In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to tell you what WriterAction is. You’d just know. Either you’d be a member of the WGAw or WGAE and thus, be a member of WriterAction…or you’d be someone looking forward to the day you could join it.
Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out that way.
WriterAction was started by a woman named Alex Sokoloff back somewhere around 2002, shortly after the last WGA credits referendum. Alex and some of her likeminded writer friends (Clifford Green, David Hoag, Katherine Fugate, David Odell and Steve Chivers) decided that what our union was missing was any real opportunity for a collective meeting place.
Sure, there’s the “writers’ lounge” in the WGAw building, but it’s about as conducive to discussion as an operating room.
Alex and her cohorts believed that writers did want to reach out and form a real community where experiences could be shared, information gathered and debated, and maybe most of all, where union members could democratically participate in and influence their union.
On the other hand, writers didn’t necessarily want to leave their respective caves either.
And so, they created WriterAction on the web, and restricted it to WGA members only. In the beginning, it was a fairly crude site hosted with the free virtual community provider EzBoard. EzBoard pretty much sucks, but it’s free, and it served the basic purpose.
I joined it about two years after its conception.
In early 2004, I didn’t really know who was running the WGA, I didn’t know who stood for what, I didn’t know how a union worked…
In other words, I was an average Guild member.
I attended an outreach meeting on the upcoming negotiations, and the host suggested that I might enjoy WriterAction (because, I suspect, I’m an opinionated bigmouth).
I joined WriterAction on April 7th, 2004. At the time, I think there were about 80 members in total.
I loved it. In a very short while, simply by participating in that very tiny community of writers, I learned an enormous amount about how my union worked, how my fellow writers thought, and how we could actually change things for the better.
Shortly thereafter, I was asked to help administer WriterAction. And after that, I was recruited to run for the Board of the WGAw.
Everything was lovely.
Except that I haven’t posted a word on WriterAction in a half a year now.
What happened?
Well, for starters, Alex Sokoloff and I really started to hate each other. Rather than get into the personal issues there, let’s just stipulate that we had personal issues, I resigned as an admin in part over those personal issues, but I continued to post long after that.
Therefore, we can elminate that as a reason for my exit.
Was it out of boredom? Perhaps. The WriterAction community has never really expanded the way it should have. There are about 7,500 current active members in the WGAw (with another 3,500 in the WGAE, but since WriterAction continues to be a mostly-WGAw meeting place, let’s not consider them in the following equations).
Out of those 7,500 members, WriterAction currently boasts a membership list of 2,106 members.
Not bad.
Except that 1,590 of them have never posted even once. Always a bad sign.
There are 516 members that have posted at least once, but 81 of them have posted just once. There are only 284 members who have ten or most posts to their name, and only 360 members have shown up at all (to lurk or post) within the last two months.
From that, figure there’s about 350 regulars. Unfortunately, of those regulars, roughly half post at a rate of less than one post a week.
Even worse, the top 59 posters (which still include both myself and Josh Olson, neither of whom post there anymore) are responsible for a full 72% of all posts made in the whole history of the place!
In short, WriterAction really hasn’t grown significantly since the days when I found it on EzBoard.
Okay, so…why? Maybe it’s meant to be small.
No, it’s meant to be big. Its entire purpose, I think, should be in its inclusiveness.
Unlike this website, which is an extension of my will and personal philosophy, WriterAction exists to build community. You can’t build community unless you get some numbers, particularly when you’re trying to mirror a pre-existing community of 7,500 people.
At its best, WriterAction was considered a rising force in Guild politics. A number of active participants ran for the Board and were elected (including myself, Ted Elliott and Alex Sokoloff). Candidates visited the site to promote their platforms. In the Board room, people would say, “This issue is playing well on WriterAction” or “We’re getting killed over this on WriterAction.” There was a sense of accountability to the constituency for once, instead of the business-as-usual “no one’s paying any attention, so let’s just do what we what” brand of Guild politics.
And that’s all gone now.
Patric Verrone knew pretty early on that numbers are numbers. If the community doesn’t grow past 200 or 300 attentive eyeballs, it’s not going to make a real difference in the big game of Guild politics.
Mind you, the whole point of WriterAction isn’t to promote one idea over another. Rather, it’s to inform the membership, inspire the membership and hopefully hold the leadership accountable to the membership’s concerns.
A half a year ago, I stopped posting. I became fed up with the following:
- Seeing the same faces, day after day
- The belief of some of the admins that frequent posters were the problem, rather than the lifeblood of the place
- The inability of the admins to bring in new frequent posters
- The kudzu-like proliferation of forums and sub-forums
- The buzzing mess of the general politics forums, which are completely off-message
- The site’s technical stagnation
- The insane way the admins disciplined problem members
Most of those are self-explanatory, save the last two.
The site’s technical stagnation is one that definitely bugs me. Denise Meyer and I (who, together, run the Artful Forum), found vBulletin and migrated WriterAction to it from EzBoard. Before we did that, poor Alex had to literally approve new members by answering individual emails to her AOL account.
While vBulletin isn’t exactly rocket science, you do have to keep up with it. There’s no reason that WriterAction shouldn’t have simple things like spell-check or the ability to embed videos. Would those things save WriterAction? No.
On the other hand, if the admins over there encouraged people to use the “warn admins” feature and then installed one of the various “warning reports” mods, they might have a better time handling the problems that crop up…and that brings me to…
…the insanity.
Every board will have problems. Even a board like WriterAction, which doesn’t accept just anyone in off the virtual street, will have its share of cranks, jerks and miscreants.
The basic WriterAction rule is “don’t engage in ad hominem attacks.”
Here’s the problem.
First, they have some whacked-out definition of ad hom, which basically changes from circumstance to circumstance.
Second, they have this weird tic where they refuse to delete offending posts. Instead, they publicly post in the thread asking you, the member, to delete your own post…or they’ll do it for you.
Huh?
And then, and here’s where they really jumped the shark, they decided that once they made a decision and implemented it, that decision could not be discussed at all.
This is just stupid. When I get into my little fights with Olson, or when a couple of commenters start going at each other, I do my thing. I delete posts if they deserve it (with special care to avoid deleting attacks on me unless they’re really out there), and if people complain, I answer back. If I don’t feel like talking about it, I just don’t.
But I don’t ban people from questioning me. That’s ridiculous.
Even worse, unlike this site, which is my own personal domain, WriterAction is supposed to be about the community of WGA members…not any one writer’s philosophy…
Ah, but there’s the rub. See, when you run a community, you inevitably start to feel like it reflects on you…and that it’s yours.
In my case, this place is mine. But does the community part…the part where other writers express themselves…does that reflect on me?
Hmmm, tough to answer. Probably not, although I have to struggle against that from time to time. I think that’s where the admins of WriterAction have gone wrong.
Well, that, and the fact that they don’t really do anything. I mean, here’s a short list of stuff they should be doing.
- Hosting live chat events with leadership, and advertising them via email blast to all 2100 members, lurkers or not
- Eliminating forums that are underused or redundant to other forums on the web
- Establishing post icons for thread-starters who want that discussion to remain serious
- Creating a forum for newbies (and limiting posting in that forum to members with fewer than 50 posts)
- Creating a forum where disputes can be hashed out between users and admins
- Publishing the Board minutes each month
- Publishing the Board agenda each month
- Creating a “featured debate” section where two members can have at each other in a civilized fashion
- Asking each new member to bring two more WGA members to the site to increase active participation
- Actively pursuing A-level writers, who tend to attract lots of other writers
What they should stop doing:
- Debating every decision endlessly
- Splashing tacky and pointless banners on forum pages
- Intimidating users who “post too much”
- Denying users the right to publicly question them
- Adding forums that no one uses
- Resisting active leadership
- Engaging in passive leadership (e.g. meetings where they ask users to “give us ideas on how to make this a better place”)
Do I think the current administrators are up to this task? No. Not the majority of them, at least.
Do I think I am? Hell no. I’ve already done my part for WriterAction, and I have my own site to run.
No, it’s time for new blood. Not mine, not theirs.
WriterAction isn’t a personal site. It’s meant to be a mirror community for the WGA. We need it more than ever right now, as we head into elections and negotiations and possibly even a strike. We need an educated, engaged, connected membership.
And for WriterAction to become that, I think it needs new leadership. The current folks have done enough, but I think they’re tired and burnt and defensive and possessive.
The admins need to turn over the reins to some new members. They need at least one technical admin who does nothing but work the vBulletin side, and then they need about five people to handle the rest. Those people should spend their time revitalizing the site, and their only benchmark for success should be a marked increase in the number of active posters and active readers.
Anything less, and WriterAction will slowly bumble along as it does now: limited, unrealized and ineffective.
