SWJ commencing phase 2 or our nefarious plan
We’re expanding our team. Can you help?
We’re looking to up the ante within this Small Wars Journal
endeavor of ours. As we continue our struggle toward world domination, we find
ourselves in dire need of talented and capable conspirators. We are moving
forward on our painfully overdue system upgrade, and trying to build out our
production and operations team so we can live well, work well, and play well
together to do more for the small wars community of interest.
It always makes Dave and me laugh (or cry) when we get
notes that refer to our "staff" or our "facility." Don’t get us wrong — we are
enriched by some fantastic advocates and supporters, a handful of volunteers
moderating the discussion board, all of our volunteer writers, and the active
participants in the online community. But at the end of the day, in large part
due to our own failings, it is still just two guys doing most of the nug work
out of our virtual offices. Not for much longer. We are growing.
We have a couple of positions looming into semblance of a
shape. You should see these as great opportunities to be involved rather than
as well defined, highly compensated career opportunities with promising growth
paths. Heck, we can’t even really pay ourselves. But we are looking to expand
our team with sharp and enthusiastic folks, and find a way to make it work for
them, us, and everyone.
These are roles rather than job descriptions; each has a
bit of an up-front project flavor to it with an enduring execution tail. We
expect you to bring some insight and vision to the position, and expand it in a
win-win way. We’re trying to frame these in terms where a palatable chunk of 10
or so hours per week is ample for success, though we realize that’s a wild guess
and it is recon pull — we’ll evolve together to further lump, divide, or build
out the cast of characters.
The big roles we’re framing now are:
- Advertising Manager (Banner King/Queen) — run our advertising
operations: rethink our ad inventory as we go through site redesign; enhance
our advertiser kit and the whole flow; outreach to, discussions with, and inking
deals with advertisers; monitor campaign execution. You have audacity, tact and hutzpah,
with the business, people, and operations sense to put it all together.
- Merchandise Manager (Schwag Tsar) — think up some nice
small wars stuff that our folks would like to have, and find a way to get it to
them. Not at a loss, but we’re more interested in building a brand and a
community than we are at selling cheap stuff to make an extra buck. Deal with
vendors, figure out some realistic inventory, and get ‘er done. Should have a keen eye for the difference between
stuff and junk, and think end to end as far as the logistics goes. Amateurs talk
t-shirts & coins, professionals talk fulfullment.
- Social Networking Manager (Grand Twit) — so we’ve got a
token Twitter and Facebook presence, but we aren’t doing much with it. There
are some untapped capabilities there and in our user profiles in vBulletin. We
haven’t done much in the way of facilitating local get togethers.
There’s tons we could do but aren’t because we just don’t have the
time. You have the vision and execution ability to do more smart stuff to
help more people get SWJ their way, and get together in ways that are
meaningful to them.
We’ve also got some more focused gaps where folks with some
specific talents can help us:
- Developer — if you’re competent on a LAMP box, we’ve got a
few office workflow things we’d like to have our system do more nicely. These
are distinct from our in-process migration to Drupal and we hope they are
discrete, interesting projects that can be feathers in your cap and arrows in
our quiver. If you’d like to drop a shoulder on some of it, send us a note for a short list of
specific things we’re interested in.
- Graphic Design (Style Guru) — so with all this redesign and
rework we’re doing, we need someone with a better eye than us fashion disasters. We’ll soon be doing the CSS work with our site
development team, and then there are a couple of collateral things that should synch
up for that clean, consistent, simple, functional, good looks. More Filson than
Guggenheim, but we want some restrained flair and perhaps you’re just the person
to dope slap us with it. We’ve got to make our 2009 Rolling Stone hotness even
hotter. Maybe this design gigs stops at the look & feel, maybe you drive
through that
to be more of a brand manager than a designer with excursions into content and
the whole IO thing — e.g. who knows what kind of junk that merchandise person is
going to try to schlep that is just inconsistent with our "look"?
Your call. But it starts with a sense of style.
We’ve got even more needs, but are a bit further out from being
able to engage when we find the right folks. So we’ll tighten that up ASAP.
For now, please know that
down the road a bit we’ll be looking for some more help in the areas of:
- Editorial and Production Assistants
- Fundraising & Outreach
- Office & Event Operations
- Content Gurus for various topic areas (~ library moderators / topic
guides)
Next steps? If you’re interested, talk to us. We have no
shortage of good ideas, what we lack is ability to execute (mostly
time-constrained); we’ll want to know that you have those in balance to be able
to come in as a value add. We need you to be able to run with intent and a
shared vision (don’t need a roadmap but won’t wander off the reservation
either), be a straight-shooter, represent us well, and get your own benefit or
joy out of doing this. Let us know what you can do for us and how we can make it
work for you.