VH Staff Meeting Digest May 17th 2013

MAY 17, 2013

Subjects addressed at this staff meeting

• The idea of townhalls was presented, and the schedule and rules for the first one (on Saturday, May 25) were discussed and tweaked.

• The staff discussed community spirit: whether users were making new acquaintances or only interacting with people they knew, and what could be done to encourage mingling and acceptance. This circled back to the need to encourage user-feedback at the townhall, so any barriers to people feeling comfortable and communicative could be understood and addressed.

• With the increased number of users and activity, better room-organization was needed. This meeting included some discussion of how to change the available set of rooms, such as creating the OOC room, with the goal of making activity in the default room less overwhelming.

• Regarding making user feedback easy and encouraged, the need for an anonymous ticketng system for users to report any problems they experience was discussed.

• The need to better define and explain the vision for the site was discussed. To this end, it was decided to prominently put the site's community vision on the wiki, to explain what sort of community this site is meant to support as compared to the other chatrooms that exist.

• Discussion occurs regarding the need for moderators to be consistent in their official actions, and initial planning for a 'Moderator's Manual' occurs.

Subsequent outcomes from this meeting

• Townhalls were implemented to give users a way to talk directly to staff, publically, about important issues.
• A new room layout was implemented.
• The wiki was updated to present the site vision/charter.
• Registration was temporarily frozen while solutions to community fracturing were discussed.