Zarf Updates

You may recall that my term as an IFTF board member ended in March. I've now also stepped back as the chair of NarraScope; Matt Griffin and JD Calvelli will be running that show in 2025. (More news on that front soon!)

This leaves me with two big IFTF roles: Treasurer and IF Archive lead. I'm happy with the IF Archive job; I figure I'll hold onto that for a while. But it's getting to be time to hand off the Treasurer job. I've been doing that since, well, since day one.

In fact, I've been doing a lot of work for IFTF that's agglomerated under the "Treasurer" job. I'm the person who sets up servers, pays the bills, tracks donations, configures the email system, keeps most of the passwords for services like AWS... a whole litany of tasks where I've said "Yeah, I'll just do that real quick" because that was easier than delegating.

So we've decided that I should have two successors:

• Treasurer: Manage the bank account and Paypal account; track all expenses and donations; make sure the bills are paid.
• Tech Officer: Manage the core online services (web hosting, domain registrations, email); set up new services when needed; general sysadmin work.

Note that the Tech Officer does not have to administer IFTF's service sites: IntFiction.org, IFDB, IFWiki, IFComp.org, and so on. Each of those programs has a committee and admins to keep them running. The Tech Officer's job is to manage the cloud services we use (Linode, AWS, Github, etc) and make sure the committees have the resources they need.

Obviously these are high-trust positions! We will primarily be considering candidates whose names we know -- people have been active in the IF and IFTF community for a while. Yes, this is a clique-y thing to say, but it just doesn't make sense to bring in a total stranger and give them the keys to the bank account or the servers.

So it's a little weird for me to be posting this on social media. I know! But it's worth getting the word out, and after all, a lot of my followers are folks that I know.

To everybody else: you are awesome too! There's plenty of scope to drop into the IFTF forum or Discord and say "Hey, I'm new here, I'd like to help out, what can I do?" Just, you know, probably not Treasurer on day one.

Okay, awkward part over. Interested in one of these jobs? Check out our forum post! (Which I posted last week; apologies if you've seen it multiple times.)

The doc attached to that post has the info for applying. The post also has estimates of how much work each role takes. (Fuzzy estimates, because it varies quite a bit.)

Oh, and don't worry -- I will give my successors a good long ramp-up for the job(s). And then I'll stick around as advisor to explain any surprises. I don't expect you'll be completely settled in for a full year, since, you know, IFTF does a lot of things that happen exactly once a year.

Thanks for your interest!