actually very fuzzy on what exactly is and isn't AD&T's roles, and how their duties are subdivided. But then I've seen at least a few former AD&T staff saying they weren't sure either.)

Time for another round of the "Gosh We Need Better Organization" song!

I am trying to remain hopeful that the new Board and the new term will mean some real progress on all of these structure & management issues where we're currently hurting.

Ok. I voted. HUZZAH DEMOCRACY!

The rundown was really helpful, so thanks!

Yay! I hope I didn't mislead you too wildly then.

Re ETA2: I don't think it's a coding reason--I think it's another way to reduce overall nominations to theoretically improve matching odds. But I speculate wildly!

I'm sure wanting to reduce overall nominations was the real reason. However the reason they gave in the posts announcing the change was that having a dynamic list of nominated fandoms was too hard on the servers! And I am holding them to that.

Which I can see constant reloading by thousands of people of a dynamic page might be a bad idea, but telling you if your specific nominated fandom was already in clearly isn't, since the system is checking as they go anyway..

Omigosh you're a fan of Lizard Music? I loved that book! Hmmm, maybe that should be one of the titles I get for our 11 yr old nephew this year. He's definitely getting The Graveyard Book because it's one of the best, and funniest, Newbery winners in years and the boy *must* be introduced to Neil Gaiman.

Pinkwater in general goes on my list of books that all pre-teens should get! His books were pretty much the only YA fiction I found with protagonists who actually shared my worldview as a weird kid who owned her weirdness, and were really kind of lifesavers.

I'm not sure how well Lizard Music dates, though, in some ways it's even more of a period piece than most of his stuff - I mean to start with a huge part of the plot hinges on television that is broadcast. With radio waves! And you just take that for granted!

I might start a current youngster with Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (which I have not yet read but really, really should) or one of the intentional period pieces...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I feel like I'm posting a lot but I have things to say. :P

It's Monique

Re: It's Monique

Re: It's Monique

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject