Friday, December 14, 2007

The Twelve Trek Days of Christmas

If you've read the cover page, you will have realised that this is going to be a major collaborative project between a wide variety of Star Trek fan groups. It's primarily meant to be a fun activity by Star Trek fans, however there can be no doubt that it will generate a lot of publicity for the participants and hopefully create and maintain good relations between the various groups. I'm assuming that successful completion of the project could open the way to making it a regular, annual event, which is kinda scary when I think about it sometimes!.

When I've contacted various people I've not asked them to do something specially for this project, instead I've asked, "What are you doing for Christmas?" and given them a framework within which we can collectively try to generate as much action and excitement on the internet with as possible! Some have done things specially for the project and some groups have wholeheartedly supported the idea, specifically TrekUnited without whose help and support I could not have done half of what I have.

Others have said, "Thanks but no thanks!", some quite reluctantly. I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed but in all cases I've thanked them for their time, wished them the best for the future and called it quits on that.

It's by far the most ambitious project I've ever undertaken but I'm pretty confident I can get it off the ground. Even when I haven't been able fill a slot, I have ways of faking it since I've got contingency plans in place so that I can make up for any (inevitable!) shortfalls.

Because this is a world-wide project, I have take care over time differences. I'm aiming at releases to come at midnight GMT, which is 7pm & 4pm the previous day in New York & Los Angeles but is 11am & 9am the same day in Sydney & Perth. This means that my "window" for updating the website between Midnight - 6am GMT is before 5pm on the day of the release for me in Sydney and 7pm for JT, my webmaster, in New Zealand. Note that Aus & NZ are both on daylight saving time.

1 comment:

Kirok of LStok said...

Boxing Day and how have I done? Well, I didn't get everything released before Christmas - I got as far as Day 7 on Christmas Eve. one or two things were held back due to circumstances beyond my control but as the overall producer I have to take responsibility for them.

What really knocked me back was the Chronology of the five major fan films on day 5 - That proved to be a major work, trying to re-format two years work! 25 pages in all!

At the moment I'm trying to get the first of the 8 podbooks online at trekunited but as you can expect, there are few people online over Christmas and Boxing day.

In fact that might make my tardiness in releasing the last "Days" a blessing in disguise. I've been watching the hit counter on the twelve Days website and things have been very quiet over the past few days. I still think that it would have worked ok if I could have got everything out before Christmas, but perhaps finishing on Christmas Eve might be best.

Someone has pointed out to me that traditionally the 12 days of Christmas are the twelve days after Christmas. Should I go that way? I don't know, some of the 'presents', most noticeably the carol songsheets would have lost their usefulness after Christmas.

I would say that, barring accidents, I will be doing this again next year. However I will be aplying the lessons learned from this year to ensure that it is even more successful!