from the volunteers-don't-get-paid-because-they're-priceless dept.
As first seen in @Day of the Dalek's journal, and suggested to be posted as a Meta story on the Main page by @quietus, here is a call for volunteers:
You've probably seen janrinok's resignation from the staff by now. As he was responsible for large portions of the site's day to day operation, this obviously leaves a big hole to fill. It's unlikely that any one person can step up to take on janrinok's duties. It will certainly require a community effort, probably from many people.
The future of SN isn't really determined by the board or the staff. For better or for worse, the community is really in control. Despite my obvious frustration with some things, I absolutely prefer the "for better" half of that choice.
I emailed admin@soylentnews.org Friday night to discuss the possibility of becoming a staff member, and what my role might be given my time constraints. The three roles suggested to me were: 1) editing an average of 1-2 stories a week, 2) facilitating policy discussions and drafting policy documents, and 3) writing occasional original content for SN such as editorials. These all seem reasonable to me. I've specifically requested that I not be given admin privileges, not now or in the future, only the minimum level of access needed to carry out my specific duties.
Like I said, I don't think any one person is likely to be able to assume janrinok's responsibilities. I cannot. This will work best if many members of the community volunteer a small amount of their time to help. I believe the site will be better off in the long term if responsibilities are distributed among many people instead of having a single person responsible for a large portion of SN's operations.
A user in one of my previous journals asked me to lead by example. I'm doing that, and discussions are already underway with the staff. But this will work best if others join me in volunteering to help a bit.
Who's in?
(Score: 5, Informative) by mrpg on Wednesday May 07, @12:02AM (5 children)
How long does it take to post a story? It can be 5 minutes, you see the list of subs, pick one, choose 3 paragraphs from it, and post it. Sometimes, if it is a long one, you might want to read more of it or all to better pick what to show. And sometimes you see the subs, read them because they are interesting and after 30 minutes you've done nothing but read good stories. Some users send the story ready, so it takes 2 minutes. Others send just a link, so you have to go and read and pick what to show, as I said before. Then you have to check the links, check the date, choose a timeslot for the story, and that's it.
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday May 07, @12:18AM (4 children)
Is that all it takes to be an editor? I could do that… I mean I might not have time every week but usually can spare 5-30 mins each week.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @12:47AM (2 children)
That's the gist of it, but it's a little more involved than that.
You need to pick a story for its potential level of interest and/or potential to spark good discussion.
If there are multiple submissions on the same topic, you need to decide which is better -- or merge them.
You need to make sure all the links in the story work.
Based on what's already been queued up and what other stories may be, in what order should the stories you publish be released to the front page and with what frequency?
All stories used to require *two* (count 'em) editors to release it for the front page. Yes, this can be bypassed, and I imagine a single editor has been the norm for quite some time, with just two (and now only one) editor(s). That said, it adds a good final check to make sure it's really ready for the front page. So you'll also need to check to see what stories other editors have queued up too.
There are a few other peccadilloes of the process and a bunch of edge cases, but that's the vast majority of it.
I'd say that once you're comfortable with the process, you can be pretty efficient at at and minimize the time you spend editing. What's more, takyon created some useful tools for editors to use which automates/streamlines stuff. IIRC, he periodically posted updates to them in his journal [soylentnews.org].
The more editors we have, the more stories we can post and the less work each editor will need to do.
If a half-dozen people edit a half-dozen stories a week (maybe an hour or so a week), or a dozen people edit three stories a week, along with half the users submitting a story every couple weeks, that would have the site humming -- and hubie will probably get more sleep too.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Wednesday May 07, @12:55AM
Yes, someone posts it and someone else should check that everything is ok. The frequency is 4:45 hours. And beware of dupes.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday May 07, @04:46AM
Surprisingly this rule is rarely bypassed. I have just looked at the latest story queue and I had to search back to February to find a story that wasn't signed off by 2 editors, with the exception of tomorrows stories which are prepared but still await a second editor to formally release them.
There are a couple of areas that cause editors problems, and they can all be solved by the community.
The first is when we run out of submissions, or more correctly run out of suitable submissions. Then the editors have to go searching for material which can add a lot of time to their job each day. When I run Arthur the bot, it can find over 500 stories in a run time of less than 15 minutes, but it still requires a human being to decide whether they are good stories, relevant to our topics and community interest, varied so that we are not publishing 5 stories about AI each day, etc. That can easily take an hour to sort through 500 stories and select the ones that we can use. It was only a few weeks ago that the submission queue was empty - today we have over 30 potential stories in the form of submissions from the community waiting to be assessed by an editor.
One step slightly better is when the community just post a link. We still have to extract the data and format it before we can do anything with it - but I would rather have a whole list of links than an empty submission queue any day! Using "upstart" (IRC) or "Arthur" (my own bot) to submit a link is much better than a simple link alone because both do an acceptable job of stripping out much of the crap. One of the tasks that is on my long todo list is to publish the output of Arthur to the community to let you sort out the wheat from the chaff and then automatically submit the one's that you choose. (This is potentially open to abuse so it is not a straight forward html listing of links).
You probably would not believe the measures some people take to try to get unsuitable material published somewhere. They make up fake stories, they disguise links in the hope that they can get a ascii art or unsuitable images published on the front page, they bury allegations about other community members in a long submission which in all other aspects looks perfectly acceptable. Being an editor is not just a mechanical task. The editors have to be able to stop all these things and more. So content has to be verified, links have to be checked, and each story has to be read and understood at least at a basic level, as several comments have already described.
The actual job of processing a good submission is, as someone has already pointed out, something that anyone could do in 5 minutes. But errors in published stories do happen, links suddenly stop working, stories are subject to real-time developments which means their relevance changes, and someone has to be on hand to manage these issues. This is not having someone sitting in front of the screen all day, but regularly checking the front page stories and comments to make sure that something the community has spotted is actioned promptly, and then knowing how to rectify the problem on a story that is already live.
Anyone could do the job. It is not in most cases difficult nor very time consuming... in most cases. It takes about 3 x 1 hour training sessions to learn how to do this 'simple' task. But your subsequent contribution to the running of the site benefits hundreds of community members.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday May 07, @06:03AM
That 5-30 minutes is all that we are asking for.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Wednesday May 07, @06:21PM
I'll repeat the commit I already made in dalek's journal: I'll put in 5 submissions each week for the coming month. (I just put in the first one, btw).