Post-FEE3 Discussion and Thoughts

Community
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Thanks for the write-up and all of your help carrying the load this year.

I’m aligned w/ your recs for next year and think ultimately self-service will be the way to help us scale and give more control to creators while reducing burden on organizers. 3-4 hours a week for 6 months is a pretty insane commitment, so hopefully some operational changes reduce it.

Keen to see how the community will come together to run FEE3 2022 - hope we can start planning soon and that a few committed folks will step up to facilitate it.

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So, I’m part of a global society that cares and puts way too much time into a hobby. We have a convention yearly in which everyone travels interstate and often internationally to present our work to an audience of people who are into the same hobby. People are rarely paid for their work that they put into the community - in either performing or organising events.

That society is the Barbershop Harmony Society (technically I’m in the Australian equivalent society but that’s not the point here)

One of the things that I’ve learned from being on the management committee of my own chorus is that yes, while we do indeed want to capture that “blue ocean” audience, we also have to remember that what we do is a very niche hobby and has limited appeal. We want to grow our audience and our membership, but that isn’t going to happen overnight.

For communities like this, we have to focus on having an uncompromising vision for the community and work towards that - that is what will allow the community and audience to grow organically. Having a strong community that looks after and mentors one another is what’s going to allow the community to flourish, and FEU has done that exceptionally well - just look at how accessible hacking has become, and how many talented and brilliant modders and artists we’ve attracted to the community. In the days where Dream of Five was the premiere hack, I’d never have dreamed that this would be possible.

I’ve seen people complaining about the fact that we didn’t get much of audience this year, but it sure is a hell of a lot more than last year’s - while I don’t have access to analytics, it seems we have an established subscriber base to feed from and that will continue to grow on its own over the years. I do think that the legally dubious nature of our hobby is part of the reason that YTers are a bit hesitant to promote the event.

I didn’t realise how much work went into organising FEE3, but in my opinion, we should absolutely put our efforts towards having a sustainable model so we don’t get organiser burnout, and if that means offloading some of the work to people that want their work presented, well… so be it. We should not be encouraging a model that has an asymmetrical amount of work for a select few while those who benefit from the event have to do very little (hacking work aside).

If that means you only end up presenting your project every, say, 2 years or so, because it’s a lot of work to do the promotional stuff, then… that might have to be it.

I was very pleased with the quality of hacks this year - we got quite a lot of “chocolate”-hacks and cool tech demos. It definitely seems smart to create some strong criteria for making an entry. Perhaps this might be a less popular opinion, but we could even consider limiting projects to not be able to present 2 years consecutively (i.e. you only get to present the same project once every 2 years). That means asking people to sit out a year in the interest of allowing more spotlight for newer projects and less work for the organisers.

I admit that I was technically on the promotions team but didn’t ultimately end up doing much aside from making @ghast make a post - I think a bit more clarity about who the team leader was and who was in the team would have helped. I also ended up unexpectedly busy IRL when I’d volunteered to help, months beforehand.

But yes, I do agree that the event is a celebration of the community’s efforts and we should not compromise on that just to get a more polished or promotable product - that’s not at all in the spirit of the community.

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63

Seems like a good compromise. Less work overall, and less repetition each year. It also means when you go two years between project updates you get bigger, chunkier, meatier updates too.

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I’m still mad Youtube decided to hide dislikes just a few days after my hack became the most disliked video of this year (which I intended to boast about) but other than that it was pretty fun, and I discovered some interesting new hacks, which I suppose is what matters most?

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I also like this idea.

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If we end up limiting entries to once every two years, I think we could make an exception for recently finished projects.

Eg. If you finish your project since the last fee3, you may enter even if you entered the previous year.

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I do want to say that a “every other year” rule would probably alienate some people. I mean, it would alienate me. I get the sentiment, but waiting two years is reeeeally long. Definitely think increased self service is a far better way to go.

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68

I don’t think limiting entries to once every two years is the way to go, sure for people who I have been seeing around the community for over a decade 2 years doesn’t mean a whole lot, but to the humble hack creator (in this scenario me), 2 years is along time, I spent a lot of my first year trying to figure out how FEE3 would even work and made the decision to submit in the final week before LP requests closed. I would like to appear at the next event, a lot can change for these projects in their initial stages over the course of a year, what I WOULD suggest is that you can only request an LPer once every two years to help ease the burden. That way new members who don’t really understand what is going on can partake but once they’ve hung around a bit and had time to sus out,(hi devvy), how the community runs as a whole they are encouraged to organize their own LP in order to participate.

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69

Yeah, it also ends up becoming more administrative burden. Entry to FEE3 needs to be kept simple. Telling someone they can’t participate in consecutive years means organizers need to keep tabs on who comes back, which requires more checks than needed, and will surely lead to debate and exceptions being made, which then gets into a quality/subjective argument.

Additionally, the projects that tend to draw more views are repeat entries - people like following projects and seeing annual progression helps bring in more users to the rest of the event. (see Sacred Echoes, FE7x, Legends of Avenir, annual animation showcases, etc.)

I’d much rather put the choice on the project submitter to not submit if they don’t want to or feel like they have nothing to show in a given year, rather than make it the organizer’s problem.

Sefishly, I’d be pissed if I was told I couldn’t present for FEE3 two years in a row, especially if I am able to do all of the work myself to put a video together, simply because I presented the year prior. For other long-standing projects, I’m sure it would hurt the event to arbitrarily exclude them and reduce the amount of stuff we share. I saw a lot of comments asking for the whereabouts of a few projects that didn’t show this year (Where is Souls of the Forest? Where is FE7x? etc), so it seems silly to for organizers to limit whether they can show or not.

TLDR I recommend we keep requirements really simple, objective, and easy to understand and implement to help reduce administrative burden and better foster inclusivity. If you’re willing to put in the work and meet the baseline requirement for entry, you should be allowed to show. We really shouldn’t go out of our way to exclude projects, especially if we shift to a more self-service model for the event.

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