[Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening

[MZMcBride]

Andrew Gray wrote:
> Here's one line of reasoning:
> 
> a) Our fundraising was effective (it brought in money) but also pretty
> tedious for readers - it relied heavily on variants of one banner,
> with the side-effect that millions upon millions of people were forced
> to stare at one J. Wales for quite a while, only lightly alleviated by
> staring at someone else for a short time before reverting to the
> original.
> 
> b) This was widely derided (see discussions passim), with people
> objecting to it for reasons including (in no particular order): i)
> undue focus on "figurehead" personality; ii) stylistic issues; iii)
> terminology (mostly of non-Wales banners, sometimes of letters); iv)
> sheer tedium of seeing the same thing for a month; etc. etc. ...
> 
> c) ...but pretty much everything else we tried didn't work very well...
> 
> d) ...even though, anecdotally, people liked seeing the other ones
> much more than they liked the routine banners.
> 
> e) Running another fundraiser is probably inevitable.
> 
> Given these points, it seems a good idea to try to ensure that when we
> next throw big banners up at a million people to ask them for money,
> we do so in a way that is less tedious and irritating. It seems a
> fairly good approach (anecdotally, at least) that people like the
> varied individual user banners; the problem is that there's something
> not quite working about them.
> 
> Hiring someone to make them work - thus allowing us to do away with
> the All Wales, All The Time approach which was, to say the least, not
> universally loved - will hopefully mean the next donation campaign
> annoys fewer people. That doesn't seem too unreasonable, to me.
> 
> (The actual job description did make my eyes roll a bit, though.
> "Storyteller", oh dear.)

Thank you very much for this post, Andrew. This post clarified the job role
in a very nice, clear way and I really appreciate you taking the time to
write it.

I'd also like to apologize to the list (or to any members of it) for being
excessively rude or stupid this afternoon. Some of the, er... cutesy wording
in the job opening left me with the wrong impression about this role and its
purpose. I still think there should be a broader discussion about whether
it's appropriate to rename the "Community Department," but that's largely
outside the scope of this thread.

MZMcBride