Introducing our "Director of Content" at Nexus Mods
Over 400 people applied for the position and over the course of a couple of months I whittled down the applicant list to a "short-list" of 30 people, and then further down to a shorter-list of 4. Before I contacted these remaining 4 individuals, however, I met up with a close gaming friend for lunch one day. His name is Paul.
Paul and I met several years ago at StratLAN, a relatively small 100-150 person LAN event that takes place a few times a year at Stratford-upon-Avon racecourse that is run by Multiplay here in the UK (the same people who run the large Insomnia series of LAN, which I also go to, and who also did this year's Minecon, whose staff I know relatively well). Paul and friends were playing the Game of Thrones board game around a big table and, over the course of many hours and many drinks we all got to know one another. We now all meet up regularly, despite some long travel distances for some of us, to play board games and go to LANs together. When we're not LANning or board gaming we're often online playing games with one another. A good 15-20 of us are close friends now, of which Paul is a part, with a further 10-30 I've come to know and like a lot. Paul and I sit next to each other at the LAN events and he sometimes watches me as I do some Nexus work in between gaming sessions. He regularly offers advice on things he'd change on the Nexus site or asks questions about why I haven't done this or that. He tends to be quite astute!
When we met up recently Paul and I got to talking about our individual situations and, long story short, I saw a place for Paul working at the Nexus. He has a passion and drive for this sort of work with prior experience working on sites and in graphic design with a keen eye for the challenges facing the site and the work necessary to get the Nexus back up to scratch. I say up to scratch because I definitely feel like the Nexus could be doing more than it is right now in almost all areas, and the reason we've dropped the ball a little is because of me. Paul's coming in to streamline our operation and work just below me (no innuendo) to not only help with the decision making process but to help micro-manage the implementation of new functionality both behind the scenes, working on streamlining our work process, and on the front end that users actually see. Basically, he's another me, who will have the time necessary to really do what's best for the sites and this community. It doesn't mean I'm going anywhere, it just means I'm now getting some help on the sites that I really needed. And quite importantly for me, Paul is someone I know, who I can go and visit and who I can trust implicitly (indeed, he's sat a couple of metres away from me right now working away at his desk, migrating our internal bug tracking system over to a much better and more efficient system).
Paul will be making himself known and getting straight down to work in his own news post to follow. In the mean-time, I would still like to hire on a dedicated Community Manager. I held off on finalising any choice of Community Manager based on the applications received while Paul was brought on and acclimatised. we've both decided that a Community Manager is still very necessary and would be very worthwhile to the sites. I'll continue that work soon (tm).
57 comments
Comments locked
A moderator has closed this comment topic for the time beingVery old axiom fulfilled again: 'It's not what you know; it who you know'
Welcome