Furry Writers' Guild Forum

State of the Guild

Announcements
#1

Ahoy-hoy!

One of the things my therapist suggested for husbandog and I was to have weekly “state of the union” talks, where we’d talk about what was going well in the relationship and what needed work. I’m not exactly in a romantic relationship with the guild (at least, I don’t think so…), but it got me thinking. We set up the coffeehouse chats for talking about the writing, editing, and publishing aspects, but we also have goals for the Guild - what we’d like to get out of it, things we’d like to see changed, and mechanical details of how it’s run we’d like to refine.

To that end, I’ll be setting up state of the Guild chats for us to talk about Guild business as separate-but-related-to the business of writing. We’ll simply go through the Trello boards and cover cards that are there and see if any new ones need to be made. They’ll take place opposite coffeehouse chats at 10:00 MST/17:00 UTC in the snoutbox on Tuesdays and 17:00 MST/Midnight UTC on Thursdays on the Slack in #state-of-the-guild. They’ll be timeboxed to an hour, but only run as long as we need. These are open to members and non-members alike, and are entirely optional; I don’t want to create additional overhead for those with already packed schedules. We’ll give them a go for a few weeks and see if we get anything out of them and if not, we can reevaluate then!

I (or someone else who’s willing) will take notes and toss them up here on this post for folks to read. I may be late to the Tuesday ones due to work meetings, so feel free to start without.

Short version

[ul][li]Weekly meetings in snoutbox and Slack about Guild business[/li]
[li]Same times/locations as coffeehouse chats, but swapped: Tuesday US mornings/Europe evenings, and Thursday US evenings/Europe late night[/li]
[li]<1 hour in length[/li]
[li]Open to all[/li]
[li]Totally optional[/li]
[li]If they’re not worth it, we’ll ditch 'em[/li][/ul]

#2

SotG - Slack - 2017-07-20

[ul][li]Maddy was late. Jerk.[/li]
[li]We opened discussion to replacing the forum software with Discourse + Babble for snoutbox capabilities. We have a test instance up and running (which will be linked when DNS figures itself out), but there’s a bug in Babble.[/li]
[li]We moved to discussing self-published writer membership: Fuzz had mentioned that we might see about having a vouch system, where guild members could vouch for a self-published author to be a member on a forum thread. Some brought up the fact that the future-member saw disagreement in that thread, it could be uncomfortable and disheartening. We came up with a few ideas, e.g: deleting threads, taking them outside the forum, etc. The idea of veto votes was brought up, but we were unsure of how to work those - we could see them being used for vetoing someone in a social sense, and perhaps in a writing sense, but how to handle them needs lots of talk.[/li][/ul]

#3

SotG - Snoutbox - 2017-07-25

Transcript is attached

[ul][li]We discussed narrowing down focus in the shoutbox chats. I suggested timeboxing, while Mark suggested narrowing goals overall[/li]
[li]We started prioritizing: membership requirements being one of the top goals, as well as the forums, though that latter bit is mostly on me[/li]
[li]We discussed showcasing fiction on the blog and yapped about rights for a bit, but decided it’d just be on a case-by-case basis[/li][/ul]

sotg7-25.txt (19.5 KB)

#4

SotG - Slack - 2017-07-27

[ul][li]We discussed membership requirements: James suggests, instead of a vouch system, a blind juried audition - the author who wants to join but doesn’t meet the existing guidelines submits a piece to someone who strips it of identifying information, and gets X number of people to vote yea/nay back and report back to the proctor[/li]
[li]We talked about ideas for the guild blog and came up with a few. Member fiction, Ask-A-Writer advice, event notices, and some ideas for the member spotlight[/li]
[li]We talked about solutions for the paypal issue and started leaning toward incorporating. Further discussions will be had as to how and what that will look like in the future[/li][/ul]

sotg7-27.txt (17.1 KB)

#5

SotG - Snoutbox - 2017-08-01

No SotG. Next will be Thursday at 7PM EST on the Slack in #state-of-the-guild

#6

SotG - Slack - 2017-08-03

[ul][li]We talked about promotional materials some - stuff to hand out at cons, and the possibility of a booth[/li]
[li]@ritter_reiter brought up the idea of a workshop or two at a physical location, which has also been brought up out of band[/li]
[li]@shirou suggested we spend perhaps two weeks on a topic, come up with one or more proposals, and then start pushing to a wider audience for formal discussion[/li][/ul]

The suggestion to have focused, on-topic discussions has lead to the plan that we will spend the next two weeks (tops) of SotG meetings focusing on incorporation and fixing the PayPal issue, with the goal of coming up with ideas that we can start formally putting to discussion. And, to hopefully allay any fears, I’d just like to remind folks that SotG meetings are not for decisions, just for shopping ideas! They’re not required, won’t decide guild matters, etc. Just a place to come up with topics to yap about ^^

sotg-83.txt (8.19 KB)

#7

Aieeee, I never posted last week’s!

[ul][li]We discussed incorporating and what would be involved with that[/li]
[li]We talked about non-profit status and whether it’s worth it[/li][/ul]

Attached is the log.

sotg8-10.txt (7.2 KB)

#8

SotG - Slack - 2017-08-24

[ul][li]Makyo was late because mortgages are hard[/li]
[li]We talked a little more about incorporation and the smoothest path forward, should we head in that direction[/li]
[li]We decided to let that matter rest while folks research and compile data[/li]
[li]We talked a bit about the guild blog and site, and how it might be neat to have a catalog/library of member publications[/li]
[li]We talked about opening up the secretary position to help with minutes like these and other little projects such as the library in the previous point[/li][/ul]

Log attached.

sotg8-24.txt (10.7 KB)