Regarding Future Website Redesign Plans

[Dr. Derpface, J.D.]

GQ about now...

[Pwolf]

As someone who has been attached to about 3 separate redesign attempts over the past several years, and aware of a few others, the biggest issue isn't really transparency. To a degree, yea sure, it would be nice to know what's going on. I can take some of the blame for keeping a lot of stuff underwraps also. I've never been obligated to keep things hush-hush but I also knew that these attempts had very low chances of actually going anywhere and the worst thing I would want is to give anyone hope when there was nothing to show yet. We've tried the whole "hope" thing to get people interested and helping but it didn't get anywhere.

The biggest problem is finding people to work on it. Not just programmers and designers. A proper redesign of this site requires people who are very truly motivated and excited to create a finished product. After that, you need people who actually know what they are doing. Even then, of the three teams I was on, maybe only one or two of them did any real programming work on the site we were working on. Everyone else was either a s designer or had little experience and we had no work for them at that stage in development. Eventually, they all fizzled out due to real life obligations (or people straight up disappearing), not administrative black tape. There's a lot you can do without administrative guidance or assistance.

It's really easy to blame the administration but that's not going to fix anything if no one is willing to do the work. Yea, we had someone who was working on a redesign and got caught up with some admin BS. But you can't change the past and we haven't seen anyone with the same skills or motivations step up and take up the challenge.

Any sort of redesign at this point requires a complete refocus, as GQ stated. Personally, I'd like to see the catalog and video uploads go away. Focus the site on the forum, contests, and social events. Removing video uploads would remove the need for donations and open more options for the site, as far as where it could go without running into legal trouble (advertising at cons?).

I'll be a little transparent here: a few years ago I was approached as someone who could possibly take ownership of the site. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the site and the non-profit that was attached to it, the costs to operate and legal issues moving it to California didn't sit well with me. If the donations, and subsequently the video uploads, went away, I could reconsider, if it was still an option. That said, I do not know what the current status is of that or if Kris had talked to anyone else but that still wouldn't have fixed any of the problems we've had with doing a recode/redesign. We would still need dedicated people to do the work and blaming it all the administration, at least to me, is a bit much.

[Dr. Derpface, J.D.]

Scott, I see what you're saying, and I'm inclined to agree to a point. But a lot of it still (IMO) boils down to a complete lack of clear leadership that's willing to actually have people participate. If the administration isn't willing to actually drive changes, then all the good intentions in the world are for naught. They have to want it to work and actually be a rallying point rather than a roadblock.

[Pwolf]

Scott, I see what you're saying, and I'm inclined to agree to a point. But a lot of it still (IMO) boils down to a complete lack of clear leadership that's willing to actually have people participate. If the administration isn't willing to actually drive changes, then all the good intentions in the world are for naught. They have to want it to work and actually be a rallying point rather than a roadblock.

I completely agree but, in my honest opinion, it wouldn't have mattered because we've never had anyone, except maybe David, who was really motivated to make something. Good leadership doesn't make a product if the people doing the actual work aren't motivated or skilled.

[MaboroshiStudio]

I have worked on communities / major sites and seriously I would rather shoot myself in the head at times... if people think it is so easy you have no clue. I have been out of the AMV community for over a decade and yeah the org is still what it was, but I won't speak ill of people who are volunteering their time for this site. Honestly a redesign / skin change means nothing... a new site with new functionality + features is everything, but guess what there is a crap load of data and migrating to a new architecture is a MASSIVE undertaking.

At my day job we are doing something similar... you know what the timeline is for a major corporation? 2 years...

[Dr. Derpface, J.D.]

I completely agree but, in my honest opinion, it wouldn't have mattered because we've never had anyone, except maybe David, who was really motivated to make something. Good leadership doesn't make a product if the people doing the actual work aren't motivated or skilled.

But when the leadership alienates those who are, that makes others less likely to step-up, because they don't want to get the same treatment. Good leadership also means giving people the means to do a task, rather than "Work your magic, but you have no actual say in anything and we're not letting you touch the assets/resources you need to do what we want." That's a great way to kill motivation, which leads to fewer motivated people wanting to help.

[MaboroshiStudio]

Scott, I see what you're saying, and I'm inclined to agree to a point. But a lot of it still (IMO) boils down to a complete lack of clear leadership that's willing to actually have people participate. If the administration isn't willing to actually drive changes, then all the good intentions in the world are for naught. They have to want it to work and actually be a rallying point rather than a roadblock.

Leadership? What does that have to do with finding generous talented highly skilled / technical people willing donating their time when they could be making $100-200 an hour doing work... and we would need a team of 3-6 people.

My one freelance client which I finally tapped out as I was burned out are having a company build a new community for them / migrate everything. When I spoke to them I asked what the sticker price was? I said $300-500k and they said $200-250k... to which I said project creep with have you over $300k easily.

[Shin-AMV]

But we've had transparency for the past how many years and how many times it's been started, and where has that gotten us? Back with the same problem. I turned it over to a small team of community members that I'm trusting to take another look at it, some of whom actually have been around a very long time, and still do care about the future of the website.

This just reminds me of

The project is being worked on by our staff in their free time, however, so we also ask for patience in its completion.

from: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/forum/v ... 4&t=101794

Honestly, I dunno how transparent the whole process has been for years now. Everytime I hear about a rework and who's been working on it, its usually 2nd hand information and there are 2 general stories I end up hearing. The first one is that changes and updates are blocked by someone with authority, whoever that may be, saying no to updates and that x and y changes don't need to be made and that things are fine. Then when those working on the rework can make no progress because of the stonewalling or obstinate philosophies they end up quitting and the work gets handed over to others where the process repeats itself.

The second story involves the people involved in the rework not being able to do what needs to be done because of real life obligations or lacking certain technical know-how to make things happen without investing either substantial time or money into the endeavor and upon this realization the project is once again passed onto another group of people where once again the cycle repeats.

I don't know whats the truth or which scenario is more accurate, but frankly either way the result ends up being the same in that the public statement about updates and the future is that the site is old and requires an entire rework which is just a restatement of the problem and not an actual plan on how to deal with it or start an actual rework/update and that the update is now in the hands of capable members with a wait and see sentiment about the whole thing. Its hard to ask for continued patience when stuff just feels like a cyclical process of stagnation, regardless of who/what is to blame.

At this point I would completely be fine with a partial update and the site effectively be in a beta state as it gets updated cause as it is right now it barely functions as anything worthwhile and is fairly irrelevant aside from maybe the Contest forum. If the site wants to become relevant again it desperately needs to update to be more community centric and accomadate things like youtube and other social media sites sharing videos across platforms and bringing these diverse groups together and being an effective hub for it all, which I should at least give props to changing the current vision of the website to recognize that, instead of clinging to an outmoded idea of the catalog or whatever. The hobby isn't dying, there are lots of editors out there, they just don't see any value in the org cause we literally offer nothing that they can't get elsewhere. Hell, I think a tumblr page showcasing AMVs on it with nothing more than a submission link and a forum link would be more relevant and appealing to people then the mess we have now.

TL;DR: Things are static, we want tacos

[Pwolf]

At my day job we are doing something similar... you know what the timeline is for a major corporation? 2 years...

And this is usually with a larger team who are getting paid good money not 5 people who have day jobs/school and are volunteering their free time for little to no compensation of any kind (maybe a "thanks").

I completely agree but, in my honest opinion, it wouldn't have mattered because we've never had anyone, except maybe David, who was really motivated to make something. Good leadership doesn't make a product if the people doing the actual work aren't motivated or skilled.

But when the leadership alienates those who are, that makes others less likely to step-up, because they don't want to get the same treatment. Good leadership also means giving people the means to do a task, rather than "Work your magic, but you have no actual say in anything and we're not letting you touch the assets/resources you need to do what we want." That's a great way to kill motivation, which leads to fewer motivated people wanting to help.

That's cool and all but a lot of this redesign could been done without the org administration's assistance. If you want to do it "right" sure, you would want the existing code and database to work from but this site isn't that complicated. I could, and have to an extent (twice), redesigned the database scheme from scratch without looking at the original schema. At worst, when all is said and done, all the administration could do is say "no" and you'd be left with a full, working site you could setup on a server and start you're own org. People have been talking about doing it this way for years. We have tried doing this and it doesn't work.

You are right, leadership is important. I can probably be blamed for a lot of the failures of the past projects I've worked on due to my lack of leadership skills but there's only so much you can do to motivate people who aren't being compensated for their time and energy. If I had the means, and I've really thought about this, I would pay people to work on a redesign.

[Pwolf]

If I had the means, and I've really thought about this, I would pay people to work on a redesign.

I may be able to compensate with tacos tho...