Welcome to the Guerrilla Translation/Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki

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This page needs revision to be brought up to date with our 2018 Relaunch

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 our working methods and governance model.

From now on, 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 an 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 that you bookmark and return to it periodically, as a roadmap. To help you out, we've included a list of all the links we've compiled for this entry right here.

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

Signing up and making user accounts

We work with a variety of online Tools conceptualized as a single workspace (more on that below). To access them, you will first 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 can read it, but a wiki account will allow you to edit it).
  • Our WordPress environment.

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

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

Familiarize 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 they 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 criteria for evaluation is the ability to keep up with some basic requirements. Most of these are common sense, no more than you would expect in a "traditional" workplace. Remember, although the collective is decentralized and fluid, we are working for a living and we take our work very seriously. Please read the responsibilities carefully and check in regularly to ensure that you're keeping up.

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 authors, and on through translating, publishing and, finally, formatting and promotion. The Tao will familiarize you with this entire 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 linguistic work we take on, we recommend that beginners cut their teeth in the pro-bono department. This will help familiarize you with Trello and our general translation protocols. All of these aspects will make your entry into the organizational side simpler.

The best way to follow the Tao is by practicing 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 when you're ready, get busy!

Read up and try our tools

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

A basic understanding of Loomio and Trello is an essential requirement for anyone working with our collective. The wiki articles linked above have plenty of tutorials on both. There's also information on how we use both, but you will likely learn a lot of this from practice. Visiting our Loomio homepage and contributing to discussions and decisions will familiarize 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 every drop of functionality out of Trello.

Putting the Tools together with Browser Tab Based Workspaces

The best way to see how we use various tools is by having 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 regarding 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 every day. To get the scoop on integrating all the tools, please read the following wiki entry:

Watch our Videos

Our videos are great! Well, in theory - but right now they don't yet exist. We do intend to release a series of videos discussing the various aspects of the collective, but we don't have the people-power or time to create them right now. Maybe you can help? Tell us!

Familiarize 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 all its aspects; from agency work, to pro-bono translations and decision making, it's all in there. Please take some time to absorb this material, you will see a lot of it happening in practice, but a good familiarity with its working concepts will help clarify the different processes we employ in the collective.

  • This will include a link to both our 1.0 GT/GMC Governance Model and a "Intro 101/ 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

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).

As an open organization with no set structures, you can become quite the renaissance (wo)man and flit from task to task. Of course this can get confusing, and new members might prefer to adopt clearly defined roles for self-organization. To address this, we began a Loomio thread on work teams. We recommend that you read it comment there, to sign up to those workteams that inspire you.

Ask lots of questions and have fun!

Maybe the collective seems complex at first: once you get the big picture, however, you might find that it's a lot more streamlined than a traditional enterprise. The big difference is that you both have access and can contribute to all aspects of our particular enterprise. Everything we do, we do 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 practice getting the groups and subgroups right!) and there will be plenty of people there to help. You can also ask your buddy over chat!

List of Quick-Start Links

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