Hi Everyone, Chemb0t here again. Just popping in to break the placidity. =]

A lot has happened “offline” this summer. Many of our members have been delving into healthy personal pursuits, strengthening their skills and accomplishing many great things in the real world. It may seem that the community site is currently a ghost town as a result, but I personally don’t find that surprising or concerning. We are after all a community that encourages personal pursuits, whether it be online or in real life.

Now that things are starting to slow down (and cool down for many of us), I’m hoping to get things rolling again, but with a slightly different approach. Survival requires adaptation. A good number of things have changed since we launched this site. One cannot argue that the Internet is quite a different place compared to half a decade ago. Social networking is a norm, blogging is rampant, videos and instant feeds are common place. The old paradigm of exclusive forum communities and written content is evolving into a lighter, more agile set of activities where a community doesn’t really stay in one place, but extends over many different sites and forms of media.  

So to that effect, here’s a few things we will start doing to keep up and keep going...

Content Centric and team centric

Before we relied mostly on volunteers from the community to work on guild projects and develop the central concepts/storyline. While this worked to some effect, it required a lot of time and energy dedicated just to management and organization. Volunteers would disappear or forget what they agreed to do, which made it difficult to keep track of. Additionally, while very well intentioned, our staff setup was difficult to keep active. We had many different teams with many different projects all going at once. Lots of gears turning in concert and a lot of us got stretched too thin.

So instead of going for a big operation, we are going to try to keep our numbers small and focus on one or two projects at a time. In essence it will be a kind of team or studio focused setup where each of us are in regular contact with each other. Unfortunately that may mean we will have to cut back on a few things. We’ve been doing too much “sailing our ship as we build it”; running community activities like RPs, OCs, character development and community projects while the universe and central concepts those activities should rely upon were still in an embryonic state. To fix this, we are going to focus primarily on fleshing out the core concepts and universe and make substantial examples to lead by. This will include writing up the missing parts of the guild info section, creating artwork to go with them and perhaps an intro comic, video or audio play to give members and visitors a good feel of what the TG universe is about. The work is going to be done by myself, a select number of staff and former volunteers whom have done great work in the past. Meanwhile the site itself will act also as a kind of development blog and extend its posts through our satellites on DA, twitter and etc. We will post updates on our progress both to show what we’ve been up to as well as get feedback from the community.

Once that primary directive completes, we will gradually shift our focus on running the community at full force. =]

Blog posts and link sharing  

It is becoming more and more a common practice to share and share alike. So while we work on the core content, we will also start sharing links and posts from other sites which we find in alignment with the guild’s interests. You will see our favorite articles on world building, character design and art technique, posts on motivation and creativity, and perhaps even news on scientific discoveries or media of the day. These are meant to work together along with the articles we hope to write and share in return. Of course, we do want to keep this open to the community so the ability to suggest and perhaps even submit articles of interest will be there.   

Project Summaries

Also while we focus on working on one main project, it would be a good opportunity to summarize and recap on the various works we’ve completed or continue to work on, such as the paintchat server, RP system, Internet Radio and the site system itself. It will give visitors a glimpse of what we did and what we learned.

So that’s what we plan to do moving forward. The hope is that we will be able to build the site and community without worrying too much about actually running it yet. In any case, I hope this new kind of activity brings back more of our members, if at least to see things unfold.  

All in all, it seems that the “secret society” part of our moniker has continued to hold its relevance. Like a guild, our operations seem to be discreet and hard to follow. Many of us are doing great things in our own realm, but every once in a while, we gather to collaborate and share our experiences. The guild is far from ‘dead’, as it may seem to an outsider looking in. If anything, it is simply dormant for the moment.  After all, the guild seems to exist more in its members than a simple web space and domain, and as such, it is just a matter of calling those people back to one place to make the guild ‘active’ once more. This is, at least, what I think we should be striving for. Not only does it allow the guild to survive, it also allows it to thrive when time and interest, those two fleeting and ever valuable elements, once again coalesce.

So thanks again for your time and interest, and I hope to see you around. =]

-Chemb0t