Not about the OTW
[First things first, I posted a fic at sb_fag_ends, a 600 PG AU fic at the end of Out of My Mind, in answer to question of what would have happened if Spike had got his chip out and turned Buffy: Your Queen You Bear Me. It has non-graphic violence, but otherwise nothing you'd warn for on the AO3.]
Talking of the AO3, however, gets me started on everything I've been reading about the OTW elections recently, in particular the recent developments outlined in this post by
bookshop. I am hesitant to make a big public post about my thoughts, mainly because I'm not a member nor am I a volunteer, though I am a fairly keen user of the AO3. The fail_fandomanon meme led me to this post by norabombay, however (where I also don't feel qualified to comment, because I have no idea who this person is - hi! if you find your way here), which sparked off some thoughts on stop_plagiarism, aka the comm I think I technically founded, strange as it seems to think now, and which I think is relatively successful these days? We are most definitely incomparably small and slight in comparison to the OTW (if The Meme correctly informs me about the size of the volunteer pool, we're about 5% of the size, although the profile page informs me we have about 1650 people interested enough to count themselves members), and we haven't had to do any coding beyond designing various LJ pages, but, hey, we're a fandom organisation I actually know something about...
And so, forgive my navel-gazing, but I thought it might be interesting to consider why it seems to have been successful - which I qualify in terms of 'still running since it was started in 2004 and, according to my cursory search, much more frequently recommended than dissed, despite a seemingly high awareness of it in fandom'. (Do please correct me if you think my impression of the situation is wrong, of course!)
What strikes me:
Are we the same as the OTW? Not in the least. But it's from this perspective that I approach any and every fandom organisation, and having this perspective I can't help but make comparisons. Even if they're only that I don't think there's any shame if circumstances mean that the best way of moving forward is for a founder to become a grunt.
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Talking of the AO3, however, gets me started on everything I've been reading about the OTW elections recently, in particular the recent developments outlined in this post by
bookshop. I am hesitant to make a big public post about my thoughts, mainly because I'm not a member nor am I a volunteer, though I am a fairly keen user of the AO3. The fail_fandomanon meme led me to this post by norabombay, however (where I also don't feel qualified to comment, because I have no idea who this person is - hi! if you find your way here), which sparked off some thoughts on stop_plagiarism, aka the comm I think I technically founded, strange as it seems to think now, and which I think is relatively successful these days? We are most definitely incomparably small and slight in comparison to the OTW (if The Meme correctly informs me about the size of the volunteer pool, we're about 5% of the size, although the profile page informs me we have about 1650 people interested enough to count themselves members), and we haven't had to do any coding beyond designing various LJ pages, but, hey, we're a fandom organisation I actually know something about...
And so, forgive my navel-gazing, but I thought it might be interesting to consider why it seems to have been successful - which I qualify in terms of 'still running since it was started in 2004 and, according to my cursory search, much more frequently recommended than dissed, despite a seemingly high awareness of it in fandom'. (Do please correct me if you think my impression of the situation is wrong, of course!)
What strikes me:
- The comm was initially set up to meet a very specific need, namely estepheia's comment here (and we can all take a minute to laugh at the exchange of 'we need an LJ community that deals exclusively with plagiarism and that exposes plagiarists' and my frankly ridiculous 'I'm thinking of setting one up at the weekend'!!), which meant that whatever else happened, we actually had a primary, singular goal in mind. We also had a model, though I can't locate it now, in bloodshedbaby(?) very carefully going through a case of plagiarism as a community mod and documenting it for the world to see, which was actually quite rare at the time.
- I was rather serendipitously joined in my very first request for co-mods by both spiralleds and mihasx. I say serendipitously because I think I lacked quite a number of crucial skills necessary to see things through, and that would have shown very quickly without them. mihasx knew about journal layouts, which I didn't know about at the time, and which I think was a big help in making the comm feel like somewhere that existed, but most importantly there was spiralleds, who deserves her very own set of nested bullet points, because
- I was completely naive and had no real experience with plagiarism investigation, but am one of those people (whoever they are in business-speak) who likes to come up with ideas and go with them. I can see problems and generally work out how systems should work, but get distracted and burn out quickly when it comes to the on-going implementation of them.
- Spi, on the other hand, not only had experience in dealing with plagiarism in academia, but knows how to properly manage a project. She knew when to expand our purview and when to limit it, could recognise when we needed new mods on the team and when we needed a better system of organising ourselves
- Since we initially started by looking at Buffyverse plagiarism cases, I think it was very useful that Spi was from (what at the time felt like) the opposite side of fandom from me - the Bangel side! (Gasp!) As time went on and we started dealing with any fandom that came to us that became less important, but IIRC it was useful in the early days to be able to say 'I actually know the authors involved in this; I think you could do a more impartial job by looking into it'. We were friends through the comm in the first instance, and I think that really helped, considering what we were trying to do.
- Also, just because it needs to be said, she has worked essentially tirelessly on the comm for nearly seven years and gets barely any credit from what I can see, due to the way I think we try to have a collective identity. She is just excellent.
- I was completely naive and had no real experience with plagiarism investigation, but am one of those people (whoever they are in business-speak) who likes to come up with ideas and go with them. I can see problems and generally work out how systems should work, but get distracted and burn out quickly when it comes to the on-going implementation of them.
- Along the way, however, the comm has also been joined by some fabulous volunteers, many of whom may well not know me because of the more silent 'scutwork' position I've been in for a long time now (more on this below), but who've all put lots of time and energy into making the comm what it is. According to the mod category of tags (the tagging itself being something I had no hand in, so definitely someone else's crucial work), there have been thirty-one people who've helped out over the years, and that's not including (I don't think) the various people, fan artists for example, who have been consulted in situations beyond our expertise, and people who have offered crucial commentary on how we're working (I remember, for example, that
ponders_life gave a lot of feedback in the early days). I've seen people who've been not sure what our processes are learn how to screencap, for example, then become familiar with the several types of cases we often see, and then teach other people what they've learnt. I've seen people come to the mod team with ideas on how to improve our internal systems and implementing them (vic_vega66, if you're reading this, much love for your magnificent Mod Queue auto-post button, which is one of things I'm thinking of). That's kept us just going and going.
- When I burnt out, it didn't actually matter for the comm as a whole. I should qualify that, because burning out is probably too strong a term, but by about 2007 my life was growing busier and I began to slightly dread coming home and having to deal with cases. I wasn't even putting in that much time, but I began to worry more and more about interacting with strangers and really didn't enjoy what I was doing. My waning naive enthusiasm, I think, was beginning to butt heads with the understanding that we actually had something going that I didn't want to screw up: it wasn't anybody's fault, just the practicalities of my personality interfacing with the changing situation. Thankfully, I wasn't needed, except in the position that requests for affiliation still came through a post I had made and there was my name on the post detailing people who had once been on the list of plagiarists, but whose year there had past. And both of these could have easily been switched over anyway. I didn't want to completely walk out on things, however, so spiralleds and I worked out a new way that I could fit - namely doing administrative tidying and chiming in if there was ever any need for some institutional memory. The fact that I, as a founding mod, could move to a very minor, quiet position proves, I think, that we had/have a strong system in place. (And I should note that, as glorious as Spi is, the comm does keep running when she goes on holiday, as far as I can tell! We don't need her to function - she just gives an awful amount towards making functioning fantastic.)
- We started in nearly completely open view and have only stepped into private when we needed to. Right at the beginning the comm was the point of mod interaction, topped up by the odd email. This then developed into the stop_plag_mods discussion community, which was and still is an egalitarian platform for all the mods to post and respond to each other about what they're working on. Should stop_plagiarism ever balloon exponentially, the number of mods ballooning with it, I'm sure a sp_mods_mods comm could be formed to add an extra tier of management, but from the start we set out to facilitate our members' own investigations and collect everyone together, so we only created separate spaces to convene when it became untenable to do it in the open. As of now, however, if anyone wants to they can go back in the archives and find our (somewhat casual) beginnings and see how various parts of the comm came into being, and I think that's in our favour.
Are we the same as the OTW? Not in the least. But it's from this perspective that I approach any and every fandom organisation, and having this perspective I can't help but make comparisons. Even if they're only that I don't think there's any shame if circumstances mean that the best way of moving forward is for a founder to become a grunt.
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