The 'Shroom talk:Issue 165/Director Election

Election Process
This page is where members of the community may make nominations and vote for candidates to direct The 'Shroom for the next year. The rules for the election process may be viewed on the election rules article.

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Hello, folks!

I am, the current Statistics Manager of The 'Shroom, and I am joined today by my running mate,. It is with great pleasure that we present to you our campaign for the position of Director and Sub-Director for the 2021 term of The 'Shroom. The reason for why I am running for the position of Director mainly stems from my passion and dedication to this project, as well as my attachment to this welcoming community. That can easily be seen by my involvement as a staff with the 'Shroomfest, by my number of inputs in 'Shroom projects (such as giving in ideas regarding the sign up page, the manual of style, community engagements, and current overhaul of our track records), and also by my leadership as the Tenth Poll Committee chairperson last year.

With all of this, I would like to be able to have the chance to do more for this community, by continuing my involvement in this wonderful project as a Director. I would like to improve community engagement, increase accessibility to the newspaper, and keep spreading positivity. Now with that said, allow me to turn it over to Goombuigi, candidate for the position of Sub-Director, before going on with our experiences, and plans.

Greetings, everyone! My name is, and I'm running for the position of Sub-Director for 2021. I'll briefly introduce myself, as well as explain my motivation for running this year, and my past experiences with the 'Shroom and the community.

Although my interests tend to wander in various directions at times, I would say that I'm most well-known for my artwork, clay work, and 'Shroom sections. I joined the Wiki and the Boards in late March of 2020, and have cemented myself in the community since then.

My main motivation for running for this position is due to the meaning that the 'Shroom has for me, and it's the primary reason that I joined the community. I've been reading it irregularly since 2018, and writing for the 'Shroom made me appreciate all of the work and effort that is put into each issue. I would like to explore the inner workings of the newspaper, as well as work and collaborate with other community members more, by taking on this position.

Although I joined the community somewhat recently, I feel that I already have a lot of experience here, and I have several qualifications. I've written for the 'Shroom since April of this year, and I currently write two sections, and I'm a member of the Eleventh Poll Committee. Lastly, I have participated in several large-scale community events, such as the Mario Awards and the 'Shroomfest. With these experiences in mind, I feel that I am ready to tackle a larger position such as this one. Of course, Ninja Squid has done an excellent job with helping me out so far, and I am confident that he will be a great person to work with, and a great Director.

Experiences To start, we would like to share about our previous and current experiences within the community with all of you.

Ninja Squid
 * Current Statistics Manager of The 'Shroom (Issue 131-present)
 * Current writer of The 'Shroom
 * Tenth Poll Committee chairperson (2019-2020)
 * Seventh, Eighth, and Eleventh Poll Committees member (2016-2018, 2020-present)
 * 'Shroomfest Host

Goombuigi
 * Current writer of The 'Shroom
 * Eleventh Poll Committee member (2020-present)

Schedules This is our proposed schedule for the 2021 term:

As we begin our term, we intend to fill in the position of the Activities Manager, and we will be working closely with them to the creation of interesting and unique ideas for 'Shroom-sponsored events. For Issue 168, we planned a small themed issue. In March 2021, the celebration for Super Mario Bros.'s 35th anniversary will end, and we would like to provide a little sendoff within the newspaper. We plan to do an Open Invite for users to write about their best memories with Mario games, thus will be our first engagement within our term. By doing so, this will help us define the kind of process we want to take on regarding this form of accessibility and engagement. Furthermore, March is also the month of Mar10 Day, which would be even more fitting for a themed issue.

Once our first two issues are released, we would like to plan a staff meeting focused on our proposals that we would like to put in place for 2021, which includes listening to the recommendations of our staff members and brainstorming ideas for the upcoming issues. Overall, this meeting would be more of a general discussion between the directors and the staff members. Following that, in June, we intend to hold our first Special Issue of the year. At Issue 171, will be celebrating her 100th issue as the Palette Swap Director. This is a phenomenal achievement, and we would like to make this issue dedicated to her, in a similar vein to what was done with former Fake News Director,. In addition, as usual, the Poll Committee Chairperson election will be held in June's issue, alongside the Community Awards Dossier, which we will be working on closely with the Awards Committee.

By the end of summer, we would plan our second staff meeting focused into the planning of Issue 175, which will take place in October. To celebrate 20 years of Luigi's Mansion, we are planning to make Issue 175.a Luigi's Mansion-themed issue, while also giving a focus on Halloween, to increase the theme's radius. There is also something important in 2021 we want to address. The year 2021 will mark the 15th years since the very foundation of The 'Shroom, which started with "2006 Beginnings". Because of this incredible achievement that would not be possible to be done without the help of our community members over the year, we want to focus most of our efforts in making the 175th issue the best issue of 2021. During our term, we intend to reach out to our community members and staff members, so we can generate discussions to make this issue special for the entire community. With Issue 175, our focus would be to look forward, celebrating this with our community members of today, who are the ones that will make the 175th issue a reality. We will also be discussing the possibility of creating a special staff collaboration, in a similar vein to what was done for Issue 150.

In November, the Awards Director Election will be held. Regarding the Holiday Issue this year, and because we intend on making Issue 175 the big event of the year, and with how close it is to the Holiday Issue, we are planning on doing it on a smaller scale. It is important not to burn out our staff mates by doing too many big special issues close to one another. The 'Shroom Director Election will, as usual, be held here.

Overall, during the year, the spacing of the special issues would allow for the January-May time period to focus on our goals and recruiting new writers, while the period between July and September to be focused on the Awards, with September serving as a cooldown from the Awards. After the work that will be accomplished during the year, we will be making the transition between however elected ticket is as smooth as possible.

To conclude, we want to maximize our effort so that 2021 is a year that will allow the newspaper to evolve, while being a source of inspiration and joy for all of us. This is the message we want to send regarding our 2021 schedule.

Plans

The 'Shroom is an important form of engagement in this community, which brings us a lot of positivity. While the newspaper has undergone a renewed interest in 2020, with many new writers joining this year both in the long-term or guest form, we feel like there are certain improvements that we want to make in 2021 to facilitate this continuity. It is important for The 'Shroom to keep evolving in order to stay fresh and up to date. By that, we mean both in multimedia integration and in accessibility. Overall, The 'Shroom should and must be able to adapt to the needs of our potential writers. With that, we would like to share some of our plans for the next year.

Refurbish the position of Activities Manager Our first goal this year will be to refurbish the position of Activities Manager. This position's main duties will be to manage the 'Shroomfest events, and working alongside Goombuigi and I, to create new and interesting ideas for 'Shroom-sponsored events throughout the year. We do feel that with the road The 'Shroom is currently going regarding community engagements, that there is a need for an Activities Manager during our directorial term.

One thing we are also considering to implement during our term is to allow our community members to pitch in ideas for 'Shroom-sponsored events they would like to see us doing, and the Activities Manager will be there to keep records of such ideas. It is important for The 'Shroom, as a community project, to listen to the community's interests, and this is precisely the approach we would like to do with such process.

While working closely with the Directors, the Activities Manager will also be working on making sure there is a good flow of 'Shroom-sponsored events through the year. If we are the elected ticket, this postion will be going through an application process during Issue 166, in January. They will be taking office for Issue 167, in February.

Improving our way of communication with potential writers through our promoting efforts Another important plan of our campaign is to improve our communication with our potential applicants by overcoming the fear barrier. There's been concern in the past about having to write long to very long sections in order to be able to write for the newspaper, and we think there is a possibility of overcoming this barrier by improving on our own promoting efforts (such as Staff Section of the Month). While this is entirely speculative, but as The 'Shroom gives lots of promoting for longer sections, such as Mach Speed Mayhem, or Anton's Half-Baked Reviews for example, it is possible that people get the wrong idea that for their section to be of great quality, they have to make them long. So, we feel like it is important to see an improvement made to the promoting of smaller scale sections throughout the newspaper. With having a good average of both smaller and longer sections being promoted by the newspaper in a monthly basis, we think that potential applicants might have a better idea of what kind of section they could write and how long their section could be.

Other possible ideas are to communicate directly with our potential applicants and discuss with them about capitalizing on their strengths, or even leading by example. With the Director and Sub-Director being on the spotlight, we might be able to take advantage of this by writing sections that are smaller than average and show that it's entirely possible for a section to be good while still being smaller.

As we want to focus first into improving our promoting efforts, we would like to create an internal staff discussion regarding our Staff Section of the Month process, and discuss what is working, what isn't working, and what changes could be made. We are also planning to discuss with potential writers and showing them previous short sections as examples of how good smaller sections can be written.
 * Objective: Improving our promoting efforts and overcoming the fear barrier of writing for The 'Shroom.
 * Result: Our potential applicants will have a better vision of how long their section needs to be, to be considered good, thanks to our improved communication and promoting efforts.

Refining the application process, in order to make it friendlier to our potential writers Among our priorities, we would like to refine the application process to make it more attractive and helpful to our potential and newer writers. In that regards, we should be able to address and communicate any issues that is upcoming with the applications. When we receive applications that must be rejected, but that still demonstrate an idea that has potential to work, we believe that we should maximize our effort to make it possible to accept this application. As such, an approach we would prefer to do is keeping communication with our potential writers, providing helpful tips, suggestions and possibly a key staff member in case they need help about things like wiki-formatting to their section. This could be done, instead of the current process, which makes the users aware of what needs to be changed, and lets them work on this mostly by themselves. Of course, a good communication between the writers and staff is necessary, and writers should still demonstrate a will to cooperate with us, and demonstrate efforts in the long term. We believe this would increase the quality of life of the application process, and would remove the burden of having to go through another application process for the same section. The 'Shroom should be a platform for possibilities, and we would love to make a shift towards that trend.

An approach we would like to do in this case would be to present the project to our staff members, and discuss a method that everyone would be comfortable with for the refinement of the application process. To conclude, it is about making the application process more communicative with our writers, and increasing accessibility to The 'Shroom.
 * Objective: Create a push towards more "accepted with contingency" sections, rather than formal "rejected" sections, while providing continued support to our potential writers during the application process.
 * Result: The newspaper's accessibility and the communications with the staff members with our potential writers would be increased.

Expanding Pipe Plaza's goal This will need further discussions with Pipe Plaza's Director, but something we would like to change within our current selection of team is to expand upon Pipe Plaza's goal. Currently, Pipe Plaza's focus is into wiki-oriented sections. As you can see as of now, Pipe Plaza's sections are currently divided into two branches, wiki-oriented sections (all sections pertaining to Mario Wiki) and Non-Wiki-oriented sections (such as Anniversary Announcements, Poll Committee Discussion, and Upcoming Games). The main change we want to do is to change the branches into "Community Sections" and "Informative Sections" while making Pipe Plaza's focus into Informative sections.

We have noticed a trend where Pipe Plaza is often the overlooked team, and there is the possibility that wiki-related sections are not the main subject of interest of our readers. In order to remedy this problem and revitalize Pipe Plaza, we believe that shifting the focus of Pipe Plaza from wiki-oriented sections to sections that are aimed to be informative could be beneficial in the long term. Such sections could be related to science facts. A section talking about birds, space, medical world and which aims to inform our readers would fit into Pipe Plaza.

We believe that by implementing this change into Pipe Plaza's goal, we could restore interest in that team, and would be more interesting and fascinating overall for our readers. Please, take note that we do NOT want to remove any wiki and community sections that currently exist right now within Pipe Plaza or for the newspaper as a whole, but simply changing the current focus of that team, and expanding its outreach.
 * Objective: Expanding Pipe Plaza's goal by adding informative sections to its focus, while shifting the team's goal towards informative sections.
 * Result: The appeal of Pipe Plaza towards our readers would be improved.

Expand and improve writers' outreach Not so long ago, the staff received a suggestion by about creating a separate section for writers of The 'Shroom who have a thread in the forum pertaining to their sections. The concern about such a thing was the low amount of threads dedicated to 'Shroom sections. However, upon reflection regarding this matter, we feel like the lack of exposure and the lack of outreach for our writers right now is probably one of the reasons for why there is a low amount of existing interactions for our writers.

In order to fix this problem, we would like to create a place where our writers will be able to interact with their audience, and expanding visibility and engagement with them. Thereby, we would like to introduce a section within The 'Shroom board on the forum that would be exclusively for threads dedicated to 'Shroom sections. The writers are the core of the newspaper and we should be able to show continuous effort from our part in making sure there is a dedicated place for them for their own outreach. Overall, during our term, we want to demonstrate an effort in being more communicative with our writers.
 * Objective: Expanding visibility of our writers sections and thread in order to improve outreach with their audience.
 * Result: With a better exposure and visibility, the interest and communication between writers and readers would be improved.

Others Some more technical and behind-the scene stuff that we would also like to look at, are the current overhaul of our Track Records system that is currently coordinated by the current Directorship. In addition, the visibility of the sign up application process on our different platforms, and the layout and styling of the newspaper across our different platforms by working alongside the Progamming and Website Managers, are also part our planning.

Conclusion The 'Shroom is important to us, and we understand how important it is also to the community. It is among our priorities that we keep improving the accessibility to our newspaper. We would love to make the 2021 term of The 'Shroom a year that will spread positivity to our community. With my leadership experience as the chairperson of the Tenth Poll Committee, and as the current Statistics Manager of The 'Shroom, I feel like I will be comfortable in taking charge of The 'Shroom for an important term that will focus in communication and accessibility. My focus, as a Director, will be to keep a good and healthy workflow for our staff members, as well as making sure that The 'Shroom is a welcoming and memorable experience to all of our community members. In addition, with a new member such as Goombuigi, someone with a fresh vision, great dedication, and with new ideas among the new blood, joining my own creative mind, we really think we will be able to complement each other well and achieve great results for 2021.

No matter the result of this election, we hope that 2021 will be a year that will live upon the great progress that was done in 2020, but also seeing an improvement to the newspaper's accessibility, an increase in communication between writers and staff members, while continuing to spread positivity in the community. Thank you so much for considering our campaign, and if you have any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact us. In the meantime, let's all have a nice election. See you around!

Votes

 * 1) Kirbyo

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Hello, contributors to The 'Shroom and members of the community at large! After seeing through the 2020 term of our long-running community paper, and myself would like the opportunity to lead the paper through another term. To that end, we're throwing our hats into this election, and have prepared a campaign for you to assess and to use to better understand our plans for the paper in 2021.

We've had a successful year in 2020, seeing the paper through another year with a few innovations and the addition of some high-quality new regular sections. The 'Shroom may not have been the largest under our term, but we believe it has maintained its quality and that we've seen an increase in the community's engagement with the paper (evidenced by some long time community members getting their start with the paper this year). We feel we have the time, energy, and drive to lead the paper through 2021 and continue these slow-but-steady upward trends.

On the whole, our plan for 2021 is continued gradual improvement. We don't have any plans for significant overhauls at the moment, though, just as happened with 'Shroomfest this year, we'll keep our minds open to new ideas and evaluate them and make use of them as they arise.

Before we continue, though, we owe it to you to list our qualifications.

Qualifications

Hooded Pitohui

I'm Hooded Pitohui, current Strategy Wing Director and current Director of The 'Shroom. I've been around the community in earnest since 2017, and I've joined in a number of projects in this community during my time here. I have:


 * Directed The 'Shroom from January 18th, 2020 to present
 * Served as Strategy Wing Director since September 2018
 * Written multiple sections for The 'Shroom
 * Served on the 9th Poll Committee, the 2019 Awards Committee, and the 2020 Awards Committee, putting the Community Awards Dossier together in both of those years.
 * Served as Chairperson of the 11th Poll Committee, from July of 2020 to present.

I feel that working on all of these projects, in multiple areas of the community, has equipped me with the perspective and skillset needed to manage and lead community projects, including one as large as The 'Shroom. I've had a chance to lead the paper for a year now, and I will take what I've learned this year and apply it to the next. On the whole, I am confident that, working by Roserade's side, I have enough experience and energy to offer the paper the attention and leadership it deserves.

Roserade

Hi there! My name's Roserade, Rose for short, and I'm honored to be running alongside Pitohui once more! I first joined the community around 2012, but after maturing a bit and returning in 2016, I'm glad to have found my place around town. I'm currently serving as your Sub-Director and Fun Stuff Director for 'The 'Shroom, and I'm beyond excited for any new future opportunities that may come my way. For my experiences, I have:


 * Sub-directed The 'Shroom from January 18th, 2020 to present
 * Served as the Fun Stuff Director since September 2018
 * Written for The 'Shroom, as well as creating for other community events such as Awards
 * Served as the Poll Committee Vice Chairperson in the 8th Poll Committee and the 9th Poll Committee, and as a normal member of the Committee for the 7th term
 * Served as a member of the Awards Committee for the 2019 and 2020 terms
 * Served as a global moderator of the Super Mario Boards from April 5th, 2020 to present

With experiences as varied and leadership-heavy as I've had, I feel confident in my ability to continue forward with leading The 'Shroom into the coming year. Much like Pitohui, I have learned a lot from sitting in the Sub-Director's chair for the past year, and I'd like the opportunity to keep growing with the role. With a partner as dependable, hard-working, and generous as Pitohui, I trust in our ability to see this next term through another successful and plentiful year.

Schedules

Now, in complete fairness, we want to disclose that Ninja Squid and Goombuigi had a nifty table, so we opted to use a table to lay out our schedule, as well. Credit goes to them for this idea, though.

This is our proposed schedule for the 2021 term:

All in all, our vision for the 2021 schedule is light. Keeping our focus on a summer special issue and our holiday special in December worked well this year, and we feel that, with the paper where it is right now, this approach will work best next year, too. Focusing on two big issues allows us to balance the workload and demands we place on our staff and writers with the goal of delivering a unique and special edition of The 'Shroom.

As for those special issues, well, there's no doubt that FunkyK38 reaching her one-hundredth issue as Palette Swap Director is an occasion worthy of celebration, so we've been planning for some time to make issue 171 one focused on celebrating her! Representing the Kirby series as a part of this issue is obvious, though we intend to talk to FunkyK and ask her for additional ideas for themes, with the idea of doing something similar to issue LXXV, where different sections of the paper were themed after Gamefreak75's favorite series. In addition, to tie into Palette Swap's roots as "Art and Music," we'll have a 'Shroomfest organized around two different genres of music that month.

In December, we'd like to celebrate the 30th anniversary of our introduction to Yoshi in Super Mario World by making issue 177 focused on the Yoshi sub-series. With games as diverse as Yoshi's Crafted World, Yoshi's Story, and, of course, the original Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, we think that this will give us a single, coherent theme for the issue that also has plenty of variation in terms of the inspiration people are pulling from. This will also address a concern we heard from some of you that this year's holiday issue's theme was too restrictive with its focus on a single game that not everyone has had the chance to play.

You'll notice that, for the most part, we've stuck to the usual "third Saturday of the month," schedule for releases. The single exception is in November, where we have the issue scheduled to release on the second Saturday of the month. As we would otherwise have five weeks between the October release and November release, and would thus be able to move the issue up a week and give us an extra week to work on the December special, we think this is the best move to make to give us more time to prepare the December issue. This time, this schedule change will stick!

Miscellaneous Plans and Policies


 * Continue to refine The 'Shroomfest. The 'Shroomfest has been a great addition to the paper that has driven new engagement with the community on the forum, and we've been very pleased with its success. However, we do recognize that it is, as a concept, in its infancy and that it is rather labour-intensive. There is room to continue refining the concept this year, and, in terms of 'Shroom-related activities for the community, we'd like to keep our focus on improving it before we begin considering additional large activities that will need to be created and managed. While we aren't opposed to incorporating some new small activities this year if ideas come up, we do want to avoid anything too large so we can focus on making what we have run as well as possible rather than ending up with numerous creaky projects without strong management behind them.
 * Refine the application process. Once again, the credit here has to the ones who were ready out of the gate. We've read Ninja Squid's ticket's plans for the application process, and, to be blunt, we agree. Credit for the idea goes to them, but we want to express our support for their plan to change the application process by moving towards "accept with contingency" over "rejection" and assigning a staff member to support our applicants by providing feedback, tips and assistance. If we're elected, we will also work to implement this system.
 * Continue working with the Awards Committee. As always, we will work with the Awards Committee, cooperating with them in promoting Awards polls, presentation sign-ups, and the Community Awards, as well. Hooded Pitohui has prepared the Community Dossier for the past two years, and has prepared suggestions for the Awards Committee to consider while making changes to the Community Awards, and we are prepared to contribute to this project again next year in close association with Anton and Turboo.
 * Continue our one-on-one outreach to attract new writers and new staff members. It's a slow and unrefined process, we admit, but we believe personalized outreach is an effective way to attract new contributors to this project. It was by reaching out directly and providing ideas based on their interests to writers like winstein, Baby Luigi, ZelenPixel, and Moldomré that we gained some great new sections and guest submissions this year, and we intend to continue this style of outreach to attract additional writers next year. In addition, we keep an eye out and encourage individuals who we feel have strong potential to contribute to the project as staff members, and will continue to do so next year as we aim to ensure we'll always have new, promising staff members to step up and fill roles as they open.
 * Observe and potentially refine the Staff Section of the Month process There's a long history of the Staff Section of the Month process having less than an ideal amount of participation, and we've been looking at that history lately. Now, we recently made a change to the process, and we're not looking to make another overhaul before we see how that shakes out. We did, however, see an idea in old staff discussion that we plan to follow up on should this recent change not produce the results we hoped it would. In other words, we're going to keep an eye on SSOTM, give this new system time so we can assess it, but we have an alternative plan we will pursue if the results aren't satisfactory.

In Closing

Our vision for next year is not a year of great change, but another year of gradual improvement and continued outreach within the community. We hope to keep the balance we have between workload and the quality and scope of the project, one based on a realistic assessment of what we can ask from our volunteer team of staff and writers. We hope to leverage the 'Shroomfest, our one-on-one outreach, and forums like Rose Garden to make people more aware that writing for The 'Shroom can be a low-stress opportunity to get creative or to share what they are passionate about with the world.

We've had a successful 2020, so, we hope to offer, in conjunction with all of you who make this paper what it is, a successful 2021! Please do ask us any questions or express any concerns or ideas you have, as we want to talk to you and hear from you, those who write for and read this paper. Of course, if we aren't elected, we'll be doing everything we can to ensure this project grows, improves, and has a long life ahead of it.

Debates
Please refer to this thread to read and participate in the debate.

Election Comments
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