the problem with fan archives is that to do it right you need a staff of five people and i have never seen one with a staff larger than like, two
you need an ops girlie, you need a programmer girlie, you need a metadata girlie, you need a moderator girlie, you need a project manager girlie
yes these all have to be different people
if four other lesbians who don¦t hate each other and don¦t have terrible takes were each willing to commit 10hr/month to make this happen, sign me up
never met them tho
@Lady Does scale not come into this?
Like can't you do more with a smaller-scale focus area?
@gaditb define scale? scale as in number of works only matters when the number of works is large. when the number of works is small the scale that matters is number of features.
moderation, website reliability, and discovery/search are three features which each require specialists and each are a requirement for any fan archive. there is no point having an archive which is not discoverable, not moderated, and always down
add a programmer to implement these features and a manager for coordinating them and there is your five
@Lady Scale as in size of community served -- and so, moderation burden in terms of complex social dynamics to be responsible for, and also burden in terms of amount of input and amount of demand.
Although a small enough amount of works allows feasible tradeoffs from technically-implemented features to manual curation activities done as part of the moderation-process of ingesting new submissions.
Like if you look at the Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade, they have (well, had, I think. The site was still up last I checked but I don't think they've been active since the early 00s?) iirc chronological, subject-oriented, and a few other different views -- that would be database queries on e.g. AO3 -- that are simply manually maintained HTML pages.
(I'd also look at the PPC, here. I don't KNOW how they're organized, but I think they're still active. I love their forum, as a piece of technical work -- it's my idealized model of where software dev should fit in society.)
@Lady Also I think you're putting reliability as "always up" or "always down" while I think practically it could be a healthy and successful part of a community's infrastructure with, like, between one and two 9s of uptime if they have a space to say "sorry, will be down for a few days -- cat chewed a wire and I have finals. Hold your uploading until the weekend? Thanks."
@gaditb sure, but my point is that these are different disciplines
it is not reasonable or sustainable to have the same person doing all of these tasks regardless of how large any of them are, because the number of hats is still too high. context switching is a fixed cost and nobody is an expert in everything. you can reduce number of hours per month much easier than you can reduce number of people
sure, you can get around some of this if you say, don’t care about users being able to search for works and don’t have sophisticated tagging because your archive only has 10 things in it (but what makes it an “archive” at that point and not just… a blog?)
@gaditb my point is that it takes a village to run a library. you can¦t just have one technician and one librarian, or one technician who is also a librarian. you need people in these different roles. and you can respond by saying that building a library is too ambitious, but then what you are building is definitely not a library
