Seeking volunteers: Site Development Council

I'm looking for 5 volunteers to be the inaugural members of the Site Development Council (name open to suggestion). Unfortunately, I'm not the best as management without direction, and it's led the site's development to end up a bit all over the place. I'd like to get volunteers who are willing to help me organize and codify the site as it exists so we can keep features we want, remove things we don't care for, and develop new features for the betterment of the community.

So what will the council do? The primary purpose will be to help organize things and to act as a body that will be the community's voice to me in terms of site development. I think things get lost when there's just a thread or a person requesting something, and obviously not every request can be accommodated. I'm hoping that this group will help me get the site in a better shape over all.

So what do you need to be a part of this group?
- An activity commitment. I ask you only volunteer if you think you'll be active on the site for at least the next 3 months, and are willing to put in some time to help write things up, review things, etc. It's a volunteer position, so I'm not expecting you to stay on forever or to do a ton of work. But I'd like help organizing things. When you feel you can no longer be a part of the council, you're welcome to step down, and I'm going to help the council set up mechanisms for finding new members.
- You must be open minded and critical. The council will be looking over features the community wants and will think about if it's worth it to the site over all, or how it ranks in priority. I'll also be looking to the council to help me make decisions as I do development on the site.

The council won't be responsible for any coding. This will be part sounding board, part development proposal. If you have experience with software development, that's great.

I'm sure there's a lack of clarity in what I've written, and heck, that's part of the problem, so feel free to ask questions. If you're interested based on what you've read here or answers below (I'll update this opening post with more information as it's decided in replies), email contact@gamersplane.com with:
- Your username
- Your timezone
- Any blurb of interest (not at all required)

Does this council need a record keeper? :D I am probably the worst choice where it comes to interacting with the community, but I do like making long bullet lists of bugs and suggestions and sorting through them; it's a passion!

Either way, excited to see this; I'll finally know where to present my long lists of small suggestions which don't feel enough to start a thread about! (Fear me, future council, fear me.)

This sounds like a great step toward shaping a more focused and collaborative development process—thanks for putting it together!

I did have a few questions:
- Is there a particular reason you’re asking for emails instead of having folks express interest directly here on the forum or Direct Messages? Since the council is meant to help organize and guide the site, it feels like using the site itself (dogfooding, so to speak) might help set the tone.
- Also, how do you envision the council interacting with you and each other once it’s formed? Will it be through Discord, email, or even a private and dedicated / "game" forum, since that's the natural medium of the platform? Just wondering how you imagine it working in practice.
- Is there any kind of site statistics or usage data currently being collected? And if so, would the council be able to request or analyze that data to help prioritize or assess proposed features?

I wasn't sure how much discussion was going to happen here and didn't want anyone's submission to get lost. As there isn't much here, posting here is fine as well. So it came to PM or email, and I didn't think choosing one over the other made a big deal.
I'll be creating a private subform for the council where all discussion would happen. I'd also be open to creating a private Discord channel if all members are active there, but I'd prefer any bigger conversations happen here so we can track and log it for transparency.
I do use Google Analytics to track page hits, but that's about it. I've never been good at analytics (I'm more a backend engineer). I can always set up some simple tooling pages to draw statistics from site data (posts per day, posts per game, characters grouped by something). I figured part of the goal for the council would be to help me figure out what's useful to decision making. There are definitely things that would remain private (emails, password hashes, etc), but I'm open to hearing what data would be useful. Interestingly, I've also been doing some machine learning studying lately, so could be an interesting time to see if anything I've learned can be used to come up with interesting statistics or insights.

Obviously, I can't speak for Keleth, but I was involved with some development a couple of years ago. Here's my perspective: We had something similar to this back in 2022, the logs are here: https://gamersplane.com/forums/8003/

I think it was mainly VagueGM and me making the coding changes via pull requests to the main GP branch (I could check the GitHub history, but that sounds right).

But it became too much for me because, as well as discussing changes and coding them, there was: liaising with the community, setting up community polls, publishing release notes (example), organising people to check staging, organising when staging would be pulled to the main branch, and working with Keleth to release the main branch to live. ...and then getting yelled at by the people who didn't like the changes we'd agreed, and rolling back those changes.

Many of the changes were made without any sort of guiding philosophy or principles. There was quite a lot of "ooo - this sounds cool". We sometimes had release themes (e.g. QoL release, bug fix release, custom game support release), but it wasn't terribly rigorous. We did some good stuff back then: GP now works on mobile devices, custom character sheets are more than a plain bbCode text box, I think dice rules are useful, character sheets at the bottom of the page, the NPC tag, maps tags, polls, being able to add dice rolls without going to "advanced posting" - we made a lot of changes that make me proud.

But, nobody really had the "clout" to say whether something should go in or not. We didn't have anyone who knew and represented the community and their needs, and could then decide whether changes were necessary. There was nobody with the final say. Of course, Keleth is the site owner, and has the final, final say, but Keleth doesn't PbP, and so getting changes in felt a little like having to petition a king who didn't know the everyday pains of us peasants. Y'know?

A hypothetical: Let's say someone proposed that GMs should be allowed to share and install custom scripts for their game for... cards or hex maps or something (say, with a warning to players that custom javascript was being injected). Well... script injection... that's real controversial, right? But, if, after a full discussion, it was decided that this feature is super important and should be added (with safeguards), then who can make that call and know the importance of the feature to the people who need it?

...or what if we wanted to modernise all the styling? Someone would have to own and manage that.

I don't mind being a really useful coding engine, but I think most of us come here to play games, not cosplay product managers - but someone (else) has manage it.

I would like to volunteer.

I want to clarify that I don't expect anyone to stay on the council for a set period of time or put in a certain amount of time per week or anything like that. I only ask if you're volunteering you think you'll still be active for a few months to avoid churn. If suddenly you decide you're done, or RL takes over, no hard feelings.

So is that a no on my question? It was genuine. :) I would love to help the site.

Oh, no, your on the list. It's definitely an important role. I'm just waiting a few days to see who volunteers.

Oh, that's nice! My axe pen keyboard is at your - potential - service. :D

On this point Adam, I'm thinking that's exactly what such a team's purpose can be. Having studied what is needed, the team should be the one proposing what these necessary changes are, or prioritise them in some order, must-haves, should-haves, nice-to-haves.

I am obviously around to help, as I have been. I suspect I will be around for the next 'three months'. :)

I was not sure if this included me. I have often found it helpful to have a 'committee to decide what needs to be done' separate from 'those who do it' (like getting the moderators to decide if a petition to 'Retire a game with an inactive GM' should happen, and then you or I can do it). As you say, Keleth, they are not the same function. Happy to help in whatever capacity I am needed.

Your work has definitely been invaluable. As someone who's helped do the dev work (and helped me get stuff done), I'm happy to have you in the forums, even if not as a member of the council. It's up to you if you want to volunteer for that role or not.