Open Letter regarding Communities Structure

I know this is another long one, but I need everyone to stick with it and post what they think.

OPEN LETTER TO THE COMMUNITY

I don't like having to be the one to suggest or post something like this up, but I feel that the time has come for someone to say something. I'm going to preface this whole thing by saying that I believe that over the last several years, I believe Chalex has done an outstanding job in order to get BRS, C2G and ATK to what each evolution became, and without him, we would not be where we are today and not have the assets available to us. Admittedly, some of his changes have not been well received or have been left desolate and never used, such as the Marketplace, but whatever he has done, he has done with the single goal of bettering the community as a whole. Some updates, such as the recent changes to the forum, the old radio station and the arcade were stellar examples of the good he has managed to bring to our community.

However, as a community, in order to continue to operate and grow, we must find ways of bringing in new members as well as keeping those new members who decide to stay. We must also provide an active environment that is efficient, easy-to-use, uncluttered and attractive to those from outside the core membership (those who have been with the community for a very long time, such as myself, Piers, Chazlene etc.). This, I believe, is the main purpose of a leader of the community – to maintain the community.

Many of you will have noticed that whilst he has been able to come on a couple times in the last few weeks, his activity has waned quite a bit, and as a result, the forums have seen a dramatic decrease in activity and threads created. I have been doing all that I can to arrange events to bring people into the community, as well as engage the current membership by asking for their input as to their game preferences in order to create the events schedule I have posted in another thread. I also created the DWPS earlier in the year to bring people onto the forums and look around once they had voted. But even with these initiatives, the community has slowly become more inactive.

It's this community inactivity which could, in the end, harm the community long-term, and without the co-operation of everyone, it could wind up that we strangle ourselves into an area where only the core members will ever be online to play games, as we are completely unmarketable to new members. Now, I understand that creating a behemoth membership of several hundred members is difficult to create, and even harder to maintain effectively. But if we even want to expand out of our current membership, we must find ways of becoming more active as a group, as well as adapting our image to become more simplistic and appealing to visiting gamers.

In order to do this, we require active leadership. However, at this time, all power to change resides with Chalex, who, as mentioned above, has become relatively inactive as of late. Before I say anything else, I understand that he has been at university and this places a massive time restriction on his life. I also do not want any 'voteban Chalex' posts, as I believe he is still performing his administrative and financial role of keeping the services running and paid for brilliantly.

What I am suggesting is that we have a three-fold reform in how the community is being run.

Firstly, we need the creation of a bigger leadership contingent. We currently have four full moderators, and I have moderating powers in some small forums that I have a large part in (such as MMO's and the poll sub-forum). However, all of the main controls, such as server editing and other aspects remain with Chalex. What I propose is a overhaul of the one-tiered system with a two-tiered leadership system. Whilst Chalex would remain as overall leader, and maintain his controls, several deputies would be appointed to assist him in running different areas of the community, by being given some of the controls, which would help keep the community active over time. Some of these roles, such as Server Manager, have been given to various people over time, but it's often informal, and often left to someone to take control of ad hoc. My recommendation is that the following roles be created. Note that I have also provided my thoughts as to who I believe would perform best in that role (that's not to say anyone else couldn't do it, as I'm sure everyone can contribute, e.g I thought that I would do well as Deputy Leader, but I felt that Phantom would do a nicer job)

Deputy Leader - Essentially becomes Chalex when he isn't available, and takes final decisions in his absence. Also ensures other managers are performing well in their roles and can fill in when required [Phantom]

Server Manager - Ensures servers are up-to-date and active, and finds ways to keep them active, whether mods or advertising [VoX and/or Col. Mitch]

Events Manager - Runs tournaments, game nights and proposes ideas for community gatherings etc [Oricalcos]

Community/Forum Manager - essentially the PR guy, he ensures new members are welcomed and supported. Any complaints with the moderators or managers come through this guy. He also makes sure the forums are kept in check and trimmed nicely, [Chazlene]

Other roles, of course, can be created, and some may not be needed, but we need a system like this in order to create an active support network around Chalex, as well as giving community members more options when wishing to ask questions to a senior member of the community, as it gives them a specialist to go to. For those of you who are a little sceptical of this model, look at successful communities, and note whether they have one leader and a couple mods, or a team of leaders who co-ordinate with each other and the mods to keep things running. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you'll find it's the latter, and in order to implement this system successfully, you must have the core team of organisers before you can build upon that foundation. On the question of mods, I believe that the current team is fine for the size that we have, but if we expanded beyond fifty active members, then I would suggest appointing another moderator.

Secondly, once the team has been assembled, we need to overview the entire site and remove anything that is either unused, inactive, or useless. This would take place one evening, where everyone can contribute on ways to slim down the site, which will include merging or removing inactive forum categories and plugins, in order to make the site less intimidating to new members. For example, I don't think anyone has used the Marketplace add-on since it was introduced. I have suggested this before, and was turned down by Chalex. However, it's got to the stage where the site looks ridiculous because all of our posts are in four or five forums, and several more are simply left desolate or empty.

Thirdly, we all need to seriously evaluate the communities aims and goals. For example, do we all wish to expand the community beyond what we are, or do you actually want it to stay as it is? Do you want to remain as an “all games welcome” community, or do you want to focus on four or five, and have others games come in as an aside now and again? What about the competitive side – do you want this to be revived? Before we can move forward, we must find out where we want this to go, and it's only by answering these questions that we find that out.

If these three steps can be implemented then I feel that we can stand in good stead to be stronger in the future.

Many of these suggestions have been given in the past as separate ideas, and have had very little backing, but as of now, I have pooled them together, and I will be championing them until change is accomplished here, because I fear that without alterations to the current structure of the site, we will simply wither and die after such a long and personal history, and I do not wish for this community to suffer that fate.

To sum this up for those who are about to post tldr;

1 - Community has become inactive as of late, as well as the leadership of the community.
Without active, effective leadership, the community will become stagnant.

2 - I propose the three step program to alter the command structure of ATK

a) Chalex devolves powers to a team of appointed/elected managers who look after different areas of the community (Current suggestion - Phantom as Deputy Leader, Chazlene as Community Manager, VoX and/or Col. Mitch as Server Manager and myself as Events Manager). This promotes active leadership in improving the community and allows newer members to ask questions to someone specifically tasked with that region.

b) After the team creation, the forum and site plugins need to be evaluated for activity and usefulness, and those which are not used enough or are inactive/useless should be removed as soon as possible.

c) The community as a whole needs to decide what it wants to become before we can move forward and take steps to become it (Larger membership? Focus on only a few games? How many more people are we aiming for?)

As a final point, anyone who thinks this will go away in a week is very mistaken. I will do whatever I have to in order to ensure that these changes are put through and implemented.

Mammoth post there Oricalcos, good job. I actually agree with pretty much everything you said.

When ATK was founded "back in the day", I had acres or time just to spend setting up 3/4 CSS servers, managing the site, organising sponsorship etc. These days, with university, a full time job over the whole summer, and various other committee responsibilities at university, I don't have the time I once had.

I have tried in the past to devolve certain administration, like the severs, but ultimately someone really needs to be DEDICATED to the task at hand. I know you are Oric, but not everyone is. I do think we should try it though.

Tonight I will come on Mumble to discuss this more with you guys, as I couldn't possibly answer all the questions you have posted.

Encore!

Read, agree on most stuff.

VOTEBAN CHALEX4!!!!

On another note this looks sensible.

Right... firstly I believe our activity has actually increased significantly over the past couple of months, look how many new members we've had introducing themselves, we've been getting new people on Mumble and people have just been saying in the shoutbox how many more new posts there's been recently. I agree that over the past year as a whole ATK's activity has waned, but that's only due to most of the founding members of ATK going off to university and concentrating on different things. However, now that it's the summer holidays and most of us have slightly more free time, activity is on the up again, plus things are looking promising for the future due to our partnership deal with GamerFM.

Secondly Oric, about giving certain members roles such as Deputy Leader, Server Manager, etc: People are part of ATK to socialise and have fun. ATK isn't part of our careers, so you can't force specific tasks onto people who aren't going to be online all the time. In practice I think it will work better if the same powers are handed out equally to the top few members such as Vox, Phantom and I, so that when something needs to be sorted to do with servers, the forum or whatever, the person who happens to be available at the time can fix it.

With all that said I do think more power and responsibility should be handed out carefully to a select few people, but it just seems counter-productive to be so strict over who has what abilities. Also even though I just said I don't believe that our activity is dropping, we still might as well follow some of these measures to improve ATK. I think it needs to be said as well that to help draw in more members we need to advertise ourselves more, tie in with other well known gaming websites, and produce something we can show off to the rest of the internet, whether it be films, game maps and skins or mods, but all done under the name of ATK. Anyway, to begin with so we can brainstorm some more ideas we should create a 'Boardroom' subforum to the admin caves, where moderators can discuss new ideas, with any that appear good moving into an open discussion with every member of ATK.

Had a chat with Oric about this before and seems like a really good idea, and focusing on a specific game again would be awesome, something like BC2 or maybe the new medal of honor??

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chazlene

Right... firstly I believe our activity has actually increased significantly over the past couple of months, look how many new members we've had introducing themselves, we've been getting new people on Mumble and people have just been saying in the shoutbox how many more new posts there's been recently. I agree that over the past year as a whole ATK's activity has waned, but that's only due to most of the founding members of ATK going off to university and concentrating on different things. However, now that it's the summer holidays and most of us have slightly more free time, activity is on the up again, plus things are looking promising for the future due to our partnership deal with GamerFM.

Secondly Oric, about giving certain members roles such as Deputy Leader, Server Manager, etc: People are part of ATK to socialise and have fun. ATK isn't part of our careers, so you can't force specific tasks onto people who aren't going to be online all the time. In practice I think it will work better if the same powers are handed out equally to the top few members such as Vox, Phantom and I, so that when something needs to be sorted to do with servers, the forum or whatever, the person who happens to be available at the time can fix it.

With all that said I do think more power and responsibility should be handed out carefully to a select few people, but it just seems counter-productive to be so strict over who has what abilities. Also even though I just said I don't believe that our activity is dropping, we still might as well follow some of these measures to improve ATK. I think it needs to be said as well that to help draw in more members we need to advertise ourselves more, tie in with other well known gaming websites, and produce something we can show off to the rest of the internet, whether it be films, game maps and skins or mods, but all done under the name of ATK. Anyway, to begin with so we can brainstorm some more ideas we should create a 'Boardroom' subforum to the admin caves, where moderators can discuss new ideas, with any that appear good moving into an open discussion with every member of ATK.

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I'm with Chaz here... Anything more formal than a couple of messages over steam to organise a team isn't really something I want to bother with...

and another '...', purely because they're awesome.

Woah, can't reply to all of that but if you want my opinion on anything specific, grab me on Steam :).


Will give my views mainly based around how things are done in the PRT, as that's essentially an organizational nightmare.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chazlene

In practice I think it will work better if the same powers are handed out equally to the top few members such as Vox, Phantom and I, so that when something needs to be sorted to do with servers, the forum or whatever, the person who happens to be available at the time can fix it.

With all that said I do think more power and responsibility should be handed out carefully to a select few people, but it just seems counter-productive to be so strict over who has what abilities.

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Highly agree with this, in the PRT we all have our own roles that we specialize in, yet we all have the relevant permissions to be able to sort out other issues. For example, I'm simply a graphics dude, but if I get a someone talk to me on xfire about the fact their user permissions have gone lulwut (With 45 (Yes, 45) usergroups this happens a lot) so I've got the relevant access to change permissions, edit forums etc etc to deal with teams from a web perspective. Also the web guy, while he mainly codes and maintains plug-ins for us, if a support ticket pops up he's got the relevant access to sort out the dispute.

Through this all, we don't often get a massive pile up of support tickets and problems (unless everyone is being lazy or the teams are being arrogant) as there is normally someone who will sort it out if others are away.

All of this is then supervised by the Lead, who is in turn watched over by senior management (main PR guys really).


So yeah, minor insight into how we get things relatively smooth (lol) when there's a lot to do/a lot of people nagging.

Some of it can be applied here, some cant, was more an example really.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by D_K_Head

and another '...', purely because they're awesome.

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It's called an ellipsis ;)