I keep wondering if there's a way to crowdsource the collation and smoothing of PF without making us all part of Mercury.
That does come back to our good will -- a little strained of late -- and their willingness and ability to coordinate volunteers, even if that's the loose coordination of having a noticeboard of "topics we're focusing on" and allowing/encouraging us to drag out the relevant pieces of "world" and have threads where we discuss theories.
I´m afraid this work cannot be outsourced like that.
But i don´t see why you all cannot join Mercury if you pass the application process. I am looking for good writers and god knows they are hard to find. So if you would like to work on the EVE Fiction in a way you cannot anywhere else then please do apply for Mercury on the EVE website.
Could I check with you whether we're talking about the same thing?
I'm thinking about the world-reconciliation project described in EON's "New World Order" article and given as the reason for largely transferring ISD resources away from generating news items. From the EON article I'd formed the impression that a lot of the initial work was collating information on particular topics from current PF, and that there was quite a lot of that to do. Since I see the "collator" and "first-level commentator" roles as requiring different skills and time commitment to the role of being a fiction-writer for Mercury, this is the type of work that I think might be crowdsourced to the parts of your community that have an interest in it. You'd then pull it in-house for final commentary and decisions, ideally you'd deliver those decisions (I'd love patch notes), and we'd all get to write fiction based on our improved knowledge of how things work.
Doing that first stage in public means that more of us are likely to be involved, adding our efforts to the topics we know and care about and keeping an eye on each other's contributions to help ensure they don't miss anything of importance. It's a blend of built-in peer review and "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". It could also significantly increase the amount of person-time resource you have available to you to do something which quite a few of us think is valuable and which quite a few of us do anyway for topics which interest us.
There are reasons some of us might not want to be in Mercury: time, focus, or simply not wanting the stresses of being under NDA to affect the immediacy and honesty of relationships with the other people we play with. There's no need for the people doing the harvesting, gathering and initial commenting to be under NDA; there most probably is for the people doing the second-level commenting, decision-making and writing of the final ruling.
As an example, last October Elsebeth Rhiannon produced a compilation of
Prime fiction on clones and mind scans. No need for Mercury or NDA -- although having searchable electronic versions of the novels would have been nice -- and some significant work got done, commented on, and added to through public discussion.
In response to Elsebeth's compilation, Dropbear stated that
the storyline team wasn't at that time 100% clear or agreed about how cloning worked. We hoped, and still hope, to hear a canon view of whatever you decide.
This matters, not only for our own play and stories but because it affects what's plausible in our shared world, including in your storylines. There is, for instance, a theory of memetic infection -- of infomorphs having their consciousnesses altered by the addition of information viruses when they're transmitted as pure data upon death or clone-jump. That theory is plausible only if the "transmit" theory of consciousness transfer is true. If the "quantum entanglement" theory is true, that's a mistaken dead end on the path of EVE knowledge, or at least needs a serious re-work to nudge our quanta around. We, as pilots, should know the mechanism underpinning this, and therefore be able to make reasonable judgements about the plausibility of theories which extrapolate from it.
Since it's been around nine months without a response on this rather significant piece of PF, I'm guessing that you're having issues with resourcing, decision-making and sign-off, or focus priorities. If the issues are resourcing or focus priorities, I think crowd-sourcing could help. That still leaves you with responsibility for decision-making and sign-off... and letting us know the results.
Can we help?
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Topic: Mercury, PF, and crowdsourcing (Read 2883 times)