The Future of Outpost10f
Jan 17, 02:04 by Andrew
DON’T PANIC
Changes are in the works here at the Outpost, as many of you who have been following the Updates are well aware. What no one but the Executive Council has known, however, is just how far reaching those changes will be as we proceed with what Iain has affectionately dubbed the “Outpost10f Reboot.”
We’re taking advantage of the reboot to completely redesign and rework several key parts of the Outpost in an effort to streamline the old girl and help her take the first steps into a Web 2.0 dominated Internet. At Iain’s suggestion, and everyone knows he is a long-textblock Jedi Master, I have broken this up into handy bullet points for easier reading.
1. Chat Consolidation
The biggest change is also a simple change. We will be consolidating all of the current chat rooms into one main room and getting rid of all of the auxiliary rooms. Think of it as the Outpost chat plus. This single room will feature different chat tops based on what genre affiliation you choose in your profile and will initially feature the old chat rooms you have come to know and love over the years.
2. New Genres
We won’t be stopping there, however. Over time we will be adding new genres that Outpost members can choose to affiliate themselves with along with new chat tops and new ranks to go with it. All of these new genres will still be feeding into the same main chat room, but the individual user’s experience will vary based on their personal preference.
This also means that the three genre system that has dominated at the Outpost for the past few years will be done away with as genre affiliation becomes a less important aspect of the Outpost experience. Currently an affiliation change involves contacting your Sector Commander and asking them to flip a switch, but under the new system a genre affiliation change will be as easy as picking an option from a list in your profile. The old system of Sector Commanders and Deputy Sector Commanders will also be removed, though there will still be a small team occupying the same role that the SCs and DSCs currently fill along with Iain and I providing leadership on the Executive Council.
The system of multiple chats just isn’t working anymore. There was a time when the Outpost was still new, Star Trek and Star Wars were at the peak of their popularity, and there were enough chatters to keep both main rooms full. These days, however, most people chat in one room regardless of their genre affiliation and are more interested in chatting with friends than they are in the window dressing on their room of choice. One room will eliminate the silly choice between various rooms as well as keep the chat more active for people who are coming to the Outpost for the first time.
3. The End of Departments
The second big change will be coming to departments. Right now the departmental system is old, bloated, and broken. The system just isn’t working. There was a time when departments provided a great opportunity for people who wanted to contribute to the community, but these days there are a few active individuals and teams who are pulling the weight for their entire department while the rosters sit full of chatters who have long since moved on from the Outpost and redundant management positions.
We thought long and hard about what to do to fix the departments in the reboot. Iain and I even got started on departmental “repairs” at one point before realizing that restructuring the departments one by one would be a nightmare since we were just reorganizing people into other departments that would themselves be getting restructured, creating an endless and neverending loop of fixes that didn’t fix anything.
So rather than try to “fix” the departments one by one, we’ve decided to just dissolve all of the existing departments and refocus our efforts around small teams. The departments might have been an effective management structure at some point in time, though I can remember people complaining about how broken the system was as far back as early 2002 when I started working in Entertainment.
What’s clear is that the department structure isn’t working today. With that in mind we’re making individual teams the organizational unit of the future at Outpost10f. Teams that are currently working well will be reorganized after the server transfer and continue their business as usual. Some teams will continue as-is, some might be consolidated with other groups, and some will be put on hold while we come up with a few new projects for the new Outpost. Also, unfortunately, a lot of the inactive old teams and departments will close their doors for good.
We will be contacting the Team Leaders for the groups that will remain active once the server transfer has taken place. We hope that this downsizing will serve to streamline the Outpost as well as free up promising individuals to tackle new and exciting projects. These are major changes to the Outpost, but drastic is what is needed at this point to get rid of a decade of dead weight that has been holding the Outpost back.
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