Round (D)one - Thanks and Feedback

[modzilla]

Finish Line! Thank You!

Creators are now revealed at the fffx 2020-21 collection. You are welcome to share what you wrote or drew far and wide.

I want to thank everyone for taking a chance on an exchange with unusually high requirements for works, on an unknown mod, and on various of my more experimental ideas. I am especially grateful to pinch hitters, to treaters, to people who consumed canons thinking about treating or pinch hitting, to betas, to commenters, and to the other Triple Crown moderators for conceiving of similar events that could complement and support each other. Three people took on pinch hits before assignments went out. My friend made me such a gorgeous icon. Just LOOK at that Godzilla with a clipboard. You're all stars.

Although I was wibblesome at the time of reveals, I think fffx generally worked and would like to run this again. So I'd be grateful to hear your feedback.

Feedback

Art
I am glad we included comics and would be happy to do that in future, so this can be the Five Figure Fanwork Exchange indefinitely. I would be happy to hear from artists about whether the minimums/requirements worked or could be tweaked.

Schedule
The 2020 schedule was:
Nominations start: 14 July 2020
Sign-ups start: 24 July
Sign-ups close: 7 August
Assignments out by: 14 August
Assignment Swap Week: 14-20 September
Check-in Week: 16-22 November
Assignments due: 30 January 2021
Works revealed: 27 February - delayed to 12 March
Creators revealed: 13 March - delayed to 26 March

How did it work for you? Should 2021-22 be similar? Should the check-in be at a different point relative to the overall schedule?

Assignment swaps
I liked having this option. Checking my notes, eight people asked to swap their assignments. Does anyone have any feedback on this aspect?

Letter deadlines / Mandatory optional details
I know it causes a lot of stress in exchanges when people are waiting on indefinitely incomplete/locked letters. I'm not sure if my threat of deleting letters that were incomplete past a certain point was helpful for this situation. I deleted three people's letter links.

Other
?? DNWs? Pinch hitter prompt promotion? Handling of nominations? I might give slightly fewer nominations next year but only SLIGHTLY. There were a lot. But I want people to be able to request and offer what they want, and matching wasn't a problem, only sorting.

Triple Crown

In the next day or so, I will provide the Triple Crown Committee with a final list of people who have participated in this exchange in such a way as to qualify for Triple Crown prizes. (See triplecrownofexchanges for cool stuff!) That will not include anyone whose work is orphaned or anon or anyone who has not commented on their gifts. So if your work is anonymous (the TCC have other ways around that too, you can talk to them rather than me) or you have reservations about commenting on your gift(s), you're welcome to get in touch with me at mod.modzilla@gmail.com.

More Triple Crown

Editing to add the reminder that prize claiming for Triple Crown starts on April 2! Enjoy the fruits of your labors, magnificent completionists. triplecrownofexchanges

Much love.

Comments

[shadaras]

This exchange was super cool! Thank you for running it! (and for accidentally sparking the whole triple crown concept!)

Regarding assignment swaps: I think I would've preferred having two weeks for that? I know that I can look at an assignment and have a lot of initial confidence in my ability to write it, and having an extra week could give that enough time to cool down in the face of starting to actually write something. I'm still not sure I would've swapped (it's a new concept to me! I'm still sort of confused about how it works on your end!), but considering the length of the exchange, one week feels like it might be a bit short.

Regarding check-ins: I agree with sandrine that having a second check-in at the beginning of January as a post-holiday reminder to finish up would be nice. And/or having the late-November check-in be a soft "have you gotten at least halfway through your drafting?" instead of just "hey are you still doing this?", to motivate people to not write 90% of their fic in the final month.

Regarding letter deadlines: It didn't effect anything for me. I'm very neutral on the idea, as a result. If it's something that helps you as a mod, go for it! (Mandatory optional details is great, though; I think that for something this long it's very important to have something for creators to go on.)

[sandrine]

And/or having the late-November check-in be a soft "have you gotten at least halfway through your drafting?" instead of just "hey are you still doing this?", to motivate people to not write 90% of their fic in the final month.

I think this needs to account for people who have a different writing process. Not everyone drafts at all, or works with an outline, or writes chronologically. Phrasing the check-in differently in the way you suggest (and perhaps that's what you mean by a 'soft' question about drafting) isn't an issue, but I'd strongly argue against actually being required to show any progress at check-in.

[shadaras]

Yeah, I also don't want to need to show any work! That sounds annoying on both a writer and mod end.

I was more thinking about how if the question is more like "how is your work going? are you on-pace to finish?" (with a suggestion of "it's half-way through the writing period! maybe aim for being half-way through by this check-in?" or something along those lines) instead of simply "are you still committed to this exchange?", it would help split the writing period into two smaller mental chunks instead of one vast endlessness that only feels Real at the end.

[modzilla]

I'm glad you had a good time! I feel I can't take much credit for sparking the Triple Crown concept, but I'm glad we proved that not only is there appetite for exchanges with longer minimums, there's enough interest that several can run at once without undermining each other. It's awesome.

I'm not quite sure how two weeks would work for assignment swaps, but I wasn't very clear about how it would work in the first place, sorry! To recap from my side: I originally conceived of it as a week-long period, but when carrying it out, I realized that didn't make any sense. Really, the time you have to decide about swapping your assignment is between when you get your assignment, and whenever the arbitrary deadline is (in round 1 it was September 14), meaning that it's four weeks. So do you think you'd prefer it were five weeks between assignments going out & the assignment swap date? I also might say that you could swap your current assignment for an outstanding pinch hit after that time, maybe all the way to the end of the year.

Thanks! I put more thoughts about letter deletion in a reply above, here.

It's interesting to me that you suggest a second check-in. It might be helpful for me as a mod to structure fffx with two check-ins, but I got the impression that many participants find a single check-in acceptable, but already burdensome. Plus I would want to keep the default-with-no-penalty cut-off at the earlier check-in.

Regarding the suggestion below about people aiming to be halfway through their work at a half-point check-in: I'm not sure that works for me. I don't expect people to space out their work evenly through the creation process. Some people might have a huge busy period in their lives in Sept-Nov and be planning to start canon review in December. Some people do a lot of overlapping exchange and set THIS fortnight aside for Exchange 1 and THAT fortnight aside for Exchange 2, even though the exchanges have writing periods that are much longer than two weeks. Tl;dr - I'm cool with people writing 90% just before deadline as long as they don't make it my problem or their recipient's.

At the check-in, I just want people to think about whether anything has changed in their life that jeopardizes their existing plans to create a work. (Do you still have access to canon? Have your offline commitments changed so drastically you cannot do the thing?) It can be a wake-up call for people who haven't started reviewing a long canon or who are hand-inking and can only physically draw so much in a day, etc. But I don't even need to know what someone's plan looks like. Just whether they still have one.

I like to hope that a mid-way check-in reminds people that the exchange is Real (I definitely know what you mean there - it's next year, how can it be urgent?) but not sure how to achieve that otherwise.

Would happily explain more about how the assignment swap process works if you like! Don't want to tl;dr you further without invitation, though.

[shadaras]

Re: check-ins - I'm not super fussed regardless of how you do check-ins; I know I'd be helped by more, but I have no problem with you taking the aggregate feelings and your own preferences and working with those.

To recap from my side: I originally conceived of it as a week-long period, but when carrying it out, I realized that didn't make any sense.
Ah, that'd be why I'd misremembered the timing. xD; I think that a month is plenty of time; I just don't think I'd remembered/realised how much time there was for it.

I also might say that you could swap your current assignment for an outstanding pinch hit after that time, maybe all the way to the end of the year.
Oh, that'd be fascinating! I think I would've been interested in that. Even though it's essentially the same as defaulting + claiming a pinch hit, it feels different somehow?

Would happily explain more about how the assignment swap process works if you like! Don't want to tl;dr you further without invitation, though.
I'd love to hear more about it! I think that it being a new concept and me not being sure how it worked contributed to me not even really considering it as an option. :)

[modzilla]

Hello! Sorry for dropping the ball on this.

Yes - you're right that the technical process on swapping assignments is no different from defaulting and claiming a different pinch hit. Though for me and I think some others, there can feel a difference between pressing the default button yourself and instructing the mod to do it for you. Anyway!

Since you mod things yourself, you've encountered the need to double-assign people at the start of an exchange, right? Where you're left with some people without creators, and some people without recipients, and then the first group get assigned to a temporary account and sent to pinch hit, and for the second group, you pick recipients for them, which means that their recipients actually end up with two creators.

(And once assignments are sent, those double assignments hang around all exchange. If a recipient has two assigned creators and one defaults, the system doesn't go "yeah, but one person's still creating for them, they're covered" - it just shows the defaulted assignment in the Defaulted tab. And similarly, you can't generate new assignments outside of purging & regenerating them all.)

But, back to matching phase - sometimes, when the matching algorithm runs, you may notice that it's possible to massage matches so that there are fewer pinch hits and fewer double-assigned recipients than the algorithm would give you.

This exchange instead goes the other way and, after matching is run, artificially manipulates the matches so as to create four separate assignments for every recipient. If you want to know how to do it yourself, it's time-consuming but I have a document I can tidy up.

But anyway, what this means is that all through the exchange, there's a "bank" of assignments held by the mod account. Say someone's already creating for you, and someone rocks up to my mod account saying "My assignment isn't working out, I want to create for Shadaras instead." Because the mod account is holding onto a hoard of extra assignments, I can easily assign that person to create for you, just as if you'd originally had two creators and the first had defaulted. On a technical level, that's exactly what happened, except, basically, you started out with four creators and three of them were the mod.

I'm not sure if that answers your question or a lot of questions you didn't ask /o\ but I hope it helps!