Welcome to the Guerrilla Translation/Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to our Wiki!

The wiki is primarily designed for people who are already working with the collective but it is also an excellent knowledge base for peers who are interested in joining or for anyone curious about working methods and governance model.

From now on, however, we will proceed as if you, dear reader, have just joined the collective! What follows is a quick-start guide to getting acquainted with the way we work and relate to each other.

You don't have to go through all of these links all at once. In fact, we recommend a [[Ongoing Evaluation Criteria and Basic Responsibilities | 3 month mutual familiarization period, but it's a good idea to read this article and start checking out these links as soon as possible. After that, we recommend you bookmark it and come back to it periodically as a roadmap. To help you out, we've included a list of all the links we've put together for this entry right here. (ADD LINK)

So, read on, don't be afraid to ask any and all questions and, above all, welcome!

Signing up and making user accounts

We work with a variety of online Tools conceptualised as a single workspace (more on that below) but, to access them you will need to make user accounts. We will send you invites for the following apps and pages.

• Loomio
• Trello
• This Wiki (the wiki is public and anyone's able to read it, but a wiki account will allow you to edit it).
• Our Wordpress enviroment.

If you haven't received invitations to all of these tools, please contact us straight away so we can send them. Sometimes they end up in the spam folder of your email account, so make sure you've checked that.

We recommend that you use the same username and email for all accounts, so we can recognise you quickly across the various platforms.

Familiarise yourself with our Ongoing Evaluation Criteria and Basic Responsibilities

As a tight, working collective and agency we need everyone that has passed the survey to keep up with the expectations the have set for themselves. For this reason we have a three month "trial period" so we can evaluate how the relationship is working. Part of the evaluation is, of course, keeping up with some very basic requirements. Most of these are very common-sense and no more than you would expect in a "traditional" workplace. Remember, although the collective is decentralised and fluid, we are working for a living and we take our work very seriously so, read the responsibilities carefully and check in regularly to ensure that you're keeping up.

• Ongoing Evaluation Criteria and Basic Responsibilities

Following the Tao of the Guerrilla Translator

The Tao of the Guerrilla Translator is our comprehensive guide detailing the "journey" of a pro-bono translation. From material selection, to contacting articles, through to translation, publishing and, finally, formatting and promotion, the Tao will familiarise you with this process. All members are expected to collaborate on the pro-bono side of the project, even if you're not a translator or editor.

Although the organizational aspects of the collective are just as important as the purely linguistic work we take on, we recommend that beginners cut their teeth on the pro-bono department. This will familiarise you with Trello and our genera translation protocols. All of these aspects will make your entry into the organizational side of things a more familiar affair.

The best way to follow the Tao is, of course, by practising the actions described herein, so look through the sections and choose whether you are going to translate, edit, format, manage... (or all of the above!) and get busy!

Read up and try our tools

As we mentioned above, you'll need to familiarise yourself with our tools and how we use them.

• For an overview of the Tools we use and how they relate to each other read our main entry Tools
• Read our wiki entry on Loomio our discussion and decision making tool.
• Read our wiki entry on Trello our workflow and task management tool.

A basic understanding of Loomio and Trello is an essential requirement of anyone working with the collective. The wiki articles linked above have plenty of tutorials on both. There's also information of how we use both but you will likely glean a lot of this from practise. Visiting our Loomio homepage and contributing in discussions and decisions will familiarise you with the big "L" in no time.

For Trello, apart from reading our wiki entry and watching the many tutorials linked there, following the Tao will give you hands on knowledge about how we squeeze Trello to its last drop of functionality.

Putting the Tools together with Browser Tab Based Workspaces

The best way to see our usage of various tools is that you have a (virtual toolbox at your disposable to facilitate whatever tasks you undertake. This integral vision of the various tool happens mainly in your perception by conceiving them as distinct yet complementary parts of an integrated whole. But wait, don't worry, not everything has to be all holonic, synergistic and smelling of patchouli there's a physical side to all this.

It all happens within your web-browser, something you probably use each and every day. So, to get the scoop on integrating all the tools, please read the following wiki entry:

• Browser-tab based workspaces

Watch our Videos

Our videos are great! So great, in fact, that they don't even exist! We do intent to release a series of vids talking about the various aspects of the collectives, but we don't have the people-power or time to film them right now. Maybe you can help? Tell us!

Familiarise yourself with our Governance Model and our Income Distribution protocols

If you've completed the survey, you should already be somewhat familiar with our Governance model. This forms the backbone of our organization and aspects all its aspects, from agency work, to pro-bono translations and decision making it's all in there. Please take the tie to absorb this material, you will see a lot of it happen in practise, but a good familiarity with its working concepts will help guide you to many of the processes you'll undertake as part of the collective.

• This will include a link to both our 1.0 GT/GMC governance model and a "For Dummies version" of that. Those are currently being written. We will put up the links here when they're finally outta the oven. Below, we have some temp links of the source material that is being combined to craft our own model

• Open Enterprise Manifesto and Governance model

• Proposed alterations in the original Open Enterprise Governance Model

Sign up for workteams

We have a variety of workteams that deal with organizational tasks, by "organization" we mean the maintenance and development of the machine that keeps the collective oiled (you can read all about that in this link).

Being an open organization with no set structures you can become quite the renaissance (wo)man and flirt from task to task. This, however, can be confusing and many people prefer to adopt clearly defined roles for self-organisation. To cater for this we begun a Loomio thread on work teams which we recommend you comment on to sign up to the ones that call you the most.

• Index page and overview of workteams
• Loomio thread to sign up for workteams

Ask lots of questions and have fun!

We know that the collective can seem complex at first, but it is a lot more streamlined than any traditional enterprise. The big different is that you have access and can contribute to all the aspects of this particular enterprise. We either do it all ourselves, or in collaboration with other like minded people and collectives.

With that in mind, please have fun and be creative with all this stuff. We look forward to your input. Whenever you get stuck on anything or aren't sure how to proceed, please ask us. You can start a Loomio thread (and practise getting the groups and subgroups right!) and there'll plenty of people there to help. You can also ask your buddy over chat!

List of Quick-Start Links

• Ongoing Evaluation Criteria and Basic Responsibilities
• The Tao of the Guerrilla Translator
• An introduction to the Tools we use
• Entry on Loomio
• Entry on Trello
• Browser-tab based workspaces
• Open Enterprise Manifesto and Governance model
• Proposed alterations in the original Open Enterprise Governance Model
• What is organizational work all about?
• Index page and overview of workteams
• Loomio thread to sign up for workteams