Five Things telescopicpoems Said
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Five Things telescopicpoems Said |
| Interviewer: | Eskici |
| Interviewee: | telescopicpoems |
| Date(s): | August 11, 2019 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | Five Things telescopicpoems Said |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Five Things telescopicpoems Said a 2019 Q&A guest post, conducted by the Organization for Transformative Works' Communications Committee with telescopicpoems.
It is part of a series. See Five Things Said.
Excerpts
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
Open Doors work is more sporadic and it involves a lot of replying to emails, which I usually can do on (IRL) “work days”. Every now and again I’ll have to do something that’s more labor intensive which I leave for the weekends (more often than not it has to do with new archives that we are looking to import).
My Docs work is done almost exclusively on weekends, as I need a lot of time to think things through. I usually have an ongoing task to work on, but if I’m waiting on a response from a beta or an author, I’ll pick up a new task: that can be drafting a document (which might mean either writing it from scratch or updating it) or doing beta. Other than the Alpha review round, which is done by one of our chairs, we have three rounds of beta checks, with each round consisting of two different types of beta that happen simultaneously.
On the first round we make sure everything is working as it’s described and that a document is as accessible as we can possibly make it. That might mean using “fanworks” instead of “fanfics”; not assuming gender; or assuming that the user is based in the US, so using examples from, say, the Sailor Moon fandom instead of the Harry Potter fandom and so on.
Since that first round might end up with a document being significantly altered, it’s only on the second round we start looking at it from a “format” point of view: we’ll go over grammar and what’s its reading level; if all the other documents that are linked in it are working fine; and if everything that you could possibly need referring to is being referred to.
Finally, there’s the Free for All and External rounds. Free for All is the last chance for all Docs staffers to go over a document. External gives other committees a chance to read it so we can make sure that everything on there is nice and accurate.
Ideally, every Docs staffer should have gone through the documents at least once over the course of these three rounds. So it ends up being a lot of collaborative work, a lot of checking and double checking and discussing all sort of things, from testing issues to what should be capitalized and when.
What fannish things do you like to do?
I had a very intense fandom phase maybe ten years ago, but have been in an on and off relationship with it ever since, so I usually chase after whatever I’m fancying at the time, which varies a lot. I also have a special liking for those fandoms with six people and a shoelace, so there’s that. Generally speaking, I’m quite the lurker and for the most part I read fanfic, will maaaybe write something, and look at awesome fanart I could never make myself.