Time to start planning out this fandom grammar community with my trusted fellows. This is the time for you all to weigh in with any thoughts/questions you might have. I'm hoping that hashing this out with the ol' flist will help to iron out all the kinks and start this comm running smoothly.

The Focus
I want to keep this comm primarily focused on fandom, making it a resource for fanfic writers and fandom readers. My inspiration for starting this comm is about 30% just because I'm a grammar nerd and 70% because I'm tired of reading badfic. There's so much fic out there that would be better if people just understood grammar/language.

Does that mean the comm will only be geared to fanfic?
No. It will be geared towards fandom, answering questions about grammar in a fandom context. I do also want this comm to be a resource to help writers gain the knowledge of the tools of the trade.

The Game Plan
There are two types of articles I'd like to see posted by our contributing grammarians.

1. Answers to grammar questions.
2. Features on writing/grammar/language.

1. Answers to grammar questions.
We'll have a post where anyone can ask questions about writing, grammar, or language. My initial plan is to post the answers to grammar questions once a week. The contributors will take turns writing these answers, collaborating as needed.

The answers don't have to be long, but should be as complete as needed. For example, when Roadie asked me about the difference between "fast" and "quick," I focused on them as adjectives and ignored "fast" as a noun. Answer articles only need to answer that specific question.

I'd like to do something like:

• assign questions once a month


• pass out deadlines


• use moderated posting to check for typos

I'm also considering assigning two answer contributors for each week so that if someone falls behind, we'll have a back up planned. This will create a queue that should get us through busy times of the year like Christmas.

ETA 1: I haven't decided how to assign the questions yet. I see three possibilities: first-come basis (where we post all the questions and contributors have to comment), directly assigning one question to each contributor, or giving each contributor a few questions to choose from. Feedback on how that is handled would be great.

2. Features on writing/grammar/language.
Any contributor who wants to write a feature will need to submit a pitch to the moderators, but I'm willing to accept features from anyone. I'm thinking features might be posted twice a month because they might take a bit longer to pull together.

Features should be essays/instructions that go beyond our question base (but they might springboard from a question). I'm envisioning a lot of the fanfic/writing issues to be addressed in the features, also some of our writing tips and pet peeves.

For example: melayneseahawk suggested writing something on drabbling as a writing tool, supercheesegirl mentioned that she's excellent with dialogue, and I'd love to address vague pronoun referents.

Just like the articles for answering questions, the features will be under moderated posting so someone can check for typos, and I'd like to establish a queue so that we have a back up feature ready.

Running Smoothly
If everything runs smoothly on this once-a-week question and twice-a-month feature schedule and everyone is keeping up deadlines, we might move to a more rigorous schedule, but I'd like to start slow and see how it works out.

The Contributors
The following people showed interest in contributing articles:
akasha_lilian
amedia - Confirmed
dunv_i - Declined
green_grrl - Confirmed
katiefoolery - Confirmed
katilara - Confirmed
kay_brooke - Confirmed
lady_ganesh - Confirmed
melayneseahawk - Confirmed
nleseul
rigel_7 - Confirmed
skroberts - Confirmed
sorcha_gaia - Confirmed
supercheesegirl - Confirmed
superhero_specs - Confirmed
theemdash - Confirmed
wiccanslyr

After reading that, please let me know if you are no longer interested in writing articles to answer questions. I need to confirm my stable of contributors so I can create a feasible rotation that doesn't tax anyone. My goal is to make sure no one is overworked.

I'm perfectly willing to work with schedules so if the initial plan for rotation doesn't work and you need to tell me something like, "I can't answer more than one question a month," go ahead. I want to keep everyone happy so we have a large stable of contributors.

Experience
I'm perfectly fine with employing contributors who do not have English degrees or jobs writing/editing (that's why my moderators do have that experience). I will want some kind of statement of your experience to post so that anyone coming to the comm knows that we've got people who know their stuff. Personally, I'm satisfied if that experience is "I've written fanfic for X years and have beta read fic."

We'll come up with a form for the contributors to fill out once I have a firm list of contributors.

If there is ever a concern about a contributor's knowledge/experience, we'll bring the concern to the contributor. I believe that almost everyone on that contributor list will be okay as long as you use resources, including collaboration.

I will have a second community for the moderators and contributors where we can go to help each other out and where you'll be able to go to look up deadlines and assignments. If you contribute to this grammar comm, you must join and either watch or track the moderator/contributor community.

The Moderators
I've got 3 co-mods who have agreed to help with this undertaking: melayneseahawk, supercheesegirl, and lady_ganesh. They all have their major ties in different fandoms and are writers/editors. I'm really excited about having each of them on "permanent" basis.

I wanted to have 4 moderators for this so that everyone can have a small amount of responsibility which would be easy for the other moderators to cover if someone needs to step back due to the ups and downs of real life and other commitments. I'm hoping that this built in support will help keep the comm up to date.

Moderator Responsibilities
The moderators will be responsible for the following tasks:

• gathering questions from the question post


• assigning questions to contributors


• assigning deadlines


• proofing answer articles


• approving feature pitches


• assigning deadlines for features


• proofing features


• tagging


• putting posts in memories

We'll need to figure out how best to organize the tags and memories, but I'm thinking that general topics would be good like "part of speech," "punctuation," "word usage," and then to get more specific like "punctuation:comma," "part of speech:verb," and "word usage:its." Or something like that. I find that having a general term in front of a specific term makes things more findable.

If we wind up with people asking the same questions over and over, we might set up a FAQ that links directly to those common questions.

I'd like to divide the moderator responsibilities like this:
Moderator 1: gathering questions from the question post
Moderator 2: assigning questions to contributors and assigning deadlines
Moderator 3: approving feature pitches and assigning deadlines for features
Moderator 4: tagging and putting posts in memories
Shared: proofing question articles and proofing features

We'll start by sharing pretty much everything while we start up and work out the kinks (because I believe in that whole 'everyone should do every job once' thing), but I think this might be the most sensible division of labor. The only thing I see as problematic is that Moderator 1 might need to assist Moderator 4.

ETA 2: I wound up expounding a bit on the Moderator 2 responsibilities here.

We'll need to talk about how to handle shared responsibilities, if that means a weekly/monthly rotation or if it's just based on who's available. Either way, I'll set up the second community for the moderators and contributors where we can talk about things like this.

The Name
Of course we need a name for the comm, but I also want names for the answer posts and the features but my brainstorming is lacking. So, here's where I really, really need input.

Comm Name
Here are the suggestions we've had so far:
fan_grammary
fandom_grammar
fandom_grammarians
fandom_semantics

Despite possible spelling concerns, I'm leaning towards fandom_grammarians because that really describes the comm correctly.

Answer Articles Name
I have no idea, but it should be simple like "Grammarian's Answer." Unless you think it should just be "Answer: [insert question asked]". Also I was thinking about numbering the answers, so it would be "Answer 1: What is the difference between 'sick' and 'ill'?"

Features Name
Same issue as with the question articles. I'm kind of leaning towards "Feature #: [title of feature]" because I'm not sure we'll come up with a title to be all-inclusive. So, we might have "Feature 1: Looking for a Referent" or whatever.

The Feedback
Help me out by leaving some feedback and your thoughts on my lingering questions.

1. Should the grammar questions coming in be screened in case anyone wants to be anonymous?
I'd like to credit people for their questions, but maybe we'd get some people who would prefer to be anon. *shrug* Regardless, I want to encourage them to ask the questions with their lj so we can reply back to them, directing them to the post with the answer.

2. What the heck should this comm be named? And what about the articles/features?

3. Are you still interested in being a contributor? Do you now have interest now that so much has been spelled out?

4. Does anyone know if moderated posting will automatically back date or will the post appear as a new post?
I couldn't find any info on this in the faq and I'm preforming an experiment with a closed comm I own now, but if someone already knows the answer to this question it would make my experiment go a lot faster. ;)

5. Please let me know if you have any recommendations or see potential problems.

6. Let me know if you have any questions because some of this will go up in the userinfo/intro post and I want to have everything spelled out as plainly as possible.