Production Period: Sep 2021 – Apr 2022
Platform: Web (www.eolt.org)
CMS: contentful
Roles: Managing Editor / Product Owner
Responsibilities:
- Alignment of all stakeholders
- Development of visual and brand identity
- Design and implementation of invitation, submission, review, and publication processes
- Hiring and liaising with a web developer
- Editing
The Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms is an online encyclopedia serving as an effective first entry point to game studies for students, scholars, and professionals alike. It contains 29 articles of renown scholars, covering a broad range of topics, from ontology, over monetization, to level design.
I was hired in 2021 to bring the long promised project to life. With only 7 months to the planned release date, this was not an easy task, as we started out with fundamental questions such as: “Who is our target audience?” and “What will the management structure look like”?
What I Learned
The hard skills I learned were mostly in the area of web development, hosting, and markdow language (and conversion). However, the project turned out to be enjoyably challenging, as it brought together stakeholders with wastly different perspectives: Our board of editors had long meetings about review structure and potential authors. The communication with authors was often asynchronous due to different time zones, and their time incredibly limited, both due to their own workload and due to our short notice request. Finally, the web developer was used to a fast-paced startup culture, with clear design documentation and user stories, all prioritized and action-pointed from meetings. It was a bit of a clash of worlds.
In the end, I successfully delivered the online encyclopedia on time for a conference in April 2022. Quickly learning agile and software development lifecycle procedures, managing scientific statekholder efficiently, creating explicit action points and agendas, as well as delegating all possible tasks to qualified members of the project helped me achieve this.