Debriefing Post

[klb]

Congratulations on another successful year of Pod Together! We're so excited to have had 61 wonderful projects this year. If you haven't already done so, feel free to crosspost around, and to change the date of your post to the current day so that your project will get a chance to have its moment at the top of the fandom and pairing lists on AO3. This is not cheating! (Unless you do it more than once :D) It's an unanticipated consequence of the way AO3 reveals currently work, and we have put in a support request about the issue, but for now changing the date and making sure each project gets its moment in the sun is the best way we've found to handle it.

So as we wrap up Pod Together 2012, we'd love to hear your thoughts about how everything worked for you as participants this year. If you had a collaborative process that worked well in your partnership, we'd love to hear about it so we can recommend it to participants next year! If you had problems, or have ideas for what you would have wanted to go differently, we'd definitely love to hear those, because we're always fine-tuning the process. We already have a couple of changes in mind for next year, and your feedback can help us come up with even better ones.

If you have thoughts that you'd like to share and discuss publicly, please leave them in the comments here. If you had problems this year that you would prefer to share privately, again that would be really helpful for us to hear, and you can email them to us at pod.together@gmail.com.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Comments

[susan_voight]

Thank you for being so thoughtful and working so hard on this!

The main thing is that two weeks to record ended up being enough time, but I was pretty anxious about it beforehand and nearly didn't sign up because of that.

Also, I see that some people did party favors, which is great for them! But I didn't go that route, even though I was worried about my ability to commit, because I didn't really understand how it would be an improvement: I'd still have to work with someone (and how I'd find them, I had no idea), and they'd still be disappointed if I didn't finish on time! It might have helped to have the find-people post put up earlier? Or maybe it's just always going to be an option very few people use because of the nature of the challenge.

[klb]

Party Favors are an interesting thing. We actually created them last year out of a need that arose, of some people who wanted to do a project quickly at the end but hadn't been aware of the challenge at the time of signups. Last year, we only had one, and this year we ended up with eight, which was pretty cool. I tend to envision them like Yuletide treats, which from what I've seen often result from finishing the project you'd committed to and then, in a burst of excitement and energy, creating another (or multiple others) quickly right at the end. So I think of them as something that people wouldn't be looking for partners for until they had finished their first project.

When would a Party Favors matchup post be most helpful for you?

[susan_voight]

Sorry I lost track of this.

That conception of party favors makes more sense to me, and I can see that it might not be a good idea to put up a matching post too early to encourage people to sign up for the main challenge if they can. So I'll amend my suggestion to be that you give examples of the circumstances people might do party favors under, so people like me are possibly less befuddled by the idea. :)

[klb]

Okay, thanks for the suggestion. I will definitely make sure to explain that better next year!