SALT News: Merger Discussion

I've already contacted most of SALT about this, but on the off chance I've missed someone (sorry), here's a quick run down and a link towards relevant reading material.

Essentially, there has been a proposal towards merging SALT and TWE, or Train-Wreck Explorers. The actual proposal from TWE is placed below. Your opinion on how we respond to this should be posted below; I would also be grateful if we could avoid trying to convince or sway other people's opinions.

A few members mentioned that they weren't sure what, exactly, the TWE are. The link on their name takes you to the group, where you should be able to gather an opinion on them.

I would like to stress that this has been initiated by both groups; this is not a case of one group wanting to take over another. Both Ravens and Csquared08 -- essentially, the (co)founders of both groups -- were involved in this issue's formation.

Here is the proposal itself, as sent from Csquared08 to me:

So, we talked about the whole SALT-TWE merger on Skype for a bit. A lot of ideas were brought up, and just as many were shut down. And nearly every Admin was there, so this is coming from all of us.

Anywho, this is the basic idea of what we're proposing:

We're going to do a full merge with SALT. They're all going to join us and such. We will then have a second group for mentoring purposes run mostly by the old SALT guys and any of our guys that want to try mentoring. There will be clear links and such to the second group.

Now, that's incredibly basic, so I'll expand on that for a bit.

Idea the first: We're going to do a full merge with SALT. They're all going to join us and such.

This is pretty simple. You all find the TWE homepage and click the "Join Group" button. However, joining the group brings no obligations you in of itself. If the SALT Admins/leadership wishes to retain some sense of authority, we'll be fine with adding you as Admins/Mods. We can work the specifics out later, but I figured it was worth mentioning that we're open to that idea. Now, as for other things within the group, there's the matter of being an approved reviewer. Preferably, if we're gonna add you to the list on the front page, we'd like to see how you handle reviewing something truly awful. If that's not something you want to do, that's perfectly fine. Don't worry about it. That's all up to you. Just do keep in mind that we prefer to have our Admins and Mods active within the group in some way.

Idea the second: We will then have a second group for mentoring purposes run mostly by the old SALT guys and any of our guys that want to try mentoring.

Now this is the real meat and potatoes of the proposal.
So, a bit of background first. The TWE is a group that is dedicated to finding the terrible fanfics published on a daily basis and give a review to the author explaining in varying amounts of detail just how bad the story is. Most of the time, the reviews are fairly lengthy and deal with many of the structural problems in the story. From that point, we're done with the story unless the author comes to us asking for additional help. We are not there to mentor the author the whole way through the writing process.

Additionally, there is also this thread in which anyone can ask for a review of their story, good or bad. Now, I honestly have no idea how well this is maintained, which is a problem in of itself. This is one thing we're not particularly organized about, and we should work on that.

That's where you guys and the second group come in. The second group (we'll call it the "Engineers" right now for simplicity's sake; the name, of course, is subject to change pending further discussion) is where we deal with authors like those in the above thread. This is a private group where membership is by invite only. So the goal of the Engineers would be to mentor authors and work with them one-on-one. As far as I know, that's what you guys at SALT try to do.

So that's the key difference here. The Explorers find the fics, the approved reviewers give off a nice long review, and that's that. Interested authors (either from a horrible story we've reviewed or a member looking to improve his story) are then pointed to the Engineers. Somehow, however the management over at the Engineers decides to do it, the interested author expresses his interest to have his story reviewed one-on-one by a mentor. A mentor then claims the author, and the matter is then handled from there by the mentor. Now, obviously there will need to be a way to make sure other mentors know an author is already claimed so that an author isn't flooded with people looking to provide one-on-one help. But that starts to go into how the management of the Engineers decides to run things which isn't exactly relevant to the proposal itself. The kinks can be worked out in due time.

So there's also the matter of how mentors are acquired/approved. Much like our reviewer application thread, we will have a thread where people apply to become a mentor (and thus join the Engineers as well. Remember, that's a private group that's invite-only so that only approved mentors are there and maybe one or two guys for group management purposes, like me). However, unlike our reviewer application thread, the mentor approval process will be much more strict. Only the best of the best will be approved (I imagine one of you guys will do the approving).

Of course, picking up an author is entirely up to each individual mentor. If one mentor doesn't want to deal with a particular subject, then he/she can just as easily let another mentor take care of it. But I digress. These are all details that can be dealt with later. The point is, mentors have a choice in who and what they take on as "students."

So if all of that makes sense, you guys at SALT who don't want to deal terrible train wrecks don't have to. You can keep doing what you're doing, but in what is hopefully a more organized and streamlined manner.

Also, another small matter is sending over some of our Admins over to the Engineers. Just like we're open to the idea of you guys coming in with administrative roles, we trust you'd be open to the same idea. Of course, as I said before, specifics can be worked out later, but I thought this was another thing worth mentioning.

And finally, idea the third: There will be clear links and such to the second group.

This is quite simple. To make things easy for everyone, there will be a clearly marked mentor application thread. There will also be a thread with a link to the Engineers that explains just exactly what's going on with the engineers. In case you haven't noticed, we have a nice big, bold, blue link on the front page to a "Required Reading" thread with links to lots of things every Explorer should at least be aware of. This is our solution to the lack of stickies and should hopefully be adequate in making members aware of the Engineers and the services they provide.

As far as I can tell, this covers all aspects of the proposal and should make things fairly clear on what we're looking for in a possible merger.

Cheers!

Opinions below, please. I will probably be a bit delayed on mine.