Wyatt’s Wall
Who Are the Staff at Pan Historia?
By Wyatt
I think sometimes we all get a little confused about the different hierarchal positions on the Instant Message Panel so I felt it was time to elaborate and clarify. We do have pages at Pan to explain the different icons but that’s perhaps insufficient to convey the true nature of how Pan Historia operates.
The Publishers at Pan Historia are the site owners (myself, Kat Black, and Fanny Fae). It’s not a promotion or position that can be attained (except perhaps if you wanted to invest than talk to our business manager, Kat). We were the people that originally sat down (or phone conferenced and emailed) and said “we want to build a community site for collaborative fiction writing in the manner of role play which also has room for research, discussion, and play (Reference and Funboards)”. From there we designed and built the site. It took a lot of time and investment on the part of the publishers.
One of the first things we did when setting up our new community was design ‘staff positions’. These roles would be held by regular members of the community and serve two important functions: 1) to facilitate the smooth and friendly operation of the site, welcome new people, help out with technical issues that members are having, mediate, and generally lead activity; 2) to reward the hard work and enthusiasm of members committed to being online at the community for large portions of week and who have proved their abilities, without reward, on the boards.
Originally, besides the publishers, there were two staff positions: Agents and Editors. People tend to view these positions as hierarchal to each other but they were never intended to be. Originally I did the job of an agent on the site (foregoing my real publisher status) in order to create the job description for the position before putting regular site members there. In general agents are there to support the editors in their job and to settle issues much like site cops. If someone registers to Pan and starts IMing everyone with trash talk it’s the job of an agent to bust them and ban them. If there is a flare up in a novel with misunderstandings all around it’s the job of an agent to mediate. If someone violates our privacy policy, or uses copyrighted images without approval… you get it. In addition agents do like to participate in fun activities, as well as do some site administration that requires a certain level of trust; for instance answering feedback, guiding new editors and genies, creating new blogs and novels, etc.
The editor job requires a diverse range of skills as well. They need to meet and greet the cubs, mentor new members, participate in all levels of site activities, and help with questions, particularly HTML related questions about home design and post designs. They should be fully conversant with the whole map of the site so that they can answer questions or guide people to the right answer to the question. They often help run games, special events, or frequently they serve as MOBs for reference books and novels to lend their experience, particularly to new or struggling books. If you need help with something the first person you should go to is an editor. You should never feel like you shouldn’t message an editor if they’re online and not busy. If they’re there they are ready to help you.
The newest position is the Genie. Genies are still finding their feet even after nearly a year of being ‘staff’ but that’s only because the nature of Genres changes in attempt to find the right balance and structure to enhance the site. Originally when genies were created it wasn’t considered a staff position as they just really looked after an informational home page (the genre home) that informed about novels and reference books in the genre. Later on I enhanced the structure in anticipation of the site growing too big for all posts and events to be centralized. The anticipated growth hasn’t happened yet, but the structure is in place.
For each genre (Fantasy, History, Horror, etc) there is now not just the genre home but genre dailies. These dailies contain all the posts from novels and reference books in that genre. That way you can just click the Horror Dailies when you’re feeling bloodthirsty and needing gore and find all the pertinent posts for the day (or hit previous and get the past posts). The genies provide additional content for that page including news and featured characters, novels, etc. They also MOB the appropriate genre Zone. Zones are set up like novels but are basically community centers for their genres. The intention is for a Zone to encourage people to feel part of their genre and want to participate. If you like one horror novel you might like another… it is a good place to recruit writers that like the genre your novel is in, or a good place to chat, play games, or write solo stories that aren’t ready for a novel yet.
