Voiceteam

Hey podfic fandom.

It’s cantarina, forzandopod, and klb, the current Voiceteam facilitation team. (If you missed the first round of Voiceteam, it’s a chaotic podfic-themed scavenger hunt.)

We’re planning a bite-sized round in late December/early January, and following up on the conversations about race, racism, and representation that have been ongoing in podfic spaces, we wanted to put out a call for new BIPOC members for our team.

We know that facilitating a challenge is a lot of unpaid work and we don’t want to pressure anyone into it! On the other hand, we know that some people (like, uh, us) like the creative decision-making and community-fostering aspects of this work, so we want the door open to anybody who feels that way and is excited about the idea of building Voiceteam with us.

We also want to let any new team members define their own level of involvement. Our team vibe is “show up when you have the time and cope, just let us know if you can’t follow through on a commitment”. cantarina, for example, is super into the planning, but gets stressed out by daily grind tasks, while forzandopod is a points-tallying spreadsheet wizard and klb loves any task that involves participant interaction. If you would like to join the team to mostly have a consulting role in the planning, awesome! If you want to be involved heavily in the day to day running, awesome! Anything in between, just let us know! And we would like to specifically clarify that your involvement as a BIPOC team member does not need to be centered in, or even include, anti-racism work unless you want it to.

If you’re interested in joining the team, please shoot us an email at voiceteammods@gmail.com. And anybody else reading this who’s excited about participating in our upcoming shenanigans—more info coming soon ;)

Yours,
Cantarina, Forzandopod, and Klb

P.S. Whether or not there’s interest from podfic fandom’s BIPOC communities in joining the team, we’re not ending the conversation about anti-racism in Voiceteam here. We have plans in the works for how we will continue anti-racism work in this community and will always be open to more input and ideas on this topic.

Voiceteam is a Discord-based team scavenger hunt for the podfic community. Teams will earn points for making different voice-based or voice-adjacent creations. Each week in the month of May, teams will get a list of ten point-earning challenges and then will be set loose to strategize, create, and have fun!


TIMELINE

Sign-ups: April 20-30
Discord server opens: April 30
Week 1—Introductions: May 1-7
Week 2—Music: May 8-14
Week 3—Adventure: May 15-21
Week 4—Endings→Beginnings: May 22-28
Amnesty: May 29-31
Results & Party: June 1

Voiceteam runs on GMT. Your mods, klb, forzandopod, and cantarina, are in EDT, CST, and PDT.

RULES

1. Completed creations should be turned in to the mods. Creations can be turned in via email (voiceteammods@gmail.com) or via the Submissions channel on the Voiceteam Discord. A mod will confirm a) that they saw the creation and b) the number of points it is worth. If you don’t receive mod confirmation or disagree with the point value, please follow up!


2. Individual players will have a cap for how many points they can earn per week. (We’ll also be trying to spread very prolific podficcers between the teams!) If you’ve capped out for the week, you can still participate by supporting and cheering for your other team members!


3. There is no minimum level of participation. This challenge is all about adding fun and connection to our lives, not adding stress! If you choose to sit a week out or to only take on one challenge per week, that is perfectly allowed. If you decide to just hang out in chat from time to time to say hi and cheer on their team, and you end up not making any creations, that’s allowed as well. Self-care is paramount!


4. Challenges will sometimes leave room for interpretation. If you are not sure whether something counts, please check with the mods. We support creativity, so we will be generous with what we allow!


5. Minors (and over-18 folk who prefer to avoid mature content) are welcome to participate in Voiceteam! Where needed, two Discord channels will be provided to a group: a general-access channel and a NSFW channel.


6. Each team member has the final decision about their own creations (including their part in collaborative creations, if they choose to participate in any). There are no requirements about the quality or size of your creations.


7. The mods are committed to supporting a positive experience for all players! Please feel free to come to the mods to request support with any issues, including but not limited to: feelings of exclusion, conflict with a group member, and concerns about the rules or structure of Voiceteam. We will keep your concerns confidential unless you give us the go-ahead to share them, but we can help you think up solutions or make mod-level changes as needed to address the problem. For more serious problems, our anti-harassment policy is linked here.

FAQ

Where did this idea come from?
Voiceteam is inspired by a combination of Amplificathon, GISH, and the 2000s eras sorting and landcomms on LJ. (Name inspiration is from here.) We wanted a point-based podfic event like Amplificathon used to be, and we also wanted an event with excitement, fun, and occasional silliness, where anybody who loved podfic would feel welcome and would have plenty of opportunities to bond and make new friends!

Do I have to be a podficcer to join?
No! You just have to love podfic. Every week’s challenges will include some non-voice options, like feedback or graphics. No one has to do every single challenge.

How big of a commitment is this going to be?
No bigger than you want it to be! The point of this challenge is to have fun and make friends, and if you end up getting inspired to create a bunch of stuff, cool. If not, that’s also cool.

Okay, but what if my version of fun is to scheme with my team members and Crush The Competition?
Go for it! Just make sure that it’s all in good fun and that team members with different reasons for participating don’t feel pressured.

What is Discord?/Tell me more about how the Discord server is going to work.
Discord is a chat-based platform. Every server (like the Voiceteam server) can host multiple text and voice chat channels. Some of the channels will be open to the entire Voiceteam community and some will be visible only to members of your team.

Voiceteam players will be emailed an invitation to the Voiceteam Discord server on April 30th. You can spend the first day saying hi and getting to know your team—we’ll provide some optional icebreaker questions you can answer for each other—and then the first list of challenges will be posted at midnight (GMT) on May 1st (as the clock is ticking over from the 30th).

How will the teams work?
When you sign up, we’ll get some information about your fannish likes and your preferred group dynamics. We’ll use that to form teams! The exact numbers and sizes will depend on the number of sign-ups, but our ideal is 10–15 people per team. If you are assigned a team and feel that it is not the right match for you, please contact the mods and we can reassign you.

Once you are assigned a team, anything you create counts toward your team’s point total. Beyond that, being on a team can be as interactive as you want. You can hang out in your team’s Discord channel all the time to chat and scheme and create with team members, or you can just check in every now and again to say hi and see if there’s anything happening you want to participate in. Or anything in between!

How do I earn points?
At the midnight (GMT) that begins each new week, a list of ten challenges will be posted in the Discord’s public channel, along with an update on point totals for each group so far. As soon as the new challenges are posted, the former week’s challenges no longer earn points until the Amnesty days.

During the Amnesty days, you can turn in anything you didn’t submit on time, but their point values will be halved.

What’s an example of what a challenge might look like?
This is tricky to answer, because we don’t want to give any of the challenges away in advance! But, for example, if this were a comm about dance rather than podfic, an example challenge might be:

Create an interpretive dance about a fandom trope. Bonus points if more than one team member contributes dance moves! (10 points baseline, +2 per additional member)

The tasks involved in the challenges have a wide range: art, photos, feedback, group chats with your team, recorded audio, and of course full podfic (or oral not!fic). There will even be an opportunity to incorporate other areas of interest, like cooking or gardening!

Note that in the above example, there are bonus points for collaborations between multiple team members. This will be true for many, though not all, of the challenges, and will always be noted in the challenge description.

What if I was already working on something before Voiceteam started? Is there a way to get points for it?
Any creation can earn points for a Voiceteam challenge as long as it is completed during the time that challenge is active. This includes WIPs you were already working on that happen to align with one of the challenges.

How do I sign up?
Head to this post!

What does the winning team win?
BRAGGING RIGHTS but the real prize is the friends we made along the way.

It is not acceptable to threaten, intimidate, or sexually coerce another participant, or to make offensive comments in relation to, but not limited to:

• race
• color
• national origin
• gender, gender identity, or gender presentation
• sexual orientation
• age
• body size
• disability
• appearance
• religion
• citizenship
• pregnancy

Any and all participants should feel free to speak up. If you feel uncomfortable or threatened as a result of another participant’s behavior, or if you witness this happening to another participant, please contact the mods right away. The identity of anyone who reports a violation will be kept anonymous. To submit a report anonymously, you can use this form.

We (the mod team) want to acknowledge that while we’re doing the ongoing work of unlearning, we’ll make mistakes too. Between us we have lived experience of racism, ableism, neurodivergence, sexism, transphobia (but not transmisogyny), and pregnancy, but we know that for most of us even those experiences are heavily, heavily informed by our whiteness and class privilege. We promise to listen to what’s said and to take it seriously, especially if it makes us uncomfortable and needs us to grow.

If a mod violates the anti-harassment-policy, you may report them using the same form, anonymously if you wish, or reach out directly to any other mod, who will keep your identity anonymous from the rest of the mod team if you request it. The mod whose behavior has been reported will not be involved in any of the decision-making around the consequences of the behavior. All four mods have agreed to this system in advance and are committed to abiding by it.

Voiceteam participants or mods found to be in violation of our policies may be asked to correct their behavior or withdraw from Voiceteam. Any participants or mods found to be in violation twice or more will be asked not to participate in future rounds of Voiceteam.