[Foundation-l] Wikimedia "Storyteller" job opening

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 6:39 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> 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.

Agreed with MzM that (though I do not have any special insight into
this job and what it entails or is meant to entail in particular)
Andrew's post was good, clear, and made an excellent point. And I
think I am going to adopt the phrase "see discussions passim" whenever
applicable!

Model discourse, we can haz :)

-- phoebe