Promotions Councillor Applications Open

[Mountain]

Greetings,

The FAF Administration is seeking a new Promotions Councillor.

The Promotions Councillor is responsible for publishing FAF news, events, tournaments and more through various channels including but not limited to the FAF client's "What's New" tab, FAForever.com website, Facebook page, Twitter, Discord, and Youtube. In addition, a successful Promotions Councillor will not only seek to enhance the project's visibility outside of the FAF sphere, but to preserve existing community engagement, and ultimately membership. As a member of the Council of Setons, the Promotions Councillor holds one vote for certain decisions made by the Council. Successful candidates are well-informed about FAF activity, excel at communication, and have no history of disciplinary action on the FAF client, Discord, or FAForever.com forums.

To apply for the post, please submit a reply including the following:

-Your FAF username
-Your contributions to the FAF Project
-A statement describing why you are applying, your goals for FAF in terms of promotions, and how you will accomplish those goals

Current Council members will appoint the next Promotions Councillor following a rigorous selection process.

Applications will close July 25th.

Thank you

[Ze Dogfather]

Heyo everyone!

Introduction

To get the first prerequisite of the OP out of the way, I am WiseOldDog, and I have been around the community for a little beyond four years, with most of my nicknames being “dog”. Whether or not you know me matters none; I am not a big deal nor am I a very good player, but I have at least seen enough of the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the Forged Alliance Forever community, and yet here we are still. Despite not playing as much as I used to, I still retain an endearing fondness for this game and the people that I have befriended over the years, and I am driven in hopes of improving the FAF experience, in some way, for others who will come after us.

In that effort I sought out to see where I would fit in as far as contributions are concerned, and while I do think being an active player is an additional tally to our numbers (+1!), I wanted to do more in my own way. This is my application toward the slot of Promotions Councilor because I feel that I carry some experience in this field both within the community and out, and there has been some other ways I have helped unrelated to the position in question.

Contributions

I will start by listing off some of my direct contributions to the FAF community as of this current date:

• For about 1-2 years of being a part of the official FAF Discord server, I had been a moderator for that branch, and eventually had moved to administrate it for one year. Through these efforts I worked on it to shape the format, accessibility, and population of the server, while regulating it through means of moderation and community feedback to enhance the platform. As of now I am currently neither the administrator or discord moderator, and the reasons for stepping down are publicly available on the #announcements page of the server, and I can happily share that post should anyone be curious as to the “why”.
• I have contributed for about two years as a trainer, and have helped numerous individuals with their efforts of learning and becoming skillful at playing the game. To this day I still offer help and resources to those who I can assist along the way.
• I have written two guides as part of promotional material on the FAF Wiki; the first is a revision of the Seraphim guide that was cowritten with my good friend biass, and the second is a guide dedicated to guiding players on the very basic ideas to starting out competitively in FAF, written entirely by me.
  https://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?ti ... _1v1_Guide
  https://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?ti ... New_Player
• I have contributed some writing to the Nomads project, as well as assisting in the direction of the campaign development along with Exotic_Retard and JJ. While I have not dedicated myself anymore to certain aspects of the project, I am still writing a dedicated piece to the history and lore of the faction, which I intend to release in its entirety once it is finished and has been edited.
• I have a YouTube channel that I use to share FAF content through commentary, shitcasts, procasts, etc., and I intend to use it to help further promote the game to different audiences we may have. This is a current endeavor that I do as a side hobby, which I would gladly like to incorporate into this role.

To top it off, I would like to point to other works I have done that would further support my candidacy for this seat. I am dedicated writer (I have spent most of my life dedicated to this craft), and have various college classes under my belt, for the eventual goal to earn my Bachelor's Degree in English. Most of my goals are focused to creating different mediums, such as my current novel, poetry, publishing articles, etc. While most of these are not accessible as published pieces, I have a spot where I have published a few articles that you can check out here: https://the-artifice.com/author/Storlid/. If you would like to see more for the sake of understanding my work (or simply possess some curiosity!), feel free to talk to me about it.

Contributions

Now for the important part: I am applying for Promotions Councilor because I feel that, innately, the community is stagnating in sharing integral information and lacking effective communication. I struggled in the past of reading certain bits of relevant information that was either poorly conveyed, or neglected to some capacity, and felt that this was a part of a much bigger issue that some in FAF are resolved in slowly improving upon. For example, tournaments appear on the surface level as empty and barren as it has ever been, and when it comes to drastic changes, it is not always apparent to users what is going on within our community. Developers have goals in mind, but for the most part, there is no general architecture to convey the ongoing and happenings of our contributors in different parts of FAF; it is sorely limited and bare when it comes to those who are not actively engaged in the development cycle. For this, I desire to work at some kind of portal that can be linked and tethered as a consolidated effort to improve communications and make relevant information far more accessible and appealing to engage with.

I will go ahead and provide a subsection here that will be much more in detail about the issue and my solution, so if you are interested in that, click on the spoiler, otherwise I will leave this as my briefing of my focus for this Councilor seat.

Spoiler: show

It is my aspiration to seek out potential remedies to these issues, which is not a simple matter, first and foremost. Asking various contributors to be proactive about the process is not a cherished task, and understandably would be tedious unless you were perhaps a front man for this department (sounds like a job for a promotions guy!).

At its core, the easily identified culprit can be the splintered platforms that our community tends to operate between, as Slack and Discord are effective boats in their own right, but these tend to be sheltered away from others in favor of a private setting, which by all accords is fine, but it is hard to get any information when everything is kept under shelter. There is a lack of a centralized medium that can link these currently, or at least an effective one, because while the forums is solid ground, it is also easily swamped and crammed with many, many other topics that can make it easy to skim over important updates. Github is a platform that might be the effective gateway for certain changes to be approved/rejected, however this is a stretch for the typical user who may not have any place to be on such a platform unless he were a developer and who understands the UI and functions, and so it only further divides concentrated information that, unfortunately, is not effectively in the loop with the rest of the community. The “What's New” tab on the client does the best of these to present certain topics front and center, but even that is scarcely occupied, and bare minimum for what can be called the front page.

For this problem, it might be tricky, but at the very least, this occupies a greater circle for what can help for our community, as having a cleaner, centralized, and updated hub, with those who can appropriately convey information is the general solution that I am aiming for. This goes hand-in-hand with tournaments, development, casts, technical help, map and mods, and so much more. The idea is to generate the core of FAF communications through a portal that can be linked to the various platforms at our disposal, while encouraging the enlisting of spokesmen to dedicate their efforts to notifying key interests, for the respective domains they entail. We clearly possess councilmen with dedicated roles serving toward the interests of expanding various important aspects for the FAF community, and to craft this portal would ideally attract users who would be interested in said topics to allow them to coordinate and promote their work in an effective manner.

We currently have multiple platforms, and it permits to the access to various tools and workspaces, but that in turn makes for more ground to cover, and while it would be easy to copy and paste the same messages, and carry this out like a pigeon courier to every social media outlet, this is exhaustive busywork. When conjoined with others who may be out of the network and have to individually carry their own messages, or have to assign this to a designated person, this ends up becoming a mess that inherently leads to this kind of disorganized platform that does not allocate for everyone's best interests, which is exactly the state that FAF communications is in now.

This solution for an FAF portal is unfortunately one that is idealist, and unfortunately, while I may possess the means to speak and deliver the ideas front and center, I do not possess the skill to build such a concept as a tangible entity. I would like to gather as much as I can in resources into something I can piece together and design, however, it is an effort that I cannot accomplish alone, which is why if you have read this far, I must iterate that I am absolutely open to cooperating and working with others who can help in this promotions field. Having others to assist in the tasks is appreciated and helpful already, but it should not be understated that this is a community effort, and while I intend to run for the seat of promotions, the work and accomplishments come from a unified position, and one that we are all capable of succeeding with if we collaborate!

If you read the aforementioned subsection, you will have a general idea of the objective I will strive towards, as I believe the effectiveness of communications and clarity will allow for not only our community to attract new users beyond our borders, but to enable our current playerbase to flourish with the contributions, activities, and enjoyment of our current members. We can strive to make solid and important changes to the system we operate, and can further improve the vision and leadership needed to keep our project going, well, forever.

Thanks guys if you have read this far, and even if you skimmed some, I shall not judge, at least not critically!

[FtXCommando]

Last day bump for other apps.