Opening message

[Lou]

Hi folks,
We're now all present on the list so I wanted to say a few words.
We've been tasked with setting up long term goals for the GCD in
regards to the membership. We are looking to establish a 5-year plan.

There are a few different dimensions that I think we should look at:
a) expanding the membership in geographic areas where we have current
members
b) expanding into geographic areas with no current members
c) keeping current members involved with the project
d) recruiting past members to rejoin the project

There are numerous ways to go about looking at these areas, but before
we begin I'd like ideas on what else we should be exploring, then we
can look at how we wish to accomplish our goals.

-Lou

[Lionel English]

Two quick notes:

 

First, we want to come up with goals that somehow support the GCD's mission statement (which I don't have time to look up, but is in the charter--publicly accessible comics database, easy to use, etc etc).  The goals should be quantifiable, so we can measure our success or failure in attaining the goal.  Each goal should have a list of strategies we can adopt to achieve that goal.  Quoting Tony's example from the Board list:

 

"What I recall was that there needs to be a clear statement of core beliefs followed by a clear statement of goals.  Then each goal needs a plan and some way to measure success, like for instance:

 

"Belief:  At the very heart of the GCD Project is the intention of indexing every comic published.  Period.

 

"Goal:  The GCD will encourage more indexing of Japanese language comics and increase their number in the database.

 

"Plan:  Find Japanese speakers among current members, name them as a committee to contact Japanese comics fans and get those fans involved in the project.

 

"Measurement:  By 2014, there will be at least 500 Japanese comics in the database."

 

Second.  Going forward, I'd like to do five year plans.  But this first one will actually be a four year plan, designed to culminate in 2014, which will be our 20th anniversary.  So one thing we might do as an acknowledgement kind of thing is a series of GCD dinners at several major cons in 2014.  I have several ideas along these lines which I might get into tonight, but most of them lack a cohesive goal to which they can be attached.  Not sure if we should take a top down approach--define our goals and then develop our plans--or a bottom up approach--throw a bunch of random ideas against a wall and then ferret out our goals by pulling out common themes.

 

On a broader note, some goals we might want to look at are, as Lou said, growing membership, and also improving our retention rate, and perhaps increasing...involvement?  Team spirit?  Not sure what I'm trying to say with the last one, but something to make people want to increase their level of participation beyond indexing.

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Mike Nielsen]

Just my two cents at the moment but I tend to work better with throwing a bunch of ideas up in the air, let them circulate thru everybody's brains and then whittle the list down to what is realistic and what isn't.

I do have some ideas.  I'll try to kick them into some kind of actual word form and send them out tonight.

Thanks,

Mike Nielsen
 

 

 

Atom: "They are replicating."

Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"

 - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat" 

---

From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, April 12, 2010 1:14:53 PM
Subject: [gcd-membership] Re: Opening message

[Mark]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 6:14 PM, Lou <gloi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi folks,
>> We're now all present on the list so I wanted to say a few words.
>> We've been tasked with setting up long term goals for the GCD in
>> regards to the membership. We are looking to establish a 5-year plan.
>>
>> There are a few different dimensions that I think we should look at:
>> a) expanding the membership in geographic areas where we have current
>> members
>> b) expanding into geographic areas with no current members
>> c) keeping current members involved with the project
>> d) recruiting past members to rejoin the project
>>
>> There are numerous ways to go about looking at these areas, but before
>> we begin I'd like ideas on what else we should be exploring, then we
>> can look at how we wish to accomplish our goals.

Hi All,

Is there any existing membership plan or do we get to start from a
clean slate so to speak?

Some of the most basic things would encourage membership, if we take
the Japanese example, the one of the most obvious things to do is
fully translate the site into Japanese, that way allowing Japanese
members to read the site in their own language. Obviously then we
would then require an editor for that language as well.

I do agree with Lionel, without goals that can be measured there is
little way of knowing how successful the process is.

Maybe first of all is to throw out some ideas and pin down measurable
goals off the back of those?

Thanks
Mark

[Lionel English]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Mark <znx...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there any existing membership plan or do we get to start from a
clean slate so to speak?

 

Starting from a clean slate.

 

 

Some of the most basic things would encourage membership, if we take
the Japanese example, the one of the most obvious things to do is
fully translate the site into Japanese, that way allowing Japanese
members to read the site in their own language. Obviously then we
would then require an editor for that language as well.

 

Just to be clear, there are (or will be) separate groups who will be developing tech goals.  Front end and back end.  And another group who will be developing financial goals.  (Although there are obviously places where these things will overlap.)

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Lionel English]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Just my two cents at the moment but I tend to work better with throwing a bunch of ideas up in the air, let them circulate thru everybody's brains and then whittle the list down to what is realistic and what isn't.

OK, in the spirit of ideas thrown against a wall...

One idea is something the board is already considering anyway:  The creation of a small (three to five people) PR team to help keep the front page fresh, maybe help monitor the contact list, prepare dog & pony shows for use at cons, talk us up on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites, etc.  One of their explicit goals should be to draw in new members via these vehicles.

Increasing our membership in the East would also be nice (Japan, China, Korea, etc) but I'm not sure we're ready to push too hard there yet--our biggest problem there is the language barrier.  Theoretically we have back end support for non-Western languages, but I think we might want to wait for i18n support on the OI before we start aggressively recruiting in areas where we have insufficient resources to mentor those indexers or approve their indexes.

On the other hand, we  should try to recruit more American/French/German/Italian manga fans to deal with the translated stuff in languages we already know, and we should keep an eye out for Japanese-, Chinese-, and Korean-language comics fans who are also fluent in one of the languages our existing editors speak, so we're prepared to branch out in those directions eventually (and so we can have beta testers for the i18n stuff when we get to it).

I'd also like to see us reach out more to fans in some of our underrepresented areas such as Romance, Teen, and Funny Animals.  And that's just the US.  It would be nice to have at least one European on the aforementioned PR team, so they could work on spreading the word in various European comics fora.

As mentioned previously, I'd like to see a few big events at several big cons in 2014, such as GCD dinners and/or presentations at the cons (GCD at 20: Where We've Been, Where We're Going).

One of the most challenging areas is one where I don't have any specific ideas, but I think it should be a goal anyway:  Improving our retention rate.  I think the new site already is demonstrating better retention than the old (though I don't think we had adequate stats on the old  to measure that).  But I'd like to be able to measure that better.  Maybe simply finding a way to measure that should be a goal.  Maybe short surveys when indexers sign up, asking them what they hope to get out of/put in to the GCD, and another when indexers go away (i.e. when they've been idle for four or six months) asking them why they've been inactive (was it us or them?  If us, are there any specific things we did?  Or didn't do?)

User satisfaction surveys might also be useful on the mailing lists.  Do people approve or disapprove of recent changes in the lists?  Do we have too many lists?  Are the lists' purposes sufficiently distinct?  Have the list atmospheres improved?  Gotten worse?  Why?

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Lou Mazzella]

A quick response. I do think we need surveys. I also think there probably should be one on the website itself so that we can gauge the interests of the site users who aren't necessarily members/indexers. Maybe as a tool for getting them more involved with the organization. -Lou --- On Tue, 4/13/10, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

[Mark]

On 14 April 2010 11:50, Lou Mazzella <gloi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> A quick response. I do think we need surveys. I also think there probably should be one on the website itself so that we can gauge the interests of the site users who aren't
> necessarily members/indexers. Maybe as a tool for getting them more involved with the organization.
> -Lou

Absolutely, I know from my own experience that my usage of GCD was
only in reading and I expanded to indexing because I seen that some
comics I had were missing.

> From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
> One idea is something the board is already considering anyway:  The creation of a small (three to five people) PR team to help keep the front page fresh, maybe help monitor the contact list, prepare dog & pony shows for use at cons, talk us up on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites, etc.  One of their explicit goals should be to draw in new members via these vehicles.

Maybe moving towards more social activities on site would be useful
too. Such as "make your own collections" or similar allowing users to
indicate the various issues they own. That way making GCD semi-social,
maybe that isn't something that GCD wishes to do.

I really like the idea of a PR team, that had the single goal of
improving presence.

Mark

[Mike Nielsen]

Lionel said:

 

On the other hand, we  should try to recruit more American/French/German/Italian manga fans to deal with the translated stuff in languages we already know, and we should keep an eye out for Japanese-, Chinese-, and Korean-language comics fans who are also fluent in one of the languages our existing editors speak, so we're prepared to branch out in those directions eventually (and so we can have beta testers for the i18n stuff when we get to it).

**********************************************

 

If I remember correctly there were one or two members on one of the lists (probably Chat) that were fluent in Japanese.  And I mean fluent in that I think one of them worked for awhile translating manga to English back in the 80's or something.  Am I totally mis-remembering that?

 

I can maybe fish that info out of my email, I'll see what I can find.

 

Mike Nielsen

[Henry Andrews]

There's Marc Miyake, who has specifically stated that he thinks it's impossible / not practical to internationalize the GCD for the far east.  I think his experience with web site I18N technology is out of date.  Most modern frameworks, Django included, were designed with Unicode and I18N in mind from the beginning.

thanks,

-henry

From: Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, April 14, 2010 5:32:09 AM
Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] Re: Opening message

Lionel said:

[Tony Rose]

Additionally, I believe that Brian Lamken speaks or maybe just reads Japanese.




tony

[Lionel English]

Marc Miyake is, I believe, a friend of Steven Rowe.  I think he's still on one of the lists but mostly lurks, and I think he's expressed reluctance to be an editor/mentor because he's afraid of the time commitment (though we might be able to talk him into beta testing and advising on i18n issues).

 

There's also Brian Lamken, and his friend (who is no longer on the lists, citing time constraints).  Brian's still on the lists, but his activity fluctuates depending on his health.  I believe the both of them were fluent in Japanese.

 

[Lionel English]

BTW--can't remember who's in the group and what their tech backgrounds are.  Just to be clear, the i18n term Henry and I are throwing around is shorthand for "internationalization" (starts with an 'i', ends with an 'n', and has 18 characters between).  Which is techie for an interface that supports multiple languages (i.e. it's built/designed to allow a user to specify their preferred language and it presents the interface in the appropriate language, following appropriate conventions (left-to-right or right-to-left, correct character sets, etc).

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Henry Andrews]

Oh, yeah, sorry.  The other one you'll see is L10N  (or l10n) for "Localization", which is similar but more about customizing the interface for a particular locale, including but not limited to getting the language right.

thanks,
-henry

[Lou Mazzella]

We do have one. But he has not wanted to participate in translation projects in the past when approached. -Lou --- On Wed, 4/14/10, Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] Re: Opening message

[Henry Andrews]

More replies to an earlier message of Mark's as I slowly get back into the swing of things with GCD business. :-)


Lou>> A quick response. I do think we need surveys. I also
Lou>> think there probably should be one on the website itself so that we can gauge
Lou>> the interests of the site users who aren't
Lou>> necessarily members/indexers.
Lou>> Maybe as a tool for getting them more involved with the organization.

Mark> Absolutely, I know from my own experience that my usage of GCD
Mark> was only in reading and I expanded to indexing because I had seen that
Mark> some comics I had were missing.

Some of this I've covered in more recent responses to Tony. But I think that it would be good to have surveys appear on the site from time to time, independent of the new sign-up page. Such as on the front page, or even linked from the search bar (which is a bit over-full right now, but we do hope to improve that design at some point). This could get new people, folks who registered a long time ago, and even casual site visitors if we allow for "anonymous" responses. There are also a lot of sites out there that let you set up surveys easily, so we could do this and just link to them.

Lionel>>> One idea is
Lionel>>> something the board is already considering anyway: The creation of a small
Lionel>>> (three to five people) PR team to help keep the front page fresh, maybe help
Lionel>>> monitor the contact list, prepare dog & pony shows for use at cons, talk us
Lionel>>> up on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites, etc. One of their
Lionel>>> explicit goals should be to draw in new members via these vehicles.

Mark> Maybe moving towards more social activities on site would be useful
Mark> too. Such as "make your own collections" or similar allowing users to
Mark> indicate the various issues they own. That way making GCD semi-social,
Mark> maybe that isn't something that GCD wishes to do.

I do very much like the PR team idea. As far as social activities on the site, I see the appeal but am less enthusiastic for several reasons:

* It's outside of our charter, which is purely data and research oriented. It's possible to amend the charter (we just did, to include comic strips and other printed forms as well as books) but that's a significant undertaking.

* It takes up a seriously non-trivial amount of technical resources. We are not even remotely capable of completing the purely research/data collection-oriented work we have planned within the next several years. There's a reason that most social sites are commercial- you need an income stream to fund that much work.

* I'd rather encourage other groups, including commercial groups, to build off of the GCD as a web service (at some point in the future) and create a partner ecosystem. That will be less of a drain on our limited technical resources. There are folks who are doing various things with our data, so I'm hoping that these features *do* emerge, just not provided by us directly.

thanks,
-henry


--
Subscription settings: http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-membership-committee/subscribe?hl=en

[Lionel English]

We've been quiet for several weeks now.  Anyone want to take a stab at organizing our thoughts so far?  We want to be able to produce some actual goals with concrete measurements out of this.

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Mike Nielsen]

I can try, but my time is limited during the week and this weekend I'll be offline, so if somebody else beats me to it that would be just fine by me.  :)

Mike Nielsen
 

 

 

Atom: "They are replicating."

Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"

 - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat" 

---

From: Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Mon, June 7, 2010 7:29:31 AM

Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] Re: Opening message

[Lou Mazzella]

Sorry folks. I know I'm supposed to be chairing this committee, but I'm having very little time right now. If Mike can do this it would be great. I'll try to get back into the swing of things soon. -Lou

--- On Wed, 6/9/10, Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com> wrote: