(Tim Greenlaw co-authored this update)

    At the beginning of July we got a dire message from our web guru stating that our plans to build the site of our dreams would require some serious cash coming in - much more, in fact, than we had anticipated.  It seems there are some possibilities, but there is a lot of work between here and there. This note to the community is to give an up-date on what we are thinking about and some of the issues we have faced so far in the process.  This is also for us to stay grounded and make sure that we are not losing sight of the big picture while working out the little details.  What follows will be some of the issues we have faced and solutions we see so far. 

Identifying the Obstacles

    At Writ Summit 2008, the current staff and the original founders met to discuss the direction of the site.  Sarah expressed some serious concerns that the collapse of the current infrastructure is imminent, and that if we can’t get this going in the right direction, the workshop will die. She told us a few possible scenarios that could follow, and one was that The WritOracle would become a static memorial to the dream of an interactive writing community that strove to bring quality creative writing out from the walls of universities and into the world for everyone with an idea and a keyboard.

      Obviously, that’s wasn’t our first choice of the possible outcomes.  Of all the options discussed, the one that had the best combination of philosophy and feasibility was a non-profit.  We decided to try to incorporate as a non-profit organization to keep the site going.  The not-for-profit incarnation of the site may be the last chance,  but it might also be our best chance.  It would not put us in a position where we would be beholden to other financial interests, ones that would likely jeopardize the integrity of the site - art, after all, is rarely profitable.  It offers us several financial incentives, including tax-exempt status, and opens us up to a lot of potential money available in the form of grants.  Joe and Tim took up the task of researching the steps to take to formalize the organization as a legally-recognized tax-exempt non-profit, and to find grants that might be available to us once we’re an official non-profit organization. 

Plans

    As we work through this process we are using the Writ Summit notes as our guide and are trying to stay true to what we all want from this site, and in listening to our members, it sounds like they want the same things, too.   The heart of the site is the workshop, and if we can get it right, all of the other goals for the site’s growth and expansion will evolve naturally around it.  We’ve been noticing for months that things on the workshop have been slowing down, and we began to identify concrete problems in April.  In May we met to discuss them, and this summer has been a race to get ahead of the curve again before we lose our most loyal members.

    The time-line for building the organizational structure is looking like two to three months to write and submit paperwork to the government.  Once that happens, there will be a new-look temporary site that will attempt to give some new energy to the community.  We will also begin to solicit micro-donations from the community.   Besides giving us a head-start on fund-raising, it shows other prospective donors that we’re serious and that other people believe in us.  The winter will be used for grant research and exploring funding.  Hopefully by March we will be ready to apply for a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which can fund an infrastructure of the site that will last. 

Staff

    Throughout this we have referred to core staff.  We wanted people to know who ‘we’ refers to, and who you can complain to.  The attendees of the Writ Summit were Julie K, Joe, Jeremiah, Julian, Sarah, and Tim. If you’re curious about who we are, shoot us an email, and we’ll fill you in on everything you ever wanted to know about the history of The Writ and the future of the community. Right now if you have any input about the site, or ideas of where we could get $20-50,000 to keep the site going, the two people you should contact are Joe Gilbert: joe@thewrit.org, or Tim Greenlaw: timgreenlaw@gmail.com. 

    If anyone has any concerns about what we are up to, or wants any of the details/thinking behind what we are doing, please let us know.  We want to do this right, and are taking our time to give the community the best opportunity to not only survive, but thrive well beyond any of us.

The writ is refocusing its collective energy to become a more complete go-to for new writers. To do this we need every one’s help!

If you have been on the writ for a while you’ll have noticed the “challenges” section on your homepage. Throughout the years challenges have been varied, from “help name the writ” to “write a piece about change.” The responses always vary from poignant to hilarious. All in all it’s a way to be more involved in the shaping and community of the Writ as a whole!

Currently we have some CRUCIAL challenges for young and old, new and seasoned.

First is the Resource Library Project. I want to call special attention to this because I have found that to be part of the greater online writing community you need to be involved in the discussions, news, and writing of more than just the Writ.  This is the chance to let the writers on the Writ who is putting out great online journals, which print journals you enjoy, your sources for writing news and even great articles that you feel everyone should read.  We want to hear your voice!

Secondly, to get a better feel for what may have been missed by those were gone and/or to get some more acclaim for some of the “golden oldies” you can submit Writ pieces to the “That which needs to be read” challenge.  It’s always good to show your successes and this is a great way to show the best of the Writ.

Your input is so important to making this a better community and resource for new AND established writers, so get on out there and challenge yourself!

Hi Everyone,

If you  tried to access The Writ this morning, you may have been surprised to learn that we destroyed the workshop in favor of becoming a PayPal phishing site.  Unforunately, this strategic business move (that I’m proud to say I had absolutely nothing to do with) failed to produce revenue for The Writ staff, and we have shut the operation down.  You’ll have to take your paypal payments over to PayPal.com from now on.

No, but seriously… some evil fingers slithered into our site through an unsecured script (my money is on that old forum, and all traces of it have now been removed from the system), and wreaked some havoc on us.  We’ve 80% recovered, but I could use your help tracking down that last 20%.

If anything is still broken, please comment and tell me about it so I can try to track down the unbroken files.

Thanks!

Sarah

Hey WRIToricians! We’re now accepting submissions for the Spring 2008 edition of WRIToracle! Here’s how to put your writing in front of our editors’ eyes:

1. Log into My Writ (or register for an account if you’re new).
2. Choose Add Writing from the My Writing menu.
3. Follow the instructions there to add your latest and greatest writing to the workshop.
4. Choose Submit for Issue from the My Writing menu.
5. Select your two best pieces of work from the workshop.
   
6. Click Submit.

Your pieces will be reviewed by our editing staff and considered for the next issue of WRIToracle.

Please note that we only consider pieces of writing that have been added to the workshop and marked as submissions. We’ve also emptied the inbox of past submissions, so your only competition is the people who submit their work now.

If you have any questions about the upcoming issue or would like to help with it, please contact JulieK at juliek at thewrit dot org.

Attention WRIToricians! We have a new fearless leader! JulieK has generously (and valiantly) stepped up to help us navigate this transitional period by overseeing the next issue of WRIToracle.

Do you remember JulieK?

Quick Writstory lesson: Way way back in the day, when we were receiving submissions via email and editing by candlight with stacks of paper and glasses of Two Buck Chuck, we had this grand idea that if we could round up some money, maybe we could pay a programmer to build us a writing workshop, so people could upload their own writing and comment on each others’ work.

We all scratched our heads and said aloud, “But who will give us money?”

Then JulieK entered the picture and said, “Oh, I can get that for you!” You see, JulieK was in charge of the Student Press Organization at the University of New Hampshire, and she had connections. Several minor battles later, we got funding, and JulieK was designated as our Goddess.

And so, with that in mind, I bring you (drum roll please!) JulieK (with her version of the story)….

hi writ peoples,

i’m julie a/k/a juliek. my involvement with thewrit started when i was doing double duty as the student press organization (spo) director and the business director for aegis (literary magazine) at unh when a group of scraggly writers–chap books in hand–came to me and said, “we have an idea”. i helped the fabulous four to get some funding for the birth of the website and then…i forgot about it! a few years ago i became more involved in the workshop, mostly editing. you may have seen my comments around. now i’m back and in full force as your new editor-in chief!

thewrit has had a few facelifts over the years and its long overdue for a major surgical procedure, so i’m super excited that sarah is again in the picture and blogging a bajillion words a minute, while reciting spoken word out of one side of her mouth and drinking tea from the other, all while she does a tap dance, and fixes the bloopers on thewrit website. yes, she’s just that amazing.

so, as the new editor-in-chief, i’m going to need your help. i’m going to be overseeing the publication portion of thewrit (thewritoracle) and i need writers and editors to work on the next issue. we don’t have any firm publication deadlines right now, but we are definitely looking for ideas for articles, artists/writers to interview, people to write/edit articles, community stories/events, dialectic essays (for the dialectical corner), and any other ideas for articles you want to see in the next issue. so please email me if you have idea or if you want to write or edit. it’s ok if you want to write something, but don’t have an idea or vice versa!

i’m super excited to get this community more connected and expand everything.

any suggestions are more than welcome. we’re blogging about everything here, so leave us comments!

hope to hear from you!

-juliek
juliek@thewrit.org

p.s. the no caps is a style thing–get used to it!

Wow, you guys are coming up with some brilliant ideas! Thank you! This is exactly what I was hoping for!

Except… you feel a little constrained, stuck down there in the comments, don’t you? I’m sorry about that. You can come out now. How about you register and log in and post some new entries, and then other people can comment on them, and then we can really call this a community blog? It sounds like a good idea to me.

I only have two ground rules.

1. This blog is for discussing The Writ from an organizational perspective. Please do not post your creative writing (you can do that here) or any non-Writ-related things (you can do that here).
2. No whining or demanding. Seriously. This is a community of unpaid volunteers, and being a crankypants at us is a really good way to kill our desire to help you with your problem. If the urge to whine or demand is striking, please find a way to rework what you want to say into something respectful and relationship-building. Be creative, offer ideas, listen to responses, and be cooperative — you’ll have much better results.

Right now, anyone can post an entry without moderation. If people start breaking these ground rules, then I will start moderating user accounts and posts. And that will make this a lot less fun, so please don’t do those yucky things. kthx.

So where should you start? Here are some of my ideas…

• If you have an idea about how the site could be cooler, post it to see what other people think of it (if you get a whole bunch of people to agree that it’s brilliant and important, we might find a way to make it happen).
• If you want to get up on a soapbox and pontificate on what The Writ means to you, post it and it may inspire others to contribute their own thoughts on the matter.
• If you have a question, ask it, and someone will answer it. And all the other people who were wondering about the same thing but didn’t have the self-confidence to ask it themselves will silently praise your existence.
• If you’ve seen another site that’s doing something that you think we should or shouldn’t also do, tell us about it!

Hmm… what else could we do with this blog? Maybe you should tell me.

Oh, and posting notes: People tend to read entries that are easy to scan. For maximum impact, use short paragraphs, bulleted lists, and the occasional bold highlights. ALSO: USING ALL CAPS MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE AN ASSHOLE AND WOULD BE CLASSIFIED AS “DEMANDING.” So don’t do that.

Am I forgetting anything?

Alright, so I’ve made a few changes over the last 48 hours (basically, I hit the easy stuff):

• Creating this blog (hey — what do you think of it?)
• Simplifying the homepage
• Removing the Google Ads

Bigger, more system-related things will take a little longer, since there are some things about our content management system that are fundamentally, um, dysfunctional. My working scheme is to migrate the content over to something like Drupal, so it’s connected to a community of developers that is constantly improving the system. But that will take some time and probably cause some hiccups, so I want to make sure we do it right.

Here are some of the things I’m looking at:

• Non-broken email notifications
• The ability to tag/categorize our writing based on what kind of feedback we want on it (via JulieK)
• Sorting tools that reduce workshop clutter and allow readers to focus on the stuff they care about (via JulieK)
• The option to post writing privately so that only a select group of people can see it (because some publishers won’t accept writing that has already been put out there to the public.)
• A branding and design facelift, including the development of a logo

What are your thoughts on these?

What else are you looking at?

Hi! My name’s Sarah. I build websites and I manage projects and I like to write.

A long time ago (four and a half years, actually), I started a website called “The Writ.” Some really nice people pitched in and made it awesome, and it became a beautiful thing.

Then something really unexpected happened: the website became popular. It took on a life of its own with more passion than I ever imagined a website could carry. It was amazing. It was a community. Lots of really, really interesting things happened as the community grew, and I’m honored to have witnessed them. But while all that was happening, my life got complicated, and I couldn’t keep up with the project. Eventually, I had to step away.

Fortunately, my friend and colleague, Julian Esteban Torres had already stepped in by this point to take the reigns, and he did an amazing job. He reinvigorated the community and forced progress on the site development and rallied up support and got the WRIToracle issues publishing again. Let me tell you: the man is a miracle. But then his life got complicated, too, and he had to take a little break.

So I was thinking, since things are quiet around here right now, why don’t we pour ourselves a cup of tea and talk a little about what’s going on? See, I have a little extra time on my hands this year, and I was thinking maybe I’d use it to make the website nicer. But I have to admit, I’ve been kind of out of the loop lately. It’s not my home anymore; it’s your home. And I don’t want to come barging into your home and renovating it without first asking where you want your sofa.

So tell me…

• What do you love about The Writ?
• What do you hate about it?
• What does it mean to you?
• What’s it craving?
• What does it fear?
• What do you want for it?

Please leave a comment below and tell me what you want me to know.

And please also keep an eye on this space. Whenever you leave a comment, you can subscribe to get follow-up comments by email. You can also subscribe to get email updates for new entries.

I want you to know what’s going on. This is for you.