So, this is less PPC-focused and more we-should-write-goodfic! focused. My idea is this: A bunch of fanfic cowrites. Essentially, each Boarder who wants to partake puts their name on a list, along with their top three or four fandoms (probably not more than that) Then, they're randomly matched up with another Boarder, with no fandoms in common, and then they write a crossover fic between the two canons. Or, you could suggest a fandom to crossover with, so long as you don't know much about it other than it looks cool. It'd be a good way both to introduce people to new canons, and help Boarders have fun with people they don't normally write with.

For example, I'd like to see, say a Nanoha/Sherlock crossover. Maybe Sherlock starts poking at a Lost Logia that's been causing inexplicable (ie magical) murders around town, and Fate, the Enforcer who has to deal with the Logia, has to deal with it and him.

I'm very, very sorry to see PC go, and I hope he knows he'll be missed - very much so. (I'm not good at goodbyes. I tend to put them off until the very last. It's not... a lack of empathy.) But I'm agreeing with Neshomeh that a big attempt to Change Everything is not what we need, and with Data that... well, a big attempt to Change Everything is not what we need.

But the metaphor here that I'm looking for is similar to Phil Plait's (and others') commentary on the Race To The Moon. If our focus is one big push, it's a huge... well, push, that quickly peters out, trails off, and gets forgotten about. As said above/below-thread, this has happened multiple times - usually either in the wake of Drama or Exit, or sometimes Dramatic Exits. But adding mods isn't going to prevent people from leaving - or rather, it may prevent some people from leaving, while pushing others towards leaving. (Personally, I should note this is a sore spot for me; last time I tried to push for mod-reform, someone left as a result of that.) I don't want to see that happen again.

I'd also say that putting up with imperfections goes on forever. We're human - we are imperfect. All of our efforts will be flawed, even those with the greatest intentions. We cannot be a community of humans and provide everyone with exactly what they want/need in a community. It's just not possible. I think what we've achieved here, though, is pretty cool. I'm biased, obviously, and I do think we could (as always) stand to improve. But as Huinesoron and Neshomeh have said, the way to do that is to work towards being a better community ourselves - the PPC Community^TM is a useful abstraction, but it's made up of humans - of us, to be specific - and I think it helps to remember that.

I don't see what the big deal is, really. Not that I'm opposed to people doing things, but why make it this big important "oh we need to do something new to save the community" thing. As Nesh points out, we've done this a dozen times before. Things come of it, sometimes, but they don't last, which is okay, because it doesn't really matter. People are going to leave eventually anyway, and new people will join, people will stay in touch with the friends they've made and old people will come back, even if it's just for a while. It's how communities work. Why not just let stuff like crossovers and RP happen naturally, instead of having this big push for it?

If people want to see things done, instead of going "Hey, we should do something, maybe x?" and having an endless conversation, why not just /do/ it?
You wanna see more RP? Make one, then. Set it up on the other board, advertise it here, and have at it.
Want to see more crossovers? Best way to do that is to partner up with people and write really good crossovers so that other people will get interested.
Want to see more stuff that falls outside of the usual mission format? Write it and they will come!

I guess what I'm trying to say is chill, folks. It'll be alright. We don't need to make it a huge issue every time someone leaves.

Because there are so many ideas here, I'm putting together a list. If anyone see's anything I missed, please add it. If you support an idea that's on there, say so. And if you have an idea that isn't on there, please add it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p3nOxd5DW9oWpkzdKxqMxB9dSzBkbFB7w3OML3WjKOM/edit

(Also, if anyone has a better way to organize the list, pleeeaaaassseee use it! It's kind of a mess...)

What can you—the person reading this right now—what can you do to make the PPC a better place?

'Cause I'm here to tell you, we've done this song and dance after somebody leaves many times, and it rarely, if ever, pays off in the long term. The reason is that "we" usually ends up meaning "somebody else," or "I will if everyone else does." There's a period of discussion, like what's going on right now, and suggestions are made, and lots of people go "yeah, that's a great idea!", and maybe one or two even do something different one time. But then everything goes back to normal again, because no one wants to be in charge, and without leadership the incentive for doing things differently quickly fades away on an individual basis.

Now, PC is a guy who led by example about the things he values. He gave concrit; he strove to make his missions unique and fresh and interesting; you never saw him flip out at the latest badfic; etc.

So, how about you? What can YOU do?

Do you want to see more concrit around here? Make a commitment to give more. Do it. Keep doing it.

You want varied mission styles? Maybe you should try writing for a department that isn't Floaters or the DMS. There are scads of them, you know, most virtually untouched. Lots of room to play around with mission styles there—or, should you venture into the rarefied airs of PPC Infrastructure, your stories needn't even be missions at all.

Want more group interaction? RP, perhaps? We've got a second board, a chatroom, and a Dreamwidth comm for that. Go start something! There shouldn't need to be a frelling emergency for agents to get together and hang out. As for co-writes, they don't need to be ridiculously huge, either. Back in Ye Olden Dayes, writers used to team up to PPC, one agent apiece. Try it!

Want more moderation? Why not speak up yourself if you see something wrong?

Whatever you do, don't just nod along in this thread and then wait for someone else to step up. If you really care about making the PPC a better place, then take responsibility for it yourself first.

~Neshomeh, who has been on this merry-go-round before and doesn't want to go again.

People - new people - come here (or at least used to) because they enjoy Jay and Acacia's stories and want to write things like them. If we declare that all new missions should be written with the agents hanging upside down like bats - it won't happen, because, y'know, that's not what J&A did.

I do have something useful to say (bear with me!) - a suggestion/offer. Time Will Decide For Us and End of the Beginning: Seventy Plus are my brief forays into a wildly different PPC (it showed up in Ghost's Story as well) of about 60 years in the future. The Departments have changed, the mission formats have changed, everything has changed - but it's still the PPC.

So. If people want to start writing missions in that time-period - or, indeed, the period of the Department of Efficiency, or any of the periods involved in Origins-Lofty Skies-Reorg-Crashing Down (these), I'm willing to a) officially open them up, and b) write up a summary of what I have sketched out (as a basis for people to work from).

I'm not suggesting this would, should or could replace current missions - but it could be a way to vary the writing and reading experience. Tired of writing Assassins? Write yourself a Demas Paladin. Fed up of DoSAT? Go visit the Technomancers on their flying city! Etc etc.

Were this to happen, I would suggest starting with an RP-type emergency: something involving timeslips (presumably from the Seventy Plus era to the present), because toying with the fabric of reality is endlessly entertaining.

Oh, and there's still a message going round the system. I'm sure at least a couple of agents are robust enough to do something with it without breaking down in tears and killing themselves.

hS, suggesting ideas

I also remember that another reason for the ban on Emergencies is that they were happening too often, and someone pointed out that when the PPC HQ is invaded by hordes of Sues on a regular basis, the Emergencies stop being actual emergencies and become something more commonplace.

What might be fun is more HQ-wide RP sessions. I'm not saying churn out one once a week or anything, just every now and then it'd be nice if we could all pool together our agents and have them, I don't know, deal with a rabbit stampede or a sudden HQ-wide ponification or something. In fact, they don't even need to be RPs. The mass Halloween scary story co-write last year? That was fun! As was Huinesoron's fourth-wall-breaking co-write (has that been concluded yet? I may have missed some of it.)

PC mentioned cliques, and people not being able to relate to other people within a group as large as the PPC. This will not do. It'd be nice to have more chances to interact with fellow Boarders, and a nice and productive way that everyone, no matter what fandom, can participate is discussions and group projects that are PPC-related in general.

Firstly, we need more things to link each spinoff to another. Co-writes, RPs, references to another PPCer's work, agent cameos, you name it, we need more of them. Right now I feel that each department is self-contained and agents don't see much of their coworkers from other branches. I realize that this is hard to pull off in a mission where the badfic is centre stage but I think acknowledging other PPCers' work makes the entire universe that much more alive.

Secondly, write more concrit. I wholeheartedly agree with PC when he says that there isn't enough constructive criticism going around: just saying "I liked it!" doesn't help an author improve. What did you like in the mission? Why? What was your favourite part? Why? Were there any passages that felt forced, slow, or awkward? Point them out and explain.
I suggest that for every mission that we read, we should write a review.

Thirdly, let's talk Emergencies. On the up side, they have certainly changed the formula of day-to-day life for agents by placing them into extraordinary situations where nobody-- perhaps not even their author-- knows how it will end. They have always spurred change in the PPC-verse and kept things fresh by involving agents from every single service branch. The down side is just that: some changes are not wanted. Makes-Things' "death" is the prime example of this situation.

I have been reviewing the discussion following Huinesoron's release of his Swan's Egg stories and it is clear that the death of important characters-- especially those that are free-to-use-- is something to be avoided at all costs when writing about a crisis. The moratorium on Emergencies was established to prevent such a thing from happening again.

But what if we set up safeguards? Rules to prevent something that would cripple or radically change the structure and workings of the PPC? In theory, we could write Emergencies responsibly by establishing what we can and cannot do with the PPC. Naturally, we will have to establish a rule on the frequency of such events (like maybe a general vote on whether we could write about one).

If a consensus could be reached, I think this could inject some life into the community.

...but that's just my opinion. Thoughts?

I rather realised it with the latest one I wrote where my Agents seemed rather bored doing it. Perhaps we chose a fic that, despite its novelty in having the Sue go after a different target in their specialised canon, was a bit too boring otherwise.

I intend on using it as an excuse for Upstairs to fling them into the Circle of Lemmings head-on, but still, I can agree that it may be time to change something with the missions (I, being one of the only people writing missions in BBC Sherlock, would love to write a mission where Eledhwen and Christianne have to solve the mission like a murder mystery).

I'll toy with the murder mystery mission format, and see if that could shake things up a bit.

I agree about the missions; that there's even a 'starter formula' listed on the Wiki's Guide to Writing Missions page has always kind of bothered me. But I also think the formula issue is a double-edged sword: on one hand, formulas tend to stagnate after a few minutes, but on the other hand, formulas can serve to give newer PPCers a sort of cheat sheet until they find their own flow.

I'm thinking that more group missions might help break up the monotony a bit - I admit, I prefer writing solo missions (and feel relatively safe in assuming others do as well), but if we're meant to be a community of writers, and not just a group of hilariously insane badfic killers, it strikes me as odd that there aren't more group missions. I'm not saying we need another emergency (we don't), but it seems to me that it wouldn't hurt to have a few group mission challenges - or something similar - scattered at odd intervals throughout the year.

I also think that changing the way missions are written should first and foremost be the choice of each individual writer, and not an enforced community edict. To me, telling someone, "You have to write it following this sequence of events" is a bit like saying, "You can be creative, but you have to use the same basic framework as everyone else."

Yes, I realize the formula is more of a suggestion than an outright order, and I'm not trying to accuse anyone of 'stifling our creativity' or 'make us all their little writing slaves'; nor am I trying to stir up or create any conspiracy theories among the Board. I just really think that we need more than one formula and that, formulas or no, we should respect each writer's decision to follow the same tried and true formula or to try something new, as it suits them.

As for the mods, I honestly think we have plenty. There always seems to be at least one around at any given point in time, and appear to be doing a good job as is. Besides that, I worry that having more mods will cause done of us - without naming names - to think the Board is becoming more repressive, and that a rift may begin to appear among us as a result.

I might suggest, at least to start, that while the GDoc system that's been adopted is very applicable, it is difficult to get used to if you are coming in to it with no knowledge of the system.

For me, I recently got done with a big email-based beta of a badfic. It was one huge brainstorming period between at least ten boarders, including myself, and we all bounced ideas off of each other that were built on, debated, discarded, applied, or tossed around. With each new factoid about the fic, dozens of new ideas sprung up for us to toy with. It was all kinds of fun.

I'm not saying "Ragh Ditch GDoc", because I got burnt while trying to handle it on my phone. That's unfair of me to do. But, I would like to suggest that maybe more of these email brainstorms could be applied to fics before big group-writes on GDocs. I'm just thinking it might do wonders towards improving the already good quality of stories, and it would give boarders a good idea of how other boarders think, and thus give a good impression as to the styles of their cohorts for any future group writes where those particular people might want to join in.

It would also help to encourage friendly discussion and debate between intelligent minds, as well as make friendships where there might have been assumed shyness, especially for newbies. In fact, for newbies, it would be a good experience with improving their styles, and getting a wide mass opinion as to how many ways you can write a good story and keep the audience interested.

Hey, it's just a thought, but it's one I've been considering for a while.