[Discussion] General Staff Reorganization
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This proposal seeks to reorganize the teams we currently have on staff, and get rid of a few unnecessary subteams. The actual functionality of most teams has not been changed.
Now, here are my proposals for changing, along with reasonings.
- Make Ambassador its own team
- I legitimately do not understand why this team is underneath IO. This change, from what I can tell, is from when Harmony was head of IO and also Ambassadors, but IO and Ambassadors handle two very different things. It's possible this was done as a power grab, similar to what happened with MAST (elaborated below). Might just have been not-well-thought-out convenience.
- Unite Community and Internet Outreach Teams under one larger "Outreach" umbrella.
- This would not fundamentally change the functioning of either team, but putting the two outreach teams under one umbrella could help facilitate transfer of knowledge between the two, along with making communication between offsite and onsite expected rather than suggested. This could also assist whenever we have something that needs to be put both on site and off site, which is incredibly often.
- Whether or not Ambassadors would also be under this hat is debatable, and I have no strong opinion either way.
- Sort-of merge Site Crit and Forum Crit into one general Crit Team.
- Having one general crit team would make future endeavors, such as chat crit, easier to create and coordinate. Along with that, transfer of knowledge between critters is extremely useful.
- An important point is that Site Crit's "primary" function, that of giving critique to mainsite articles, should be entirely dropped in the merge. This goal has been unsustainable for quite a while, and additionally hasn't really been worked on. Other responsibilities, like chat crit, should be kept and moved to the "new" team.
- Disband CO's New Member Introduction Team.
- We've agreed not to do this anymore, atleast not in staff capacity, a while back. Not quite sure why this team is still around.
- Disband MAST's INT Hub Maintenance Team.
- This should not be a team on its own, and most likely just fall under Ambassador responsibilities.
- Merge MAST's Wikiwalk team into Navigation.
- For those unaware - MAST has Navigation, who has purview over changing technical site elements such as the sidebar and topbar1, and Wikiwalk, who has purview over hubs and a lot of navigational elements. The teams have a comical amount of overlap in responsibilities and action in-practice, that it'd be better to merge them, and personally I just think "navigation" is a more fitting name.
- Make Collections its own team.
- Collections was initially under CO, and is currently under MAST. The team, frankly, fits neither umbrella and deserves to be its own team. They haven't even been using any MAST resources while under them, even talking on a separate discord.
- Move MAST's Guide Updating to Rewrite.
- Guide Updating's goals are more similar to "rewriting" than they are to any concept of "maintenance," in my personal opinion. Since 2020, the only minor changes to pages have been done by non-updating teams, while Guide Updating has exclusively rewritten pages, usually in extreme ways.
- I am aware that rewrite, in its current form, has a very limited scope which isn't necessarily to rewrite pages themselves but rather to facilitate it for site authors. In my opinion, this goal can and should be expanded for more general rewrite-related needs.
- As rewrite have mentioned they're going through an internal reorganizing, if this proposal passes, Guide Updating should only be moved once they've finished.
- Disband Seminars.
- Seminars has been dead for quite a while and in my personal opinion, until we have consistent, frequent seminars, this could just be a general CO responsibility rather than a subteam one.
- Rename MAST to just "Maintenance."
- To begin - I think it's important to remember that MAST was made, in part, to coup staff. This is not a joke nor hyperbole, harmony straight up used it to try and takeover the site. I wish I was kidding. This initial goal sort of explains MAST's bloated sub-team list, weird mishmash of purviews (how the hell is tagging, collections2, and navigation3 under one roof), and a lot more. To make it clear what this team's goal should be, and to avoid any future power-grabs, I think we should make it positively clear this team is just for site maintenance.
Once all is said and done, the new staff structure should look something like this:
- Ambassadors
- Anti-Harrassment
- Collections
- Criticism
- Forum
- Chat
- Disciplinary
- Outreach
- Offsite
- Tiktok
- Twitch
- Onsite
- Contests
- Site News
- Data Analysis
- Offsite
- Licensing
- Maintenance
- 05command Pruning
- Collab Log Pruning
- Deletions
- Navigation
- Sandbox Cleaning
- Tagging
- Recap
- Rewrite
- Article Rewriting
- Guide Updating
- Technical
This thread will be up for a week of discussion before being moved to a voting thread (assuming people like this idea), and any particularly controversial points will be given their own sub-vote.
