CSM Campaigns

Ali, you brought up something I wanted to touch on, actually. And it's best to speak to you as an incumbent CSM in that regard, as you were involved.

TOS-Gate was not resolved. It was back-burner'ed and left in a corner until most people forgot about it. They might have backpedalled on the bonehead statements made by the GM staff early on, but there was no final word, no summation, or finalization.

It was just quitely swept aside and ignored. For goodness sakes the third-to-last post on it was mine, in November.

What are your thoughts on this?

I don't want to steal Ali's thunder here but CSM8 have been interviewed once a month on CZ and Ali has appeared a few times personally. At the start of CSM8's term, I asked if I could interview them once a month and they have kept up to that schedule without any problem with the vast majority actively taking part. And several times, their opinions on what CCP are up have been quite negative.

I know you're asking everyone this but-- should continue as present, or increase, seeing as how I'm already on the CSM . I'll be honest-- I don't log on as much as I used to, but that's if anything improved of late.


So, I'm going to sort of sum up a conversation we had on jabber here so everyone else can read it. Xander's right: we were on CZ, and I did use TheMittani.com as a platform for CSM stuff occasionally. We also started http://csm8.org, whose main purpose ended up being "here's a place to read all the blogs in one place." Ripard wrote weekly updates, and while the occasional lack of content was frustrating to some, they were consistently in one place and readable.

We are talking about perhaps condensing these into monthly updates, similar to the ones TMC runs about other areas. This could be good-- there *are* improvements CSM 9 can make (and I would like to help them make) to the communication process. It'd be great to talk more clearly about the stuff we're working on or frustrated about, although by necessity some of it ends up being very very vague ("today I was annoyed because it felt like we were going in circles about a thing, and I really do think it should be changed before release").

CSM should have its own clear communications outside of the minutes, and institutionalizing this and making it awesome is a good goal for CSM 9. CSM 8 has in a lot of ways taken the work CSM 7 did in setting up a CSM/CCP relationship and run with it: CCP has been cutting us in on a lot more, even some surprising stuff, across a lot of different levels. We've been working with a lot more teams, and we've had direct influence and effects on various aspects of development. The stakeholder system has been working well. All that's great, and now we should be bringing that back to the community better.

One specific idea I had: create a little graph app that shows CSMs self-reporting "I meaningfully interacted with CCP over a feature". CSMs push butan to sign off, and you get a nice little scrolling ticker of CSM activity, so you can see the ebbs and flows of days and release cycles.

Wrong: No clear central location / not enough attention on csm8.org. Right: we did do it a lot, just didn't advertise it as broadly.

I talked about some of this earlier: "Failing: Collectively, probably the speed/visibility of our response on the Somer controversy? We responded quickly in private, and several CSMs were publicly posting things about it, but there was less of a Unified Statement Thing the way there was with the TOS response."

Accomplishment: Ugh I have to pick one. SMA loot drop was pretty good, though, and then getting the whole thing un-NDA'd so we could showcase how it works when ~the system works~.


This is the hardest out of the set. I still really love my old corp, Valkyries of Night, which contains a lot of smart people with whom I "grew up" in the game. Several are also RL friends, so they're probably the ones I talk to about the CSM the most. Brave Newbies, going from zero to a huge and wildly successful organization, just absolutely blows me away, especially in that they've got the whole classy cultural thing going on.

I was "social director" for my college job? In seriousness, most of my experience with communities comes from in-game ones. Obviously, I've served out 3/4 of a year on CSM 8, but back in the day in WoW I had the really bright idea to start a coalition of smaller/more casual guilds to run Molten Core content, and sorted out all the fighting cats stuff therein (it was a trainwreck we were scrubs). I've learned to do groups of people there, and real-life social skills I just happened to pick up at some point. Communications I've been learning as I go, and I think I've gotten better at it as the term has continued on.

Hi ali was just wondering if you could get round to answering my question , its been over a week now.

Of course you're not stealing her thunder. I was just asking her the same question I've been asking most CSM candidates etc.

This was answered a fair bit back but I wanted to chime in and say that Ali got this way all the time in discussions, something I say in the best way possible - if anything the reply here is a very concise one that hardly scratches the surface. If you're looking for someone to mind the interests of NRDS on the CSM, Ali's your person.

We're significantly further along in the process than we were two months after the summer summit :P I'm going to push for ASAP still; we've got a lot of stuff back from CCP/revised a lot so far, but waiting on some CCP stuff and then a final back-and-forth of edits.

I've been a lot more, well, nagtastic this go 'round, so I've got a better sense for when things are coming and am following the process more closely.


I'm going to defer my answer to this to closer to the election itself-- it's a very wide field, I want to make sure everyone I like gets their passports in and all that, and I have like three hard drives' worth of interviews to listen to.

CSM9 Candidate Interview: Ali Aras
http://www.capstable.net/2014/03/14/csm9aliaras

I have to echo James, although I'm sure he is further in the loop on Ali's performance over this last year. The reason I feel comfortable in supporting Ali is that she is so active in this community, extremely vocal, and dedicated to bettering the community in as transparent a fashion as possible.

I have had the opportunity to observe her performance over the last year, read updates, listen to her community involvement, and as a wormhole resident, I am so impressed with her ability to take time and reach out to the various communities. Ali, I still need to get you over to RCC comms to introduce the guys to who I hope can chair this next CSM, hopefully with me serving along side, but rest assured, that I will have you on my ballot and all my recommendation shy of the wormhole candidates :)

Best of luck!

I would hate to inflict another year of CSMing on anyone, but the many endorsements of Ali support my general impressions of good sense and dedication. Ali will get votes from all my accounts...and my deep and abiding sympathy.