The FictionAlley brouhaha: a bit of research.
Basics, if you haven't already heard.
Okay, so this is what I have (props to
seperis for causing me to look) gleaned from the incredibly unclear website and, more properly, from reading everything else I can find about the Pepsi Refresh project: there are six categories, and four levels of funding, but if you expected one thing per level of funding in each category will win, you are wrong!
Example from February's contest here. I went through and actually, God help me, put all the details given on amounts/categories into an Excel sheet and ran the thing through a PivotTable to get this.
The bottom three amount categories each got 10 ideas picked; the $250,000 level got two picked.
By Number of Grants:
9 grants to Education: 2 in $5,000, 3 in $25,000, 3 in $50,000, and 1 in $250,000.
8 grants to Neighborhoods: 1 in $5,000, three in $25,000, three in $50,000, and one in $250,000.
5 grants to Food & Shelter: 4 in $5,000, and 1 in $50,000.
4 grants to Health: 1 in $5,000, 2 in $25,000, and 2 in $50,000.
4 grants to Arts & Culture: 1 in $5,000, 1 in $25,000, and 2 in $50,000.
2 grants to The Planet: 1 in $5,000 1 one in $25,000.
By amount:
Education got a total of $485,000.
Neighborhoods got a total of $480,000.
Arts & Culture got a total of $130,000.
Health got $105,000.
Food & Shelter got $70,000.
The Planet got $30,000.
Either way you look at it, it is great to be Education or Neighborhoods, and sucks to be The Planet.
Granted, I am missing some key data, like how many submissions were there in each level and in each category, but nonetheless, what we're looking at here is that Pepsi clearly is not doing a one-per-amount-per-category kind of thing. Pepsi nowhere states that they are doing anything of the kind, and I'm guessing that's because, well, they're not. So yes, FictionAlley is running against homeless shelters and taking care of wounded vets and the like. So is the asshat who wants to get money to build a model train set, for reasons I don't understand. They are competing against people in their amount category, and that does include quite a few things I'd think are more necessary for life. HP fandom applies to a very specific portion of a fairly privileged people-- you must have a computer and an internet connection to apply, and I know we forget that, but not everyone does-- and
ETA: For the sheer hell of it, I added all the other months (thanks to
seperis, I found all the months' recipients here): the resulting massive spreadsheet and hopefully more helpful summary page is here. I will now die from my own geekiness, oh God. [/ETA]
In addition-- well, I'm not in on the details, but I checked around to see what was going on, and the first time there was any kind of fundraising appeal in the fiction_alley comm is September 1, and it sounds like that was a big announcement, including announcing some changes at the site made to try to figure out the money situation. That would be the day after pinkfinity-- I believe that's Heidi-- posted about her first attempts to get into the Pepsi Refresh thing the previous month. Someone else who's more familiar with FictionAlley might be able to tell if there was some kind of e-mail campaign or something on FictionAlley Park, but at the moment, to me, this looks kind of bad. This looks like they started trying to get into the Pepsi Refresh thing before they started asking for money from their own member base.
I have some thoughts about that.
1) Seriously, this is your plan for raising money? This is underpants-gnome levels of planning, people. This appears to be like buying a lottery ticket; from what I'm hearing, FA has a pretty low chance of winning.
2) pinkfinity references how OTW owns their own servers. I'm pretty sure that somewhere, she actually knows that it took years for the OTW to accomplish that, and that in the meantime they got really freaking good at raising money. Like, daily posts on their LJ/DW accounts (and on the blog, and frankly anywhere else they had access), support icons, gifts for certain levels of support-- hell, they look like a mini NPR during pledge time, it's great, extremely professional. What they did NOT do was put up a total of one post with the pledge information. Pete's sake, I don't think most people check in every day; the likelihood of wading back through pages of your flist to accidentally trip over a one-time-only post is kind of silly. Point being, this already looks like a shoddy kind of way to run this thing, which seems surprising given their whole VERY OFFICIAL legal set-up.
3)
epershand posted about it here, and put her finger on one big thing I hadn't thought about consciously yet: in this day and age, a single-fandom archive-- more, a single-fandom archive with no NC-17 and some specific rules about what gets in-- is a dinosaur. The fandom migration to LJ (and other LJ-type spaces) has meant, among a number of other big changes, that even when someone you're friends with in one fandom moves on to write fic for another fandom, they're still in the same place, still under the same handle, still in touch. There's not this walled garden approach anymore: by the very nature of the place, we're all a little polyfandom, if not extremely so.
Even the people who are involved with this-- pinkfinity and gwendolyngrace-- are involved in other fandoms that have taken over the majority of their attention and their LJ background wallpaper. I think it may just be that the time is past for a single-fandom archive to be able to rally the resources to own their own servers. It might honestly just be time to see if they can work something out with the OTW to get the archived fic saved, if the people in charge can't pony up the money to keep the place going themselves-- and honestly, if it were a fandom I hadn't been seriously active in for years, I wouldn't, even if I could. People move on. A lot of us stay in fandom, just... different fandoms. Which is why, these days, it's a lot easier to get money for the OTW servers than for the FictionAlley servers-- whereas back in 2002, that wouldn't have been the case at all.
4) Goddamn, gwendolyngrace, you did yourself NO FAVORS with this: I've done the research and I'm here to tell you that there are far more sources of funding available to starving children in Africa than there are to fan-oriented websites. Seriously, fandom has long memories, and people still remember the Laptopgate/Charitygate bundle of awful-- possibly because it wasn't just wank, it was awful, and ugly, and had that same kind of sense to it-- that BNFs deserve your money, but sick people you don't know... don't.
It's just been badly handled from beginning to end, which doesn't help anything, ever, anywhere. It seems to have been decided by the people at the top and handed down by fiat without consulting anyone else, after only a mild attempt to actually raise funds from members; the announcement and poll on FictionAlley Park was entirely made up of varieties on "yay, yes I will vote for FA" without any kind of dissenting vote possible (although it's possible people did dissent by not voting at all, since only 19 people actually voted and two people commented in the thread to say that this was not cool); and then when the LJ announcement sparked fury, gwendolyngrace seems to have intentionally made things worse. And then she deleted the comments and locked everything, as one does after ending up on the wrong side of a dreadful mess. If there was a bingo card for this-- there probably is, somewhere-- somebody out there just stood up and yelled BINGO.
All in all, I'm still glad I found out about this when I did. I really did want something to distract me today, and boy howdy, this did the trick.
Crosspost from Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. Comments are disabled on LJ because LJ hates privacy, but you can comment on Dreamwidth. (Yes, even if you don't have a DW account!)
Okay, so this is what I have (props to
seperis for causing me to look) gleaned from the incredibly unclear website and, more properly, from reading everything else I can find about the Pepsi Refresh project: there are six categories, and four levels of funding, but if you expected one thing per level of funding in each category will win, you are wrong!
Example from February's contest here. I went through and actually, God help me, put all the details given on amounts/categories into an Excel sheet and ran the thing through a PivotTable to get this.
The bottom three amount categories each got 10 ideas picked; the $250,000 level got two picked.
By Number of Grants:
9 grants to Education: 2 in $5,000, 3 in $25,000, 3 in $50,000, and 1 in $250,000.
8 grants to Neighborhoods: 1 in $5,000, three in $25,000, three in $50,000, and one in $250,000.
5 grants to Food & Shelter: 4 in $5,000, and 1 in $50,000.
4 grants to Health: 1 in $5,000, 2 in $25,000, and 2 in $50,000.
4 grants to Arts & Culture: 1 in $5,000, 1 in $25,000, and 2 in $50,000.
2 grants to The Planet: 1 in $5,000 1 one in $25,000.
By amount:
Education got a total of $485,000.
Neighborhoods got a total of $480,000.
Arts & Culture got a total of $130,000.
Health got $105,000.
Food & Shelter got $70,000.
The Planet got $30,000.
Either way you look at it, it is great to be Education or Neighborhoods, and sucks to be The Planet.
Granted, I am missing some key data, like how many submissions were there in each level and in each category, but nonetheless, what we're looking at here is that Pepsi clearly is not doing a one-per-amount-per-category kind of thing. Pepsi nowhere states that they are doing anything of the kind, and I'm guessing that's because, well, they're not. So yes, FictionAlley is running against homeless shelters and taking care of wounded vets and the like. So is the asshat who wants to get money to build a model train set, for reasons I don't understand. They are competing against people in their amount category, and that does include quite a few things I'd think are more necessary for life. HP fandom applies to a very specific portion of a fairly privileged people-- you must have a computer and an internet connection to apply, and I know we forget that, but not everyone does-- and
ETA: For the sheer hell of it, I added all the other months (thanks to
seperis, I found all the months' recipients here): the resulting massive spreadsheet and hopefully more helpful summary page is here. I will now die from my own geekiness, oh God. [/ETA]
In addition-- well, I'm not in on the details, but I checked around to see what was going on, and the first time there was any kind of fundraising appeal in the fiction_alley comm is September 1, and it sounds like that was a big announcement, including announcing some changes at the site made to try to figure out the money situation. That would be the day after pinkfinity-- I believe that's Heidi-- posted about her first attempts to get into the Pepsi Refresh thing the previous month. Someone else who's more familiar with FictionAlley might be able to tell if there was some kind of e-mail campaign or something on FictionAlley Park, but at the moment, to me, this looks kind of bad. This looks like they started trying to get into the Pepsi Refresh thing before they started asking for money from their own member base.
I have some thoughts about that.
1) Seriously, this is your plan for raising money? This is underpants-gnome levels of planning, people. This appears to be like buying a lottery ticket; from what I'm hearing, FA has a pretty low chance of winning.
2) pinkfinity references how OTW owns their own servers. I'm pretty sure that somewhere, she actually knows that it took years for the OTW to accomplish that, and that in the meantime they got really freaking good at raising money. Like, daily posts on their LJ/DW accounts (and on the blog, and frankly anywhere else they had access), support icons, gifts for certain levels of support-- hell, they look like a mini NPR during pledge time, it's great, extremely professional. What they did NOT do was put up a total of one post with the pledge information. Pete's sake, I don't think most people check in every day; the likelihood of wading back through pages of your flist to accidentally trip over a one-time-only post is kind of silly. Point being, this already looks like a shoddy kind of way to run this thing, which seems surprising given their whole VERY OFFICIAL legal set-up.
3)
epershand posted about it here, and put her finger on one big thing I hadn't thought about consciously yet: in this day and age, a single-fandom archive-- more, a single-fandom archive with no NC-17 and some specific rules about what gets in-- is a dinosaur. The fandom migration to LJ (and other LJ-type spaces) has meant, among a number of other big changes, that even when someone you're friends with in one fandom moves on to write fic for another fandom, they're still in the same place, still under the same handle, still in touch. There's not this walled garden approach anymore: by the very nature of the place, we're all a little polyfandom, if not extremely so.
Even the people who are involved with this-- pinkfinity and gwendolyngrace-- are involved in other fandoms that have taken over the majority of their attention and their LJ background wallpaper. I think it may just be that the time is past for a single-fandom archive to be able to rally the resources to own their own servers. It might honestly just be time to see if they can work something out with the OTW to get the archived fic saved, if the people in charge can't pony up the money to keep the place going themselves-- and honestly, if it were a fandom I hadn't been seriously active in for years, I wouldn't, even if I could. People move on. A lot of us stay in fandom, just... different fandoms. Which is why, these days, it's a lot easier to get money for the OTW servers than for the FictionAlley servers-- whereas back in 2002, that wouldn't have been the case at all.
4) Goddamn, gwendolyngrace, you did yourself NO FAVORS with this: I've done the research and I'm here to tell you that there are far more sources of funding available to starving children in Africa than there are to fan-oriented websites. Seriously, fandom has long memories, and people still remember the Laptopgate/Charitygate bundle of awful-- possibly because it wasn't just wank, it was awful, and ugly, and had that same kind of sense to it-- that BNFs deserve your money, but sick people you don't know... don't.
It's just been badly handled from beginning to end, which doesn't help anything, ever, anywhere. It seems to have been decided by the people at the top and handed down by fiat without consulting anyone else, after only a mild attempt to actually raise funds from members; the announcement and poll on FictionAlley Park was entirely made up of varieties on "yay, yes I will vote for FA" without any kind of dissenting vote possible (although it's possible people did dissent by not voting at all, since only 19 people actually voted and two people commented in the thread to say that this was not cool); and then when the LJ announcement sparked fury, gwendolyngrace seems to have intentionally made things worse. And then she deleted the comments and locked everything, as one does after ending up on the wrong side of a dreadful mess. If there was a bingo card for this-- there probably is, somewhere-- somebody out there just stood up and yelled BINGO.
All in all, I'm still glad I found out about this when I did. I really did want something to distract me today, and boy howdy, this did the trick.
Crosspost from Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. Comments are disabled on LJ because LJ hates privacy, but you can comment on Dreamwidth. (Yes, even if you don't have a DW account!)