Sept. 26, 2021, 7:05 p.m.

Interns Wanted!

Banner by shallowvenus | @shallowvenus

Interns Wanted

Dear Sukutomo Community:

I want to say that this community continually inspires me with its creativity and love for the franchise. You are all really amazing.

Where we're at

As you know, we're all volunteers. We do what we do out of love for the school idol community

About two years ago db0 passed the day to day management of this site over to a committee composed of Яна, Ryqoshay, Ryuko, and myself. In addition to the committee, we still have several other incredible staff members that still contribute to keeping things going. As time has passed, people have gotten busy with other obligations, and a lot more responsibility has fallen on me and the few active staff remaining.

The problem with that is that I'm unable to handle every task that I've taken on over the years. For those of you that don't know, I made a late-life career change a few years ago, and am now an attorney in just my second year of practice. Additionally, I'm an adjunct instructor at the Peoples College of Law. Suffice it to say that I'm always very overwhelmed and busy. You've probably noticed that things like the site news updates have essentially stopped, TBT stopped happening on Twitter, and we're not doing as much tweeting of franchise goods that brings in affiliate fees to help pay for the server costs.

We need help

As our staffing page says:

"School Idol Tomodachi is made by fans for fans. It's important for us to stay community-driven, that's why we want to get our community members involved as much as possible!"

I'd like to try something new. I'm calling for interns to train and then assist me and other staff with certain tasks instead of asking for a big commitment up front. As you intern, you can decide if you want to continue and become official staff, or if we should begin training someone else. Also, by breaking up some of the traditional staff roles into smaller, less demanding tasks, it might be easier to keep people on.

What we're looking for

People that want to participate in maintaining and growing the site and supporting the community. Knowing markdown helps, but that's something that can be learned. What's more important is consistency and enthusiasm. Any other skills you bring are a bonus.

I've created a list of available tasks that I'll start appending to the end of this post.

How to get started

UPDATE: we've switched to a simpler application form. Many thanks to MaralinaSakura for creating it.

Sound like something you'd like to try? We're still going to ask you to go through the application process and provide referrals. Once you've started doing that, contact me here in the comments of this post, or on my SIF twitter. We'll get you set up on discord, hackmd.io, and get you started.

Initial positions

Current intern positions will be community manager (CM) oriented. We need multiple interns for each task (you could work with a friend). You'll have tasks that will assist in CM. Here's some initial positions:

  • Merchandise curator: select merchandise from CDJapan, centralize, and prepare social media posts. End product looks like this. This is a hugely important role—the servers are expensive and these affiliate fees have always helped offset them. This task literally will help keep Sukutomo going.

  • News gatherer: collect and centralize franchise announcements and other news valuable to the community. When posted on the official account, you will be credited with a link to your sukutomo page for your scoops.

  • Idol birthday assistant: our birthday staffer could really use help. You help keep track of dates, select cards to use in posts, and help centralize and prepare social media posts.

  • Event assistant: our event staffers could really use help with the fan awards and other events. You help keep track of dates, help centralize information, and prepare social media posts.

  • Card promoter: love SIF cards? You would help keep track of new scouting boxes and promo cards, notify staff of cards not correctly marked in our database, help centralize information, and prepare social media posts.

  • Miscellaneous: there's a number of small tasks like creating TBT posts, creating additional content for our tumblr, etc.