Things I want to talk about

The zine. It's coming together nicely. We have stories to print. No one has run screaming at the sight of our publishing contract (yet). Two people have even thanked us for prompt and polite rejections. Buying InDesign was bad for my credit card, but it's a dream to work with. Still need to figure out where we're going to print it, and find out if I can get it into any local stores.

Publishing. It's a weird business. I was thrilled to rediscover that the front of the Chicago Manual of Style is a guide to bookmaking, which has enough crossover for serial publications to be useful and interesting. I really wish someone had a similar kind of guide to serials, though. I'm discovering that print on demand is a hot topic right now, even though it's immensely impractical for most kinds of publishing. I'm discovering that most people still don't want to talk about business mechanics and economics. I don't get this, because looking at the mechanics of things makes me feel like I have more control. Don't other people want to know where to apply the lever?

Work. There isn't much I can say in public. I'm feeling frustrated and burned out. We're so close to finishing the project, and yet... not.

Planning. This is another area where it's all about mechanics. You have resources, you have time, you have goals. Getting all of those to work together is mostly an issue of breaking it up into pieces and knowing where you can compromise. One of my coworkers likes to talk about goals as a kind of boundary. You use them to determine whether a given activity is inside or outside. So if the goal is to fix the car's engine, you don't waste time cleaning the windows. It doesn't feel hard to me, but it must be more difficult than I think because a lot of people are really bad at this. They don't pay enough attention to the details.

I'll stop there, because I have a long list of bugs to fix. If anyone feels like commenting, tell me: what have you been wanting to talk about?

Addendum on planning: I'm really tired of people acting like I'm an asshole when I say, "Given our resources, the only way we can finish by Tuesday is by cutting a deliverable." or anything similar. I'm not doing it to yank anyone around. It's just my honest assessment of the situation. If you don't like it, change the timeline or add more resources (though there's a limit to what you can do with that second one--see Mythical Man Month).

Another experiment

Not a full story, just a piece or a sketch. Click the image to see a larger size (with readable text).

Stickers!

Because I'm a dork and wanted to play with my new printer, I made stickers.



I only printed a single sheet of these, but I'll make more if anyone has a use for them.

Short, short, short stories

Escape Pod, one of my favorite podcasts, is having an open contest for stories under 300 words. They received so many entries that the voting has been broken into groups of twelve. I submitted my entry over a week ago, and it's just now up on the site.

If you're curious about the stories, and mine in particular, here's how it works: anyone who creates an account on the Escape Pod forums can read the stories and vote on their favorite three in each group. But since it's anonymous, I can't tell you which story is mine. Go read, and vote for the stories you like. It's really interesting watching how different people try to make a story work in that little text.

Edit: I removed which group number my story is in, because I'm starting to realize it might make it to the next round, and I don't want to spoil things by making it too easy to identify my entry.

Recent Changes Camp

I spent yesterday and part of today at Recent Changes Camp, which is an unconference about wikis.
Part of how an unconference works is that the participants are encouraged to bring topics they'd like to present on or discuss. So when it came time to put topics on the schedule, I did two: "Building Diverse Communities", which I combined with Dawn Foster's community building discussion, and a photography thing that didn't attract any participants (oh well).Some really interesting thoughts on communities, openness, and access came up in the session with Dawn. One was the idea of having a formal process to guide newcomers, either by assigning community greeters, building an intro tutorial to walk people through the basic steps needed to participate (Second Life was given as an example here), or creating some other process to welcome people and help them get involved.

We talked a bit about hooks, about entry-level activities that get people interested or demonstrate that this is something individuals can become a part of. Afterward, I started thinking about how to recognize participation a multi-level process.

Here's an example:

Organization	Free Geek	Personal Telco	OPB	Linux (or other open source project	Wikipedia
Level One	donating old computer equipment	accessing a wifi node	listening to a radio program	using Linux on a computer	anonymously editing a spelling error on a page
Level Two	volunteering to sort recyclable donations	installing a wifi access point at home or work	donating during the pledge drive	reporting a bug	adding content as a registered user
Level Three	building computers for others	helping maintain the network and access points	volunteering to answer phones during a pledge drive	contributing a patch	helping moderate discussions about content and editing

...and so on.

The table format suggests that it's a linear process, but there could easily be all sorts of activities at each level. What I like is that it recognizes that even casual participants are still part of the community, and that not everyone will want to be on the leadership committee or learn to program for the Linux kernel. These different levels of involvement are natural and healthy.

If a community wants to continue to grow or even just stay alive, it needs to have opportunities for a variety of people to get involved. How broad of a group you want to target will depend on the community or project, but I don't think you can succeed in the long run without some diversity, and the ability to accommodate individual time commitments and levels of interest.

I think the discussion tapped into a lot of things people were already thinking about, because we went at least half an hour beyond our scheduled time slot. There were many other interesting ideas from the participants, and you can find detailed notes on the RCC wiki.