Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge Summary & Discussion

[dark_administrator]

Authors have been revealed and yuletide has opened an AO3 collection for New Year's Resolution 2011, thus, marking the end of the main yuletide challenge.

Last year, dark_agenda was started as a collective effort to promote representation for chromatic sources and characters in yuletide. This year, with your continued help and support, we extended our effort and sought to provide more resources. Among them included the lists of Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Fandoms & Characters (html version), Chromatic Yuletide Fandom Promotion Posts, Source-Sharing Resources, Chromatic Yuletide Beta Offers, Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Prompts (html version), Critiques & Common Pitfalls and Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Stories & Resources. We amassed:

• ~1000 fandom meta tags for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Fandoms & Characters list
  
• ~700 requests for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Prompts list
  
• ~500 stories for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Stories & Resources list

And our challenge AO3 collection received ~260 submissions!

Thank you for all the participants, beta volunteers, readers, wranglers and passersby who contributed to and supported Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge -- we can not truly thank you all enough!

Of course, our AO3 collection will remain open for New Year's Resolution 2011 submissions and we will continue to collect more fandom meta tags, requests and stories. (For New Year's Resolution 2011, we would love more help in adding requests from Yuletide Complete List of 2010 Prompts to our prompts spreadsheet -- you can use this form or add prompts directly into the spreadsheet, thank you!)

We realized that despite these awesome numbers and achievements there's still much we can to do to increase visibility of chromatic sources and characters. Stories from chromatic sources and/or featuring chromatic characters still only comprised less than 20% of yuletide output and the percentages for stories from African, First Nation, Latin American and South/Southeast/West Asian sources are even depressingly lower (some even non-existent).

With that in mind, how has your experience with Chromatic Yuletide been so far? We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback! If you participated in Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge:

• To which challenge components did you commit yourself and how did it go?
  
• Did you have specific goals in mind while writing your story? What were they?
  
• Do you have any tips and tricks for writing chromatic sources or characters you'd like to share?
  
• How were dark_agenda helpful for you in achieving your goals? And what do you think dark_agenda could do to be more helpful?
  
• How effective were the promo posts? Were there some formats that worked better than others?
  
• Was the information provided on the beta list sufficient? Are there other categories that we should include for next year?

As readers:

• What were your expectations for the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 Challenge? And did the challenge meet them?
  
• For yuletide stories in general this year, what were some portrayals of chromatic sources and characters that work for you? What didn't? How do you think those latter portrayals could be better?
  
• What do you wish to see next year with regards to chromatic source and character representation?

Comments

[allchildren]

I knew that dark_agenda was going on, but I admit I was pretty disconnected with the community's direct efforts and challenge. I was assigned a chromatic source and was happy to work with it. I cared very much about the racial aspects of my story and source, and worked hard to do them justice, but I didn't use the comm as a resource. (My final product, btw, was Sincerely, Cindi. for Metropolis: the Chase Suite - Janelle Monae)

I do however credit Dark Agenda for generally and steadily reminding me to prioritize stories about people of color. This year all four of my requests included women of color; last year maybe two did. It wasn't something I was particularly conscious of, but I thank the community for being a constant reminder that I can do better.

[dhobikikutti]

Thanks for the feedback! Is the disconnect you felt from the comm's direct efforts and challenge something voluntary, that you are happy with having, or is it something you think we could prevent, if we did something different/more? And I have a lot of friends who love Metropolose: the Chase Suite fic, so yay you for writing them some!