Some [Incredibly Long-Winded] Thoughts on Running a Fic/Art Exchange
Before I begin, I need to make a couple of comments:
1. I'm mostly not going to be talking about Fests. When I think of Fests, what comes to my mind (rightly or wrongly) is a prompt-driven Fic and/or Art festival that focuses on a single theme or pairing or fandom. While Fests and Exchanges have many things in common, my main interest (in part because it has more potential booby-traps) is in Fic/Art Exchanges, specifically the Anonymous variety.
2. I also want to add that while these thoughts are written specifically from a Mod's perspective, most of these ideas were formed as a participant in one exchange or another, sometimes because a procedure a Mod instituted struck me as really great, and sometimes because there was something that didn't work in the way I preferred. Note: I still participate in exchanges/fests that aren't run my way, and yet somehow I still have a good time. The only way to have everything run precisely the way you want them to is to run everything yourself, and what fun would that be?
3. This isn't a Fest Modding "how to," since I'm leaving out all sorts of logistical concerns (especially things like how to make the assigning process relatively painless or what I've learned about spreadsheet wrangling). it's just a loose collection of some of the issues I've been thinking about over the past months.
So. Some things you might want to consider if you're thinking of running an Exchange of your own.
What kind of exchange do you want to run?
There are two basic issues at stake here, and while both might seem self-evident, they're not always.
A. The first is that you'll want to run an exchange that focuses on something you enjoy. Honestly, unless you just like being in charge of things for the sake of being in charge of things, there's nothing more boring than running an exchange that focuses on a pairing or a theme that you can't stand (especially when it comes to issues such as checking fic submissions against requests, about which...more later). You may not have a choice in the matter if you've taken on Modding responsibilities when somebody else had to drop out mid-stream or if you're co-modding to help a friend with different fannish tastes, but if you're starting from scratch, make sure you're a fan.
My own exchange -
hp_beholder - was created in large part simply because I wanted more relationship fic and art about characters who aren't often featured in romance or erotica because they're considered too old or too fat or too ugly.
B. Which leads us to the next point, which is that there's not much point to setting up an exchange if you're the only person with an interest in the pairing or theme or fandom. Oh sure, you could trade stories with yourself, but the whole anonymity thing would kind of fly out the window. *g*
In my case, when I was considering setting up this exchange, I took a poll, asking whether people would be interested in participating and, if not, whether they'd be interested in reading/viewing. Not everybody's going to want to write or draw, but you need some kind of critical mass of folks watching the community (and - with any luck - leaving comments) or some of the fun is going to be lacking.
Note: Assuming you have enough submissions to keep posting active for more than just a week or two, there's going to be a drop off in comments, no matter how great the fic and art is. That's just how things are, no matter how much you try to cajole people into commenting. There have been a number of attempts to work against this automatic drop off (fan/participants of the Snape/Hermione exchange, for example, are currently overseeing a BINGO game in which you give feedback, and then get your square based on the names of recipients, and that seems to be helping keep the comment levels higher than normal, but...the sshg_exchange has a gazillion participants, so we'll see what the comment levels look like in another month.)
The Calendar, Part One: Organizational Issues
If you're in a tiny fandom, some of these ideas might not be as relevant, but for those of you in big fandoms like Harry Potter, it probably hasn't escaped your notice that there are already many, many fests and exchanges. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's safe to say, for example, that there doesn't have to be more than one Harry/Giant Squid Ficathon in a single month. In other words, try to schedule your Exchange when it's not going to run up against other similarly themed exchanges or when the fannish calendar is not so full of fests and exchanges that most of your potential pool of participants are already [over] committed to other projects.
Then what? Well, I've found it helps to make a general information post at least a week or two before sign-ups begin. In the first place, your post will (hopefully?) get people interested in participating, which is, after all, sort of the point. But it also gives a place for folks to ask questions, make complaints, and request changes before you're committed to rules and procedures.(*)
As for how long your sign-up period should last, or how long you should give participants to write or draw, that's really up to you. You can take a look at the Beholder timetable here to get a general idea of my own Modly preferences, but the sort of exchange you're running may have particular needs (for example, if you have artists working with authors, you might want to give people more time than I do to complete their submissions.
*Regarding being "committed to rules and procedures": honestly, while it's great to have things planned in advance, both for your sake and for the anxiety levels of your participants, there has to be room for flexibility if serious problems arise (for instance, if you receive a reasonable complaint about one of your rules). Your solution might be to say "yes, this is a problem and we'll change the rule next year," or you might decide to change the rule immediately or you might even decide that the complaint isn't relevant, but digging your heels in about something just because you happened to make a rule about it is, quite frankly, silly.
A bit of a calendar-related digression
One thing I always do, however, is sit down with a calendar and a list of worldwide holidays and religious observances (**) and try to ensure that at the very least, the start and end of the sign up period and the start and end of the submission period, and the start and end of the posting period doesn't conflict with any of those holidays/observances. You, personally, may not care about any of those dates, but there will probably be people who are interested in participating in your exchange who do care. They have children that need to be herded through the streets on Halloween, or they are going to be hosting 50 relatives for Diwali, or they can't type on the High Holy Days, or they are singing in the church choir throughout the Easter weekend, or they will be volunteering at their local polling site during their elections. Keep those folks in mind when you're setting up your exchange's calendar.
Or, you know, don't. See, here's the thing...while it's absolutely understandable that some of you might not have considered this issue once upon a time, now that you've read about it, you can't not know it exists (mwahahahaha!). This, then leaves you with alternatives. You can say "Okay, I want to be as inclusive as possible, so I'm going to try my hardest to take all these issues into account" (with the understanding that you still might get things wrong), or you can say "I want to be mostly inclusive, but this is [for example] a Solstice Exchange, and I want the art and fic posts to be made on the Solstice, even though this means that folks who actually celebrate the Solstice won't see things until later in the day" or, well...you can come up with examples of your own all the way through to "I don't care at all about being exclusive. In fact, I don't want anybody but my three best friends to feel comfortable participating in this and why I made a public post about it is beyond me!" The point is that while you have a perfect right to do whatever you want, it's not a bad idea to try and be conscious about what you've decided and why you've made the choices you've made.
(**) In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I would never have considered checking the calendar for conflicts with national, cultural, or religious observances if I hadn't read about other people's concerns in other fests/exchanges. Why wouldn't I have thought about it? Because I'm neither an observant person, nor do I live in such a way that offline concerns typically keep me from doing whatever I want online. It would have been nice if I had thought of these things without being prompted, but I didn't. Better late than never.
The Calendar, Part Two: Deadlines and Timetables
Are you a responsible person? Do you live for organizational structures? Are you a clock watcher? If so, you're probably suited to life as an Exchange Mod, because here's the thing...as much as you might complain privately about late submissions and the like, the person who most needs to keep on schedule is you.
What that schedule is going to be depends on a lot of factors. Even the assignment stage is going to be vastly different for somebody running a single pairing exchange in a small fandom which allows a limited number of requests than it will be for a massive, multi-fandom exchange. (note: yuletide uses a really cool software program that makes assignments for thousands of participants in way less than a day, but most exchange assignments are done by a Mod [or Mods] sitting on the floor surrounded by scraps of paper, highlighter pens, and spreadsheets.). But if you (the Mod) say the assignments are going to be emailed by Sunday night, then they better be emailed by Sunday night. If you say you'll respond to email queries within 24 hours, then you'd better have email access every day of the Exchange. If you tell your participants that two (or three or four) fanworks are going to be posted every day, then that's what you need to do. (***)
As for the participants, well...speaking as somebody who has asked for extensions in probably 50% of the exchanges I've signed up for, I'm in no position to complain about people getting their work in late. However, this doesn't mean I don't think deadlines are important. For example, I never post a gift for recipients who haven't yet turned in their own submissions, not even if the late-submitter is somebody I know and love and I'm absolutely sure they'll eventually get their story submitted. For my own peace of mind, I need to be at least a week ahead with stories and art that are ready to post (with Beholder, for example, I post two fanworks a day, so I have to have fourteen stories/artworks in hand at all times. From my own experience, one of the ways to ensure you never have an unwanted posting delay is to keep in contact with your participants from the start, because if you don't, here's what might happen:
a. People forget they're participating. Seriously. They may have signed up for so many Fests/Exchanges that they just don't remember the one you're running, especially if it's a small (or new) one.
b. People forget the due dates (like...they get May 1 stuck in their head for some reason when the real due date is April 1). I send email reminders to everybody - even the early birds - a month before and then a week or so before the submission due date (and I post reminders to the community journals)
c. An emergency might have taken place in one of your participants' lives and guess what? That's their priority, not your Exchange. Yes, in the best of all possible worlds they'd write to tell you they won't be able to continue with the Fest or that they're going to need an extra two weeks and is that okay, but sometimes they just aren't thinking of you.
d. Some participants might just be your typical fandom procrastinators (*looks in mirror*) and they don't even start their project until their final warning. And if that means they can't get it done by the deadline, then what can happen - and this is something I used to see with my students when they were late with their papers - they disappear. I mean, they really disappear. They stop posting in their journals, they don't reply to email, their fandom friends lose track of them...and often it's just because they're nervous about being called out on their lateness by a Fest Mod. But if you have a relationship with your participants (even if it's "just" a fandom-business relationship), an email from you isn't as scary and there's a far greater chance that they'll reply to it.
e. Finally, though - and I cannot emphasize this enough - in the end, a participant getting a story or a work of art in on time (or at all) isn't anywhere near as important as a problem in their family, a flair up of an illness, a work-related crisis, or any one of dozens of other offline issues. Yes, commitments are commitments, but Fest participation really isn't a matter of life and death, especially not when there are usually lots of folks waiting in the wings who are happy to step in and pinch hit if you need it. In other words, if somebody has to drop out, don't guilt them to death.
e.2 Okay, this is not to say that you shouldn't try to keep your participants. I can't tell you how happy I am that almost all the Beholder participants - even the ones who were experiencing some difficulty or another - decided, in the end, to stick with the Exchange. But for the few people who didn't? The ones who wrote to say they had to withdraw? I'd welcome them back anytime.
(***) The gone-but-never-forgotten merry_smutmas, under the direction of the stellar Mod gmth used to post four works a day, one every six hours. And when I say every six hours, I mean exactly on the hour. And yes, gmth had posting assistants on occasion, but still...that's not a schedule you should set up if you're the kind of person who's likely to sleep through posting time. (my own schedule is "two works, sometime in the afternoon, EST")
Should you Mod solo?
The answer for me is most emphatically *yes*. I like being part of a group for most things, but I can't see how I'd be any happier dividing the work in my own Exchange. (*control freak!*) However, there are plenty of excellent reasons to work with a second Mod (or to Mod alone and have helpers).
In the first place, you might not be the kind of person who can commit to posting every single day for weeks on end. As long as you check the formatting of the fic/art posts first (in locked entries), you shouldn't have any trouble giving up some of the posting responsibility to a trusted friend or two.
Or you might be running an Exchange that's so popular and has so many participants that it would be next to impossible for most people to run the thing without any help.
hp_beholder averages about 60 participants, which is manageable, but I might reconsider the whole "work alone" thing if we had two or three times that many participants.
If you're not a particularly fast reader, you might want somebody to help out during the submission stage, because, okay...your mileage might vary (as they say), but I wouldn't feel comfortable posting anything that hadn't first been checked to see that it meets the requirements of the recipient's request, and in the case of fic, that means reading every word. And yes, I do send authors notes after I read their stories - about typos I've noticed or continuity problems or canon errors - and sometimes the authors say "I actually meant to do that," at which point I apologize and slink away, but usually they say "thanks for catching that." Not all Mods are of the "read every word" school of Modding, but if it's something that you (or you and some friends) can manage to do, I'd definitely recommend it.
In the end, you (the Mod) are responsible for what's posted in your community.
Which leads me to another point: something that's been made crystal clear in the wake of recent fandom-wide discussions about problematic entries in fests and exchanges is that even with the best intentions in the world, authors and artists - because they're human - can submit work that includes elements that are racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or...well, you get the point. This doesn't mean that they are any of the above, or at least not more so than any other member of our imperfect world, but there might be something in the story or the art that is. With that in mind, starting with next year's Beholder, I'm going to add something like this (text mostly stolen from somebody or other) to the sign-up sheet:
*Ensure that your work doesn't perpetuate oppressive, discriminatory tropes and attitudes.
*Don't exploit other people's tragedies or cultures in your work.
*Please research before writing about places and peoples with which you're only vaguely familiar.
(*waits to see if anybody's going to use the phrase "...political correctness run wild!"*)
I can't actually recall any Beholder entries that were problematic in these areas (yay, Beholder participants!), but a reminder never hurt anyone, so if you think this might be useful for your fest/exchange, feel free to use with or without changes.
A tiny note about sign-up forms and submission headers.
I have very little to say here because every fest and exchange is different, but the three things that are most important are:
1. Get somebody to read your sign-up information before you post it publicly. You know: get a beta.
2. Provide a template - preferably one that the participants can copy/paste - for both the sign up form and the submission form.
3. If possible, model a sign up (see here) because if something can be misinterpreted, it will be.
Oh, and this is totally your choice, but as a participant, I far prefer public (i.e., unscreened) sign-ups. I participate in Fests which screen as a matter of course, but I prefer seeing who else has signed up and what sorts of things they're asking for (which I then steal for my own sign-ups).
A slightly longer note about warnings (aka, content)
Back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth (you know...about five minutes ago in internet time), I was opposed to warnings on my fic, but I've since been swayed by the arguments of People Who Are Not Me that warnings - or rather, content information - should be included in the headers. If you want to read my rationale for this, click here. The thing, though, is that I still personally hate to read warnings and I know that there are hundreds of people just like me. So, how to compromise when you're running a Fest/Exchange? Ask your participants to include something like this in their headers:
(note: to see how the following works in the header of an actual story, click here. If you want to use the code or some variant, remember to change the square brackets to angled brackets.
[b]Possible warnings and/or enticements - highlight to view (may contain story spoilers):[/b] ([a title="Skip this Warning" href="#skip.familymatters"]skip[/a])[span style="color: #357EC7; background-color: #357EC7;"]Nothing to speak of. Please leave a comment if you believe anything should be added here.[/span][a name="skip.familymatters"][/a]
(Full disclosure: up to this point I haven't had a consistent content info policy for Beholder, but I'll be implementing some variant of this header line as of HP Beholder 2011.)
*All content information is masked so people like me who don't like too much early info can avoid it.
*The "Skip this Warning" coding allows blind and vision impaired folks who use assistive devices to read to also ignore the warnings if they want. If you have more than one story on a page view, make sure you type "skip.titleofyourstory" (as I did above in two places with "skip.familymatters") or all the entries are going to skip back to the first entry on the page. (thanks to
amadi's excellent and far more coherent entry here for this tip)
*Underneath the "highlight to view" can be whatever the author/artist wants to include. If you think something should be added, ask the author/artist before including it. If they really don't want to include a warning for something you think is important (or for anything), include the phrase "This author/artist chooses not to warn" which will allow concerned readers to either skip the work entirely or find somebody to preview it for them.
The End of the Party
Earlier, I wrote about how important it is that a Mod be good with organization and deadlines, and this just becomes more important as the fest/exchange comes to an end.
Do, do, do make sure that all your regular participants have received something in return for the art and/or fic they created, even if that means you have to check your spreadsheet five hundred times a day. And if you have pinch hitters...okay, personally? When I'm pinch hitting, I really don't care at all whether I receive anything for my efforts, but that's just me. Other pinch hitters may really love being gifted with something, even if it's not quite the sort of story or art that they would ordinarily have requested.
Whatever you do though, don't just wander off into the cyber wilderness and leave the members of your community wondering what happened to you. Post a Master List (with links), make a final 'thank you' post...you know, give your participants some closure.
A final reminder: all my views about how exchanges/fests can best be run are utterly subjective (which...how could they be anything else?) Without a doubt, there are countless alternatives to everything I mentioned above, and not only because the Fest you want to run may have different requirements to mine. The point, though, is that even fun activities like this involve some actual thought and planning - quite a lot in some cases - for everything to run smoothly...but from my perspective, it's absolutely worth it.
This entry was originally posted at http://bethbethbeth.dreamwidth.org/543868.html. (Read
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1. I'm mostly not going to be talking about Fests. When I think of Fests, what comes to my mind (rightly or wrongly) is a prompt-driven Fic and/or Art festival that focuses on a single theme or pairing or fandom. While Fests and Exchanges have many things in common, my main interest (in part because it has more potential booby-traps) is in Fic/Art Exchanges, specifically the Anonymous variety.
2. I also want to add that while these thoughts are written specifically from a Mod's perspective, most of these ideas were formed as a participant in one exchange or another, sometimes because a procedure a Mod instituted struck me as really great, and sometimes because there was something that didn't work in the way I preferred. Note: I still participate in exchanges/fests that aren't run my way, and yet somehow I still have a good time. The only way to have everything run precisely the way you want them to is to run everything yourself, and what fun would that be?
3. This isn't a Fest Modding "how to," since I'm leaving out all sorts of logistical concerns (especially things like how to make the assigning process relatively painless or what I've learned about spreadsheet wrangling). it's just a loose collection of some of the issues I've been thinking about over the past months.
So. Some things you might want to consider if you're thinking of running an Exchange of your own.
What kind of exchange do you want to run?
There are two basic issues at stake here, and while both might seem self-evident, they're not always.
A. The first is that you'll want to run an exchange that focuses on something you enjoy. Honestly, unless you just like being in charge of things for the sake of being in charge of things, there's nothing more boring than running an exchange that focuses on a pairing or a theme that you can't stand (especially when it comes to issues such as checking fic submissions against requests, about which...more later). You may not have a choice in the matter if you've taken on Modding responsibilities when somebody else had to drop out mid-stream or if you're co-modding to help a friend with different fannish tastes, but if you're starting from scratch, make sure you're a fan.
My own exchange -
hp_beholder - was created in large part simply because I wanted more relationship fic and art about characters who aren't often featured in romance or erotica because they're considered too old or too fat or too ugly.
B. Which leads us to the next point, which is that there's not much point to setting up an exchange if you're the only person with an interest in the pairing or theme or fandom. Oh sure, you could trade stories with yourself, but the whole anonymity thing would kind of fly out the window. *g*
In my case, when I was considering setting up this exchange, I took a poll, asking whether people would be interested in participating and, if not, whether they'd be interested in reading/viewing. Not everybody's going to want to write or draw, but you need some kind of critical mass of folks watching the community (and - with any luck - leaving comments) or some of the fun is going to be lacking.
Note: Assuming you have enough submissions to keep posting active for more than just a week or two, there's going to be a drop off in comments, no matter how great the fic and art is. That's just how things are, no matter how much you try to cajole people into commenting. There have been a number of attempts to work against this automatic drop off (fan/participants of the Snape/Hermione exchange, for example, are currently overseeing a BINGO game in which you give feedback, and then get your square based on the names of recipients, and that seems to be helping keep the comment levels higher than normal, but...the sshg_exchange has a gazillion participants, so we'll see what the comment levels look like in another month.)
The Calendar, Part One: Organizational Issues
If you're in a tiny fandom, some of these ideas might not be as relevant, but for those of you in big fandoms like Harry Potter, it probably hasn't escaped your notice that there are already many, many fests and exchanges. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's safe to say, for example, that there doesn't have to be more than one Harry/Giant Squid Ficathon in a single month. In other words, try to schedule your Exchange when it's not going to run up against other similarly themed exchanges or when the fannish calendar is not so full of fests and exchanges that most of your potential pool of participants are already [over] committed to other projects.
Then what? Well, I've found it helps to make a general information post at least a week or two before sign-ups begin. In the first place, your post will (hopefully?) get people interested in participating, which is, after all, sort of the point. But it also gives a place for folks to ask questions, make complaints, and request changes before you're committed to rules and procedures.(*)
As for how long your sign-up period should last, or how long you should give participants to write or draw, that's really up to you. You can take a look at the Beholder timetable here to get a general idea of my own Modly preferences, but the sort of exchange you're running may have particular needs (for example, if you have artists working with authors, you might want to give people more time than I do to complete their submissions.
*Regarding being "committed to rules and procedures": honestly, while it's great to have things planned in advance, both for your sake and for the anxiety levels of your participants, there has to be room for flexibility if serious problems arise (for instance, if you receive a reasonable complaint about one of your rules). Your solution might be to say "yes, this is a problem and we'll change the rule next year," or you might decide to change the rule immediately or you might even decide that the complaint isn't relevant, but digging your heels in about something just because you happened to make a rule about it is, quite frankly, silly.
A bit of a calendar-related digression
One thing I always do, however, is sit down with a calendar and a list of worldwide holidays and religious observances (**) and try to ensure that at the very least, the start and end of the sign up period and the start and end of the submission period, and the start and end of the posting period doesn't conflict with any of those holidays/observances. You, personally, may not care about any of those dates, but there will probably be people who are interested in participating in your exchange who do care. They have children that need to be herded through the streets on Halloween, or they are going to be hosting 50 relatives for Diwali, or they can't type on the High Holy Days, or they are singing in the church choir throughout the Easter weekend, or they will be volunteering at their local polling site during their elections. Keep those folks in mind when you're setting up your exchange's calendar.
Or, you know, don't. See, here's the thing...while it's absolutely understandable that some of you might not have considered this issue once upon a time, now that you've read about it, you can't not know it exists (mwahahahaha!). This, then leaves you with alternatives. You can say "Okay, I want to be as inclusive as possible, so I'm going to try my hardest to take all these issues into account" (with the understanding that you still might get things wrong), or you can say "I want to be mostly inclusive, but this is [for example] a Solstice Exchange, and I want the art and fic posts to be made on the Solstice, even though this means that folks who actually celebrate the Solstice won't see things until later in the day" or, well...you can come up with examples of your own all the way through to "I don't care at all about being exclusive. In fact, I don't want anybody but my three best friends to feel comfortable participating in this and why I made a public post about it is beyond me!" The point is that while you have a perfect right to do whatever you want, it's not a bad idea to try and be conscious about what you've decided and why you've made the choices you've made.
(**) In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I would never have considered checking the calendar for conflicts with national, cultural, or religious observances if I hadn't read about other people's concerns in other fests/exchanges. Why wouldn't I have thought about it? Because I'm neither an observant person, nor do I live in such a way that offline concerns typically keep me from doing whatever I want online. It would have been nice if I had thought of these things without being prompted, but I didn't. Better late than never.
The Calendar, Part Two: Deadlines and Timetables
Are you a responsible person? Do you live for organizational structures? Are you a clock watcher? If so, you're probably suited to life as an Exchange Mod, because here's the thing...as much as you might complain privately about late submissions and the like, the person who most needs to keep on schedule is you.
What that schedule is going to be depends on a lot of factors. Even the assignment stage is going to be vastly different for somebody running a single pairing exchange in a small fandom which allows a limited number of requests than it will be for a massive, multi-fandom exchange. (note: yuletide uses a really cool software program that makes assignments for thousands of participants in way less than a day, but most exchange assignments are done by a Mod [or Mods] sitting on the floor surrounded by scraps of paper, highlighter pens, and spreadsheets.). But if you (the Mod) say the assignments are going to be emailed by Sunday night, then they better be emailed by Sunday night. If you say you'll respond to email queries within 24 hours, then you'd better have email access every day of the Exchange. If you tell your participants that two (or three or four) fanworks are going to be posted every day, then that's what you need to do. (***)
As for the participants, well...speaking as somebody who has asked for extensions in probably 50% of the exchanges I've signed up for, I'm in no position to complain about people getting their work in late. However, this doesn't mean I don't think deadlines are important. For example, I never post a gift for recipients who haven't yet turned in their own submissions, not even if the late-submitter is somebody I know and love and I'm absolutely sure they'll eventually get their story submitted. For my own peace of mind, I need to be at least a week ahead with stories and art that are ready to post (with Beholder, for example, I post two fanworks a day, so I have to have fourteen stories/artworks in hand at all times. From my own experience, one of the ways to ensure you never have an unwanted posting delay is to keep in contact with your participants from the start, because if you don't, here's what might happen:
a. People forget they're participating. Seriously. They may have signed up for so many Fests/Exchanges that they just don't remember the one you're running, especially if it's a small (or new) one.
b. People forget the due dates (like...they get May 1 stuck in their head for some reason when the real due date is April 1). I send email reminders to everybody - even the early birds - a month before and then a week or so before the submission due date (and I post reminders to the community journals)
c. An emergency might have taken place in one of your participants' lives and guess what? That's their priority, not your Exchange. Yes, in the best of all possible worlds they'd write to tell you they won't be able to continue with the Fest or that they're going to need an extra two weeks and is that okay, but sometimes they just aren't thinking of you.
d. Some participants might just be your typical fandom procrastinators (*looks in mirror*) and they don't even start their project until their final warning. And if that means they can't get it done by the deadline, then what can happen - and this is something I used to see with my students when they were late with their papers - they disappear. I mean, they really disappear. They stop posting in their journals, they don't reply to email, their fandom friends lose track of them...and often it's just because they're nervous about being called out on their lateness by a Fest Mod. But if you have a relationship with your participants (even if it's "just" a fandom-business relationship), an email from you isn't as scary and there's a far greater chance that they'll reply to it.
e. Finally, though - and I cannot emphasize this enough - in the end, a participant getting a story or a work of art in on time (or at all) isn't anywhere near as important as a problem in their family, a flair up of an illness, a work-related crisis, or any one of dozens of other offline issues. Yes, commitments are commitments, but Fest participation really isn't a matter of life and death, especially not when there are usually lots of folks waiting in the wings who are happy to step in and pinch hit if you need it. In other words, if somebody has to drop out, don't guilt them to death.
e.2 Okay, this is not to say that you shouldn't try to keep your participants. I can't tell you how happy I am that almost all the Beholder participants - even the ones who were experiencing some difficulty or another - decided, in the end, to stick with the Exchange. But for the few people who didn't? The ones who wrote to say they had to withdraw? I'd welcome them back anytime.
(***) The gone-but-never-forgotten merry_smutmas, under the direction of the stellar Mod gmth used to post four works a day, one every six hours. And when I say every six hours, I mean exactly on the hour. And yes, gmth had posting assistants on occasion, but still...that's not a schedule you should set up if you're the kind of person who's likely to sleep through posting time. (my own schedule is "two works, sometime in the afternoon, EST")
Should you Mod solo?
The answer for me is most emphatically *yes*. I like being part of a group for most things, but I can't see how I'd be any happier dividing the work in my own Exchange. (*control freak!*) However, there are plenty of excellent reasons to work with a second Mod (or to Mod alone and have helpers).
In the first place, you might not be the kind of person who can commit to posting every single day for weeks on end. As long as you check the formatting of the fic/art posts first (in locked entries), you shouldn't have any trouble giving up some of the posting responsibility to a trusted friend or two.
Or you might be running an Exchange that's so popular and has so many participants that it would be next to impossible for most people to run the thing without any help.
hp_beholder averages about 60 participants, which is manageable, but I might reconsider the whole "work alone" thing if we had two or three times that many participants.
If you're not a particularly fast reader, you might want somebody to help out during the submission stage, because, okay...your mileage might vary (as they say), but I wouldn't feel comfortable posting anything that hadn't first been checked to see that it meets the requirements of the recipient's request, and in the case of fic, that means reading every word. And yes, I do send authors notes after I read their stories - about typos I've noticed or continuity problems or canon errors - and sometimes the authors say "I actually meant to do that," at which point I apologize and slink away, but usually they say "thanks for catching that." Not all Mods are of the "read every word" school of Modding, but if it's something that you (or you and some friends) can manage to do, I'd definitely recommend it.
In the end, you (the Mod) are responsible for what's posted in your community.
Which leads me to another point: something that's been made crystal clear in the wake of recent fandom-wide discussions about problematic entries in fests and exchanges is that even with the best intentions in the world, authors and artists - because they're human - can submit work that includes elements that are racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or...well, you get the point. This doesn't mean that they are any of the above, or at least not more so than any other member of our imperfect world, but there might be something in the story or the art that is. With that in mind, starting with next year's Beholder, I'm going to add something like this (text mostly stolen from somebody or other) to the sign-up sheet:
*Ensure that your work doesn't perpetuate oppressive, discriminatory tropes and attitudes.
*Don't exploit other people's tragedies or cultures in your work.
*Please research before writing about places and peoples with which you're only vaguely familiar.
(*waits to see if anybody's going to use the phrase "...political correctness run wild!"*)
I can't actually recall any Beholder entries that were problematic in these areas (yay, Beholder participants!), but a reminder never hurt anyone, so if you think this might be useful for your fest/exchange, feel free to use with or without changes.
A tiny note about sign-up forms and submission headers.
I have very little to say here because every fest and exchange is different, but the three things that are most important are:
1. Get somebody to read your sign-up information before you post it publicly. You know: get a beta.
2. Provide a template - preferably one that the participants can copy/paste - for both the sign up form and the submission form.
3. If possible, model a sign up (see here) because if something can be misinterpreted, it will be.
Oh, and this is totally your choice, but as a participant, I far prefer public (i.e., unscreened) sign-ups. I participate in Fests which screen as a matter of course, but I prefer seeing who else has signed up and what sorts of things they're asking for (which I then steal for my own sign-ups).
A slightly longer note about warnings (aka, content)
Back in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth (you know...about five minutes ago in internet time), I was opposed to warnings on my fic, but I've since been swayed by the arguments of People Who Are Not Me that warnings - or rather, content information - should be included in the headers. If you want to read my rationale for this, click here. The thing, though, is that I still personally hate to read warnings and I know that there are hundreds of people just like me. So, how to compromise when you're running a Fest/Exchange? Ask your participants to include something like this in their headers:
(note: to see how the following works in the header of an actual story, click here. If you want to use the code or some variant, remember to change the square brackets to angled brackets.
[b]Possible warnings and/or enticements - highlight to view (may contain story spoilers):[/b] ([a title="Skip this Warning" href="#skip.familymatters"]skip[/a])[span style="color: #357EC7; background-color: #357EC7;"]Nothing to speak of. Please leave a comment if you believe anything should be added here.[/span][a name="skip.familymatters"][/a]
(Full disclosure: up to this point I haven't had a consistent content info policy for Beholder, but I'll be implementing some variant of this header line as of HP Beholder 2011.)
*All content information is masked so people like me who don't like too much early info can avoid it.
*The "Skip this Warning" coding allows blind and vision impaired folks who use assistive devices to read to also ignore the warnings if they want. If you have more than one story on a page view, make sure you type "skip.titleofyourstory" (as I did above in two places with "skip.familymatters") or all the entries are going to skip back to the first entry on the page. (thanks to
amadi's excellent and far more coherent entry here for this tip)
*Underneath the "highlight to view" can be whatever the author/artist wants to include. If you think something should be added, ask the author/artist before including it. If they really don't want to include a warning for something you think is important (or for anything), include the phrase "This author/artist chooses not to warn" which will allow concerned readers to either skip the work entirely or find somebody to preview it for them.
The End of the Party
Earlier, I wrote about how important it is that a Mod be good with organization and deadlines, and this just becomes more important as the fest/exchange comes to an end.
Do, do, do make sure that all your regular participants have received something in return for the art and/or fic they created, even if that means you have to check your spreadsheet five hundred times a day. And if you have pinch hitters...okay, personally? When I'm pinch hitting, I really don't care at all whether I receive anything for my efforts, but that's just me. Other pinch hitters may really love being gifted with something, even if it's not quite the sort of story or art that they would ordinarily have requested.
Whatever you do though, don't just wander off into the cyber wilderness and leave the members of your community wondering what happened to you. Post a Master List (with links), make a final 'thank you' post...you know, give your participants some closure.
A final reminder: all my views about how exchanges/fests can best be run are utterly subjective (which...how could they be anything else?) Without a doubt, there are countless alternatives to everything I mentioned above, and not only because the Fest you want to run may have different requirements to mine. The point, though, is that even fun activities like this involve some actual thought and planning - quite a lot in some cases - for everything to run smoothly...but from my perspective, it's absolutely worth it.
This entry was originally posted at http://bethbethbeth.dreamwidth.org/543868.html. (Read
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