The 'Shroom talk:Issue 177/Director Election

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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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WAAH! *ahem* I mean… Hello there, folks!

My name is (you may also know me as NS), I am the current Statistics Manager of The 'Shroom, and I am joined today by my running mate,. We are here today to let you know of our intention of running for the position of Director and Sub-Director of The 'Shroom for the upcoming 2022 term.

My motivation for running for the position of Director of The 'Shroom mainly comes from the passion that I have for our community newspaper. I started writing for it in Issue 106 way back in January 2016, and since then, I became a member of the Core 'Shroom Staff as the Statistics Manager during the 2018 term. As the Statistics Manager, my main job is mainly to be in charge of the application process, updating our historical spreadsheets (keeping records of our writers, staffers, and sections of the month), and leading our End-of-the-Year Awards (serves to honor our writers, staff, and any contributors for their help in maintaining The 'Shroom). However, my contribution to the newspaper did not stop there. I participated in several projects by giving in inputs, and helping in improving the newspaper. Some of them included a revision of our sign up page, such as including example sections, providing our potential writers with a general idea of what we can typically found in our teams. Another one of them is the revision of Pipe Plaza, providing inputs in order to expand its coverage in making it a more informative and factual team outside the wiki and community margin, which was also one of my campaign plan during last year's election. One of my biggest contributions to the newspaper is possibly the creation of the 'Shroomfest as a concept, in order to expand our interaction with the MarioWiki community.

I am still as passionate as ever for our community newspaper, and that is why I would like to have the opportunity of becoming the 'Shroom's next Director. This year, I am running with Waluigi Time, who is candidate for the position of Sub-Director. Waluigi Time has a great deal of experiences, has proven being a trustworthy user with whom I also have the privilege of having a great relationship with in this community. I am confident that he will be a reliable Sub-Director for the newspaper, and ultimately, a wonderful addition to the Core 'Shroom Staff.

Below, you will find our experiences, our schedules, and our plan with several ideas of what we would like to bring for the next term if we are elected, but first allow me to turn it over to Waluigi Time!

Expecting someone else? Well, I don't know why you would be since Ninja Squid introduced me. Anyway, hey, I'm Waluigi Time, or just WT for short, and I'm running as Ninja Squid's Sub-Director! I'm excited to run for the Sub-Director position because I love The 'Shroom (if you didn't know already), both for the opportunity to get to write 'Shroom sections and use it as a creative outlet, and also to get to read what the other members of the community come up with every months. So being able to join the staff and help actually run the paper feels like I'm giving back to it in a way.

As for relevant experience, I started writing for The 'Shroom in Issue 166, and as of this issue I'm now writing five ongoing sections and haven't missed an issue yet! I've also been part of the wiki staff for a little over a year, first as a patroller and currently an administrator, and I'm a member of the Poll Committee. I think my experience in these positions, including being used to working with other users here and being able to take and provide constructive criticism, will help me to be a good Sub-Director.

We've got several great ideas that I'm confident will be fun for the community and will make writing for The 'Shroom an even better experience, and I'm thrilled and honored to be working with Ninja Squid on this. That's about all I have to say, so I'll hand it back over to Ninja Squid now to talk about our campaign plans.

Experiences Before presenting our plan for the 2022 term, we would like to present you our experiences as community members.

Ninja Squid
 * Statistics Manager of The 'Shroom (Issue 131-present)
 * Writer of The 'Shroom (Current sections: The Odyssey of a Squid and Hiding Koopa)
 * Tenth Poll Committee chairperson (2019-2020)
 * Seventh, Eighth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Poll Committees member (2016-2018, 2020-present)
 * 'Shroomfest Manager (2020-2021)
 * Awards Committee Member (2021)
 * Rogues in Rogueport Mafia Game Host
 * Ultimate Location Battle Co-host

Waluigi Time
 * Writer of The 'Shroom (Current sections: Mushroom Kingdom Smackdown, Shmaluigi, Private Investigator, Waluigi Time Comic, To Infinity and Beyond and Consumer Corner)
 * Super Mario Wiki Patroller (November 24, 2020-August 24, 2021)
 * Super Mario Wiki Administrator (August 24, 2021-present)
 * Twelfth Poll Committee member (2020-present)
 * Waluigi Time Cereal Mafia Game Host

Schedules This is our proposed schedule for the 2022 term:

The beginning of our term is going to be pretty smoothly, allowing us getting more comfortable with our newer positions, and the inner-workings. Once the first issue of our term is released (Issue 179 in February 2022), we would like to host a meeting with our staff mates in order to express our vision for the term, and hearing feedbacks and ideas, as inputs from staffers is important for the health of a project such as this one. We will also like to start brainstorming ideas of what kind of commemoration we could be doing for Yoshi876, who will be reaching 100 issues in the position of Spotlight Manager during Issue 181 in April. The concern here is how the placement of this issue is very close to the beginning of our term, but taking in consideration how much time and effort he placed in this community newspaper, it is our duty to commemorate him in some way by giving our token of thanks for his wonderful support. For the record, Yoshi876 is currently the Spotlight Manager, has held the position of Pipe Plaza Director, and holds the record for the most section written in Pipe Plaza, Strategy Wing, and for the entire history of the newspaper (128, 115, and 734 sections respectively); the shear amount of workload he did is immense!

This year, we intend in keeping the tradition of having two special issues. A summer special, and a holiday special, which will be held during Issue 183 for the Summer Special (June 2022), and Issue 189 for the Holiday Special (December 2022). We believe this format has worked well over the past years, and we do not believe it is necessary to provide any alterations to that matter.

For our Summer Special, we will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Super Mario Sunshine, a perfect suit for the Summer Special, given the summer vibes emanating from that game (after all, Mario was supposed to be in a vacation in that game, well… was supposed because yeah). Time to celebrate the beloved cast of characters that was introduced in that game, some of them even becoming recurring characters, such as Piantas, Nokis, Bowser Jr., F.L.U.D.D., Petey Piranha, Toadsworth, or even awesome locations such as Delfino Plaza! If this is not enough coverage for you, don't worry, as we do intend in opening this issue to a wide variety of gaming content as well that gives off some cool summer vibes. Under the cover of Let the Sun Shine!, we intend in celebrating the hottest of seasons the best way we can, so make sure to bring your sunglasses, and solar cream, because this will be a joyful issue coming in!

December's issue will be all about racing games, as we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the popular Mario Kart series and its legacy in the racing game genre. Again, as we wish to be less restrictive and allow a greater coverage for our special issues, we opted to cover to entire racing games genre such as Nintendo's Mario Kart and F-Zero series, or from other game developers and editors, such as Forza, Crash Team Racing, and Chocobo GP. This is to allow a greater diversity of possible sections to our special issue, to celebrate racing games as a whole, but also to YOU the writer to enjoy writing a section about YOUR favorite racing game. Let's accelerate to the first place, because it is all about speed here. Just make sure to watch out for the spiny shells…

This year, we also intend to plan several community activities since it is important for us to interact with community members and, as the last years as shown, community interaction is an essential ingredient for the success of the newspaper that as help us strengthen our family of writers. This is why we wish to continue in this direction by building on the foundations of the last two years. That being said, this year, we are planning to hold two 'Shroomfests, both for the special issues. As you can see, it is two less than the last two years. The reason for why we decided to go this way is to answer the concerns over the workload of holding four 'Shroomfest in a year, but also to allow us more time to host a greater diversity of activities. These activities are even in development as we speak; one we are working closely with and  based on strategy gameplay elements, and another one in company of fellow community member  that is mafia-related. We are thrilled at the opportunity of hosting such games jointly with the community newspaper. As you may notice however, these activities aren't currently displayed on our calendar at the moment, as we feel like it would be better for us and the entire team to hold these activities when we think is the right time, having more than enough development time to fully flesh out our gameplay ideas, rather than sticking to strict deadlines.

We are also considering smaller-scale activities similarly to Ultimate Location Battle, Photo Contest, and Art Gallery, which will help to diversify the offer as well. We are definitely having fun with brainstorming exciting ideas that you may like too!

If there is a word that can describe our 2022 calendar, that would be fun. We want community members to have fun writing for the newspaper, fun partaking in our activities, and fun interacting with the community. We also wish to have fun leading this community project with our staff mates, and have fun developing new ideas that will enhance the newspaper to new ground. Therefore, let's have fun in 2022!

Plans Plan to increase the newspaper's audience During our term, we would like to experiment with a plan to increase the audience to the community newspaper. By that, we mean both readers and writers. Such ideas include experimenting with our outreach on Social Medias, such as our Twitter account and NIWA channels. We know from past years that reaching an audience with our Twitter account has proven not to work as desired. However, we would like to give it a shot by working on some form of interactions that could be possible with it, such as with fun polls or with events that can be workable on a Social Media outlook. We would also like to collaborate with the MarioWiki Staff for helping us promoting the community newspaper on their Twitter account, and with NIWA mods and representatives regarding what can be possible to advertise on their channels.

As proven in the past, we had some outsiders both on NIWA who demonstrated interest with The 'Shroom and Twitter was also used to highlight winstein's Palette Swap section Drawn and Pressed (done by Critic Corner Director, Anton). We think these are few ideas of what could possibly be done for promoting the community newspaper with NIWA and Twitter to some extent.

However, we are not planning to make this a major focus where we will spend a lot of time and resources, as we instead, wish to experiment on what can be done and be cautious by the usefulness that it could bring us. Of course, we are not expecting the ratio of social media outreach to be massive.

If we conclude that this project is not worth keeping our efforts on it, we will simply drop pursuing with this project, because as we said, this will be something that we simply wish to experiment. Take note that we are NOT planning to open a Social Media Manager position. We do not feel there is a necessity for it, and we think the Core 'Shroom Staff in its current form can easily make decisions regarding this.

Expand and improve writers' outreach Last year, the staff had received a suggestion by regarding the possible creation of a separate sub-board section for writers of The 'Shroom who have a thread in the forum pertaining to their sections. As you may remember, this was also a proposed plan for our campaign last year.

During our brainstorming sessions and thinking on the possibility on bringing this idea back, we noticed and received as info that the concerns about this idea was the low amount of threads dedicated to 'Shroom sections, and that the Fan Creations board might had a higher traffic than the 'Shroom board. Thinking on it again, we thought that overall, it might be better to have everything pertaining to The 'Shroom easily findable into one place, rather than split everywhere into the forum. Do you want to find something related about the newspaper or simply interact with the writers regarding their sections? Go the 'Shroom board! You will find everything you need to know about the latest happenings of the newspaper, there.

Gauge feedbacks and expand the 'Shroom's outreach on the wiki Something we would be interested to try is to expand our outreach with the wiki audience of the community, which require us to find different ways to interact with them. An idea we have is to go through with a survey or polls to get some more general feedbacks on The 'Shroom.

The questions will mainly aimed towards them and to our "casual" readers of the newspaper. For example, we will be asking how did you find the 'Shroom, what would you like to see from the newspaper, and what is your favorite part of the newspaper. We are also interested in asking to what extent they are involved with the newspaper (i.e. do they vote for SOTM, vote for ‘Shroomfest, etc.) to have an idea of the extent they are involved in the more interactive parts of the community newspaper.

This will serve for us as a means to get more general feedbacks, as we don't often get feedbacks from casual readers as most discussions happens on the forum or on Discord for example, where some of our readers may not necessarily be in these sectors.

Our plan is doing this as sooner as possible during the term, likely around February and April, allowing us to gather feedbacks, and help us shape what will be good to consider for the remainder of our term.

Standardize the process of sending deadlines A plan we have for this year is to standardize the way of sending deadlines. By that, we mean having a goal in mind of when we are expecting our team directors to be sending deadlines to the writers. The main objective here is to prevent deadlines from being sent too late, and to provide a better communication with the writers.

Now, before going further, we wish to clarify something for the team directors especially. This is not a policy and by no mean, we are intending on making this a strict procedure. We fully understand that we cannot be fully expecting every team directors to be following a rigid process and working on the same time frame, has this will be something unrealistic to apply. There is a need to be flexible, and this should be fully be expected from us! The only reason we want to consider this as a goal is to strengthen communications between the Director/Sub-Director and the team directors, and between the team directors and writers.

For example, our method here will be to approach the team directors individually on the Wednesday the week prior to the release of an issue, asking for an ETA on when your sub-team will be ready (which is something that is already done right now), if you have sent deadlines (when you'll be planning on doing it), and if you need any help from us. This will help us keeping an important level of awareness of how things are going as we are preparing new issues, and prevent cases where writers were not made aware of deadlines.

Communication is important for a project such as The 'Shroom, and for this method to work, there must also be a good level of communication from the Directors. We want to make this clear here: We do intend on making this one of the most important expectations of us as Director/Sub-Director. Preventing miscommunications or a lack of it will only be beneficial for everyone involved.

Creation of a Welcome policy We plan on making this in effect as we enter in office, as we want to aim at making to newspaper more welcoming by making our new writers comfortable when they start writing for the newspaper.

When a new writer is joining the paper, we want the team directors to send them a message to welcome them to their team, explaining how reminders and deadlines are working, and ask them where they wish to get these reminders. We would also like to push this idea further, and making sure that our team directors to acknowledge when continuing sections get submitted, allowing our writers to know they were rightfully received.

The main goal with this policy is to help improving communication between our applicants and team directors, making our writers more comfortable with who they are in contact with, and preventing lack of communications such as writers not being very much aware if their sections was received. We also want our writers to feel like what they are doing is worth the time and what they do is recognized. The 'Shroom needs to be as welcoming as possible, so we wish to push its welcoming nature further by making this an expectation from our team directors. After all, communication is an important ingredient for the success of a community project.

Continue our collaboration with Poll Committee and Awards Committee As you can see from our calendar, we wish to continue our current collaboration with the Awards Committee and Poll Committee during our tenure as Director and Sub-Director. It is important to continue having this strong relationship with other sectors of the MarioWiki community, therefore, you can expect from both of us that The 'Shroom will keep collaborating with the Awards Committee and Poll Committee with great enthusiasm!

Conclusion There is still many things that can be done with The 'Shroom, and when we say that, we mean by the creation of fun interactions with our community members, and by improving its quality of life features that can ease our writers and staffers. With our fair share of experiences with the community, we wish and believe we are able to deliver a wonderful year for the newspaper, and we are looking at the opportunity of leading this project with great enthusiasm.

Allow us to thank you so much for considering our campaign, and we hope you will be looking forward to this election and help us shape the future of this newspaper as well! If you have any questions, ideas, or concerns, please communicate with us. We would be delighted to hear from you of what do you think would be great to build an awesome year for the newspaper.

Before concluding, we would like to give credits where due, and especially thank Goombuigi who was a great partner through this process, and whose contribution to this campaign has been incredibly vital and helpful. Thank you Goombuigi!

In the meantime, see you around!

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