Kaleidoscope feedback summary & a call for volunteers

[dark_administrator]

Hello doers of darkness -- thank you for all your input on Kaleidoscope! It has been really helpful and as a result, we've added, clarified and expanded on some of our policies and procedures:

• Graphics: one of the biggest changes we've made is adding a graphics category as a fanwork type that participants can request and offer and which will hopefully encompass digital collage, photo manipulation, picspams, user-interface graphics (e.g. desktop wallpapers, program skins, etc.) and web graphics (e.g. icons, banners, etc.). For the fanwork requirements, digital collage, photo manipulation and user-interface graphics submitted for the exchange must be completed pieces while picspams must have at least 30 images. For web graphics, submissions must have 20 icons, 5 banners or other equivalently sized graphics.
  
  We're waiting to hear back from AO3 on whether all fanworks that fall under our definition of graphics can be hosted on the archive, but we're very excited about having a graphics category!


• Rarity: there have been a lot of concerns and questions regarding the method Kaleidoscope is using to determine rarity. We want to clarify that we focused our rarity policy on the consumption and production of source materials and their trends in English-language fandom.
  
  dark_agenda operates in a primarily English-language space, and our goal is to promote fandoms that are underrepresented in this sphere. Thus, when we assess fandom rarity by looking at the number of text-based fanworks, we will be limiting ourselves to English-language multifandom fanfiction archives and will not count non-English fanfiction. However, we are including some popular non-English fanart archives like Pixiv in our rarity criteria because in our experience, a lot of fannish engagement occurs through consuming the fanworks available on those sites. Our hope is that Kaleidoscope will not only increase the production of fanworks for rare chromatic fandoms but also encourage people to consume more fanworks from these underrepresented fandoms and promote chromatic sources that may be less well-known in our fannish spaces.
  
  We aim to establish numerical cutoffs that will be realistic in reflecting the patterns of both consumption and production in English-language fandom by collecting as much fanwork data as possible. Since fanart in particular crosses language barriers more easily than text- or speech- based fanworks, our fanart cutoffs will likely be more generous in scale than for other forms of fanworks. However, at the moment we have no plans to establish similar cutoffs for graphics (e.g. banners, icons, manips, picspams, and the like).
  
  We also acknowledge that there are often large discrepancies in numbers among different types of fanworks, e.g. a fandom that has very few fanfics may also have a disproportionate amount of fanart or fanvids. In such cases, we encourage you to nominate the fandom anyway and bring the matter to our consideration during the dispute process.


• Vids: for the vids category, we'll add a clarifying sentence to the following paragraph (changes made are in bold):
  

  Vids may be AMVs, compilations, fanvids, songvids or fan-made MVs, but excluding slide shows -- or simply a series of photographs set to music. Mixed-media vids that include some still images or vids that manipulated and animated them would be welcome.



• Source Creators: we weren't being clear regarding the issue of source creators, but the person(s) credited as the sole creator(s) -- listed as the main creator(s) -- for a source will determine that fandom's eligibility in Kaleidoscope. Only when there are no clear creators listed will directors, writers, developers, etc. be considered.
  
  We'll clarify that policy in the following paragraph:
  

  What fandoms will be considered eligible for Kaleidoscope?
  
  For this challenge, we are only allowing rare fandoms whose source has both (a) at least one chromatic character in a major role and (b) at least one chromatic person who is credited as an creator. In cases where there are no clear creators listed, directors, writers, developers, etc. may be submitted as creators, e.g. Ang Lee, Wang Hui-Ling, James Schamus and Tsai Kuo Jung would be considered creators of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while for Final Fantasy, only Sakaguchi Hironobu would be considered as the source's creator. For fandoms involving real people, the chromatic creator criterion does not apply.



• Non-English language fanworks: as we've said in the above rarity section, one of Kaleidoscope's main focuses is on the patterns of consumption and production in English-language fandoms and as such, we encourage the inclusion of non-English languages or codeswitching in faworks, especially non-English languages associated with chromatic cultural groups, as we've noted in our Requests section of Kaleidoscope's policies and procedures. This extends to fanwork submissions in non-English languages and our final draft of Kaleidoscope's policies and procedures will reflect that.


• Permissions: we'll be adding a sub-section under Assignments period regarding podfic and other permissions:
  

  Permissions: in essence, fanworks are about (re)working source materials and sometimes these may include other fanworks, so we encourage participants to include a section in their submitted fanwork's notes indicating whether they give blanket or partial permission for others to remix, produce secondary fanworks (e.g. cover art, fanmixes, fanwork trailers, pre- & sequels, spin-offs, etc.), and/or record podfic for their Kaleidoscope submission or for their entire body of fanworks.
  
  We believe in efforts like chromatic_podfic and hope that encouraging participants to be explicit about their fanwork policy will promote more consumption and production of (existing) chromatic fanworks.

We hope these revisions have clarified our goals and guidelines for the Kaleidoscope challenge! As always, we rely upon and are very grateful for your feedback and support, which is crucial as we finalize our policies and prepare for the challenge.

Currently, we are looking for volunteers for the following tasks:

• Fanwork data collection: we desperately need help collecting fanwork distribution numbers so if you're interested in helping, please contact us through PMs to dark_administrator/darkadmn or our email darkadmn AT gmail DOT com with your email address, or just leave a comment here in this entry. The task would basically entail loading any of the following archives: AnimeMusicVideos.org, archiveofourown.org, asianfanfics.com, deviantart.com, fanfiction.net, pixiv.net, vimeo.com and youtube.com, inputting one of the fandoms listed in the Fanworks data spreadsheet and noting the results in the spreadsheet.


• Spreadsheet wrangling: our current proposed nominations and disputes processes involve a lot of spreadsheet wrangling so we'll need a lot of help in this area. Volunteers will be working from several Google Docs spreadsheets of nominated fandoms, characters and people and manually editing them into a final list which will then have to be input as tag sets in Archive of Our Own for sign-ups. If you're interested, again please contact us through PMs to dark_administrator/darkadmn or our e-mail darkadmn AT gmail DOT com with your e-mail address or leave a comment here in this entry.

And of course, if you're interested in generally volunteering for Kaleidoscope, you can contact us through the same channels at any time.

On a final note: as you've probably noticed, we've created a mirrored LiveJournal community for dark_agenda and any official Kaleidoscope posts will be manually crossposted there: darkagenda.

This entry is posted at Dreamwidth and LiveJournal and you may comment at either journaling platform.

Comments

[littlebutfierce]

I could help w/some of the fanwork data collection.

[wistfuljane]

Thank you for volunteering! You should have received an e-mail at littlebutfierce At dreamwidth Dot org just now about fanwork data collection. I hope it's okay to send it to that address?

[littlebutfierce]

Oooh, yes, that's fine--& now I know the DW e-mail forwarding works, heh. Thank you!

[mumblemutter]

I could help out with some spreadsheet wrangling, sure!

[wistfuljane]

Thank you for volunteering! We'll contact you once the nominations process begins and the spreadsheets start populating. =) What e-mail should we use to contact you?

[mumblemutter]

The first two syllables of this username at gmail.com! :-)

[(Anonymous)]

To address the issue of fanart/English-language fanfic imbalance: would it be possible to have some fandoms which are eligible for the exchange if the requests are for the medium of fic, but ineligible if the request is for the medium of art? Or would that just be too difficult from a technical perspective?

[troisroyaumes]

Hi, let me first apologize for addressing this question so late. Currently, our plans are to hold sign-ups on AO3, and to the best of our knowledge, we don't think it's possible to configure the AO3 sign-up form to handle different sets of eligible fandoms, short of holding separate sign-ups for different forms of fanworks, which would not allow people offering fic to request art, etc.

The fanwork data collected so far show that there are less than a dozen outliers that show massive discrepancies between numbers of fanart and fanfic (at least, with the data we have so far and with the tentative cutoffs we've been considering). It should be possible to just allow these fandoms through despite the fact that they are eligible under one form of fanwork but not another or perhaps allow the community as a whole to vote on them.

I'm not categorically ruling out the possibility of running sign-ups outside of AO3, but it would require me (personally) to code the sign-up form and matching algorithm, so I would have to weigh how much time it would take vs. how much time I could spare. If people are really insistent that they would like to see this feature, where different lists of fandoms are eligible depending on the type of fanwork being requested/offered, please comment and let me know so I can take that into consideration.

[vi]

I could help with data collection or spreadsheet wrangling!

[troisroyaumes]

Yay, thank you for volunteering! Which email address should we contact you at? I'll forward the previous emails sent to volunteers.

[vi]

strangevisions at gmail dot com. ^^