Strategic planning update #6

Hello from Strategic Planning! Just a short update from us this month…

We are almost finished with the first draft of our Tag Wrangling report, and we’re very excited to share it internally and receive feedback. As we mentioned in our last update, first the report will be shared with Tag Wrangling committee staff, then with the Board, then with Tag Wrangling volunteers; then it will be published publicly. Each of these groups will have the opportunity to correct factual errors in review, but not to remove or edit the summary of what was revealed by the information gathering process.

We are specifically interested right now in hearing more about tag wrangling issues concerning fandoms that are underrepresented on the Archive Of Our Own, particularly anime/manga and other non-Western fandoms. If you are a current or retired tag wrangler for these fandoms and have thoughts to share, we would like to hear from you, particularly if you did not have a chance to fill out our survey. You can get in touch with us through our direct contact form

We are also beginning to conduct follow-up interviews with people who indicated on their survey responses that they’d like to talk to us further about a particular issue or experience. We really appreciate how many respondents were willing to take even more time out of their busy lives to share their thoughts with us, and we’re excited for the more in-depth information these interviews will yield!

The second team to work with us is Volunteers & Recruiting, and we have recently begun drafting our Volunteers & Recruiting report. We’ve also deployed a survey to retired Volunteers & Recruiting staffers and chairs.

One of the things we’ve found quite helpful is the “meta” question we include in our surveys:

Are there any questions we should have asked on this survey that we didn’t, or something else we should have done differently (e.g., a different approach, a different format, etc.)?

We’ve done our best to take those answers and use them to improve each new survey to make sure they are easy to take, easy to understand, and get us the most amount of data possible. It seems to be working! We feel extremely lucky and grateful that the OTW volunteers and staffers taking our surveys are so willing to give us immediate feedback on what we’re doing right and wrong — a big thank you to all of them!

Next up for us is the information gathering process for the Open Doors team: we’ve reviewed documentation, deployed a staff survey and started interviewing the chair. We are in the process of contacting the chairs of other committees to determine who we should look at next. We’ve also started talking to the Translation committee about actually getting our reports translated; at the very least, we’re hopeful we’ll be able to have our all-org and Board reports translated.

As always, people with questions and comments about the strategic planning process and/or who would like to get in touch with us about their OTW experiences are all welcome to contact us via our direct contact form. We look forward to hearing from you!

2012-10-03 admin
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  1. Starlady commented: What exactly does Strategic Planning want.to know from animanga tag wranglers? "Thoughts to share" is pretty vague.
    • Claire, on behalf of Strategic Planning commented: Thank you for your question! These are the interview questions we have been asking people who respond through our contact form: - Did you feel like there was sufficient AO3/OTW support for any specific tagging issues you may have had during your wrangling experience for this fandom? - Did you feel like you were able to wrangle your fandom(s) on your own (or with the help of your co-wrangler(s)) to your satisfaction? - How much time did wrangling your fandom(s) take? Was it what you would consider to be too much? - Do you feel your input and fannish experiences are reflected in the current guidelines for canonical tags? If not, do you have any suggestions for how these guidelines could be changed to better incorporate the needs of your fandoms? - Do you feel the tag wrangling needs of your fandom(s) are being adequately met at the moment? - Do you have any suggestions on how to address wrangling issues specific to your fandom(s)? Demographic questions. We’d appreciate your answers to these if you’re so inclined and have the time. - How long have/did you work with the OTW? (And in what capacity?) - What has been/was your overall OTW experience like? - Which fandoms did/do you wrangle? Feel free to answer generally (e.g., “large, wrangling-intensive manhua” or “small k-drama”) or specifically (e.g., “Prince of Tennis and Bleach”). - If you no longer wrangle, please tell us why not. If you have left the OTW altogether, we’d be interested to know the reason(s) for that. We also definitely invite people to share any thoughts, ideas or experiences about wrangling that don’t happen to fit into these questions. In order to maintain confidentiality (as well as for ease of analysis by our team), we ask that people not answer these questions in the comments to this post. Anyone who has answers to share is encouraged to use our contact form! And thank you very much to the wonderful wranglers who have already gotten in touch with us in response to our call for more input.