Greetings and Salutations! Calling all challenge mods, archivists, and people with vivid fannish imaginations! If you’ve run a fannish challenge or exchange, moderated a challenge community, edited a zine, or put together a themed rec list, we want to talk to you. If you’ve participated in a fannish challenge and/or have ever thought in detail about how to run a challenge, please also help us out! We’re in the process of developing the design for two essential pieces of functionality on the Archive of Our Own Roadmap, Version 0.7: Collections and Challenges.
As part of that design work we need to know how it’s going to be used and understand what different people want from it.
To make this easier we’re writing up a series of different scenarios describing how a person might use Collections or Challenges and we ask you to contribute. We want short stories describing ideal scenarios and we want them from the perspective of different people – moderators, writers, readers. Go wild!
Examples under the cut. Please leave a comment below; members of ADT (Accessibility, Design, & Technology; the Archive team) will be watching and collecting scenarios. (Please don’t worry if your idea contradicts someone else’s way of doing things! The AO3 needs to be able to work in multiple ways! And feel free to build on or respond to each other’s ideas.)
Collections:
Samvara is a keen fan of the Supernatural fandom and is particularly stuck on stories where Sam Winchester grows wings, she has an account on the AO3 and creates a Collection called SamOnHigh. She writes the blurb for the Collection giving guidelines on joining the Collection explaining she loves, loves loves Sam with wings but is willing to accept stories where any other Winchester has wings so long as Sam does too. Samvara messages every author on the AO3 with a winged Sam story that she can find, inviting them to join the Collection and promotes it shamelessly on the interwebs. One day someone tries to add a story where Sam grows tentacles but Samvara removes it from the Collection and messages the author explaining that even if he can fly, it’s still not really WINGS now is it. They never speak again 🙁 Eventually Samvara gets a debilitating disease and decides to put her energies into something else and makes one of her co-moderators of the community do all the work as she vanishes off to learn rock polishing in the desert.
Challenges:
Before Samvara gets all diseased she also decides to run a wingfic writing challenge and publishes a manifesto encouraging all writers to consider this magnificent idea, submit story ideas (prompts) and sign up to write. The prompts are visible to everyone and some have to be removed because they didn’t understand it was a SPN wingfic writing challenge and keep trying to insert Legolas – this spurs some heated emails and several other wingfic challenges get launched. Eventually Samvara reaches her goal of 50 prompts and 50 sign-ups and randomly allocates the prompts to writers. The due date for the stories is in 3 months and she writes the odd encouraging message reminding people of the deadline. She also has to change some of the prompts and match them up with new writers who didn’t like their initial prompt or were unable to continue writing.
People start posting their stories about a month in and Samvara gloats over them lovingly until the due date is reached (which she had to extend by 10 days) and then she makes the new additions to the Collection visible but keeps the authors anonymous for another 14 days.
shipcollection. ghostwriter, by then only moderator/owner of the collection, decides to abandon it, as the amount of fic being posted is too much for her to read and add. ... until another fan of Wally West dark!fics appears, and the story repeats itself (this time with the release of the new Flash Live Action movie) ;P.Scribbler and her partner-in-crime write stories in a shared post-series 'verse for a certain fandom, for which they hammered out details, plots and story lines together, even if they are writing separately. They gather their stories in a collection. Except they wouldn't want anyone else who happens to write post-series (or other) fic for the same fandom to be able to add their stories to the collection too.Never mind! Just figured out we can already do that using co-authors on series. Which is, well, awesome! Challenges Scribbler also runs (when she's in the mood) a Fan Fiction Tumble Game, a variation of the Round Robin. With the FanFicTumble, there's not one story making the rounds, but as many as there are participants. Every participant starts out with the same teaser, and every writer writes a part for each story, resulting in widely varying, co-written stories that started with the same scene. Preferably, each participant adds their part(s)/chapter anonymously, before Scribbler reassigns the stories to a new participant. Once stories are finished, authors will be revealed and stories made public. Ideally, participants would only see their currently assigned story and not have access to stories that others are working on, so as to keep the suspense going.