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poetreealee_grrl
Back in March whenjjhunter and I (alee_grrl) were looking at creating new features to encourage community participation we came up with two ideas. The first was the Sunday Picnic. The second was to do a weekly challenge post. In discussing the format and framing of the challenges we quickly realized we needed to have two different types of challenges as we wanted to encourage broader participation in the community and not everyone who is part of our community writes poetry. We wanted to be sure that we had some way of including the poetry enthusiasts in the fun.
Both of us really enjoy playing with words and building on existing metaphors. Asjjhunter explained in her earlier post about the interplay of art and the poetree community, our community name was inspired by a sculpture of a tree made from a book of poetry. The title of the work is "poetree", which is both a play on the word 'poetry' and an elision of the words "poet's tree." The poet's tree is a wonderful image that has formed the roots of many of our community's features. When we were discussing creation of a weekly challenge we exchanged a lot of playful title ideas, but the one that we both really loved was "Climbing the Poet's Tree."
After coming up with a format and title the only thing we had left to plan was prizes. Contests and challenges should have some form of reward. It is part of what makes them fun for many people. One prize idea was to offer 30 dreamwidth points, which equals a month of paid time on dreamwidth. We know that not all our community members are dreamwidth users, so we decided we could offer people a choice of prizes and maybe switch up those choices each week. Asjjhunter and I are both writers, and both tinker with icon creation it made sense that one or both of those options be the alternate prize.
Climbing the Poet's Tree has changed a bit since it first premiered in March, 2012. One is that we've settled into standard prize options, which are the 30 dreamwidth point or a poem or icon. Another is that as we have divided some of the duties to try to make the community more sustainable, I have become the point person for the challenges. Thoughjjhunter is always willing to pitch hit if need be. Finally we decided this fall to make the challenges bi-weekly rather than weekly. This gives people more time to participate, and makes it less stressful for us.
Of course the challenge for me is to come up with new and interesting ways to challenge both the writers and readers in our community. I often try to tie the challenges into one of the preceding weeks' themes/posts, or connect it to the upcoming week's theme if that is known. That said I'm always looking for new ideas. If you have some ideas on livening up the challenges, please feel free to share them in the comments.
Further reading:
I had trouble picking my favorite responses to challenges. There are too many good ones. However if you want to read through the challenges posts yourself, you can find them all here. Please also feel free to share your favorite responses or challenges.
Back in March when
jjhunter and I (alee_grrl) were looking at creating new features to encourage community participation we came up with two ideas. The first was the Sunday Picnic. The second was to do a weekly challenge post. In discussing the format and framing of the challenges we quickly realized we needed to have two different types of challenges as we wanted to encourage broader participation in the community and not everyone who is part of our community writes poetry. We wanted to be sure that we had some way of including the poetry enthusiasts in the fun. Both of us really enjoy playing with words and building on existing metaphors. As
jjhunter explained in her earlier post about the interplay of art and the poetree community, our community name was inspired by a sculpture of a tree made from a book of poetry. The title of the work is "poetree", which is both a play on the word 'poetry' and an elision of the words "poet's tree." The poet's tree is a wonderful image that has formed the roots of many of our community's features. When we were discussing creation of a weekly challenge we exchanged a lot of playful title ideas, but the one that we both really loved was "Climbing the Poet's Tree." After coming up with a format and title the only thing we had left to plan was prizes. Contests and challenges should have some form of reward. It is part of what makes them fun for many people. One prize idea was to offer 30 dreamwidth points, which equals a month of paid time on dreamwidth. We know that not all our community members are dreamwidth users, so we decided we could offer people a choice of prizes and maybe switch up those choices each week. As
jjhunter and I are both writers, and both tinker with icon creation it made sense that one or both of those options be the alternate prize. Climbing the Poet's Tree has changed a bit since it first premiered in March, 2012. One is that we've settled into standard prize options, which are the 30 dreamwidth point or a poem or icon. Another is that as we have divided some of the duties to try to make the community more sustainable, I have become the point person for the challenges. Though
jjhunter is always willing to pitch hit if need be. Finally we decided this fall to make the challenges bi-weekly rather than weekly. This gives people more time to participate, and makes it less stressful for us. Of course the challenge for me is to come up with new and interesting ways to challenge both the writers and readers in our community. I often try to tie the challenges into one of the preceding weeks' themes/posts, or connect it to the upcoming week's theme if that is known. That said I'm always looking for new ideas. If you have some ideas on livening up the challenges, please feel free to share them in the comments.
Further reading:
I had trouble picking my favorite responses to challenges. There are too many good ones. However if you want to read through the challenges posts yourself, you can find them all here. Please also feel free to share your favorite responses or challenges.
