(no subject)

[esmenet]

How difficult is it to run a ficathon/fest/prompt meme thingie? School is starting in about a week, but I keep wanting to do that Everyone But The White Guys thing I talked about once. I've been noticing a lot lately how, for instance, the Teen Wolf fandom is aalllll about Sterek (the two white dudes who barely even interact) while ignoring or hating on the actual Latino protagonist and his kickass girlfriend. And I am really, really not here for that stuff, so I want to make a thing to counteract that trend just a little.

Living alone & taking classes in a foreign country is really attention-sucking, though, so I want to make sure this is something I could run while also doing that. Experience/opinions/advice?

Comments

[tropicsbear]

I ran a fic exchange a while back. It wasn't really anything big, though. The only trouble I ran into was making sure people submitted their stuff on time.

But I think if you plan on running a prompt fest with no deadlines, I think just planning out everything in advance would be okay.

[littlebutfierce]

It depends how intensively you want to run/monitor things. Like, just putting up a prompt post for, say, a drabblefest or a general comment meme in your journal is easy; if you want to index the posts, that gets a bit more time-consuming, but you could ask for volunteers. If it's just the sort of thing where prompts go up & people can fill them whenever, then there's not much maintenance.

But if you want to do something where you assign prompts to ppl/make them sign up/have deadlines/etc. then that gets more complicated. From past experience, running fic fests on AO3 is not nearly as easy as perhaps they'd like it to sound; at least when I did it, their documentation for how to set up the collection & the sign-ups & how the matching should work was *awful* (incomplete, unclear, & sometimes blatantly text or screenshots didn't match what I was seeing); I had to contact Support numerous times & then ended up hand-matching anyway.

I think it depends partly on how much help you think you could get if you did want to do something more involved.

[skygiants]

My experience has been: doable, rewarding, and not THAT much of an energy drain, but INFINITELY EASIER if you have a partner to share the workload with. I suspect yours would be less structured than ours was, though, which also makes life simpler!

[terajk]

Like littlebutfierce said, running a commentwork fest in your journal is fairly easy/a low-energy commitment.

Also, I am not very familiar with Teen Wolf but if you want/need help with stuff (e.g. indexing, general drudgery) I can help!

[seventhe]

I'm one of three mods for DOINK! Final Fantasy Exchange, and I'll be the first to tell you that it's a lot of work -- but then again, it's because we offer a lot within that exchange that other exchanges don't bother to (hand-matching to attempt to ensure everybody has 2 or 3 choices to choose from within their match, rather than only 1, for example; plus a lot of mod-participant interaction in general), as well as the fact that "Final Fantasy" is not one fandom - there are, so far, over 20 separate "canons" that we include in the exchange. So while I'm like "dude I do nothing else in March and April but FFEX", that is why. Running an exchange in one fandom will be easier -- but I still wouldn't underestimate the amount of work it takes.

As an alternative -- I once ran a "claim-a-thon" in my own journal, which went like this:
1) people submit 3 prompts each
2) I post these prompts anonymously with only numbers as IDs
3) everyone privately gives me the numbers of 3 prompts they're willing to fill
4) I work Excel Magic to match everyone up
5) Profit!

this was really fairly easy - I'm pretty sure I ran it while prepping for a move - so if you're interested in something like that, I'd be willing to discuss more.

EITHER WAY: one of the most valuable things you can have in any kind of fanwork exchange is a Pinch Hit Team. Whether you're doing a normal exchange, a claim-a-thon, whatever -- if it's the kind of thing where people are "guaranteed" a gift, a pinch hit structure is really the only way you'll get there. We lean on our pinch hit team every year and they come through with fireworks!