I may be slightly biased, but I thought it was a good term.
Here comes a wall of text!
Commenting in response to Bren... what the last few terms have shown is that it's difficult to do the job justice when you're at our life stage. The experience factor means that these teams
should be better than teams from back in the day, and so our expectations are higher than they historically were, for the quality of events... while we also tend to have less time and/or less of a desire to spend that time working on these activities.
The problem with running a term based on activity is that there's no substitute for activity, and for activity, you need time. At first, we thought we had it figured out. While most of y'all work jobs and have progressed in real life, I haven't so much, which meant that I
historically have had ridiculous amounts of free time for these kinds of things. So, the expectation was that Bren would provide ToO-specific experience and an 'inside angle' while I would go on a tear and do my best to 'purchase' forum activity and success with my time. I knew that, by itself, was achievable, based on my previous online experience. The trouble is that I wanted to do this, do
other productive electronic things outside of the forum, and then still have real things properly prioritized.
It worked pretty well
for the forum for a few weeks, but I'm a novice at time management, and my thinking and posting styles tend to be slow-paced anyway.
(This post probably took me at least an hour, and I'm still not quite satisfied with it.) I quickly lapsed from being a 'part-time worker' back into my old habit of it being an 'all-consuming passion'. That
may have been acceptable when I was younger, but as you've surmised from my earlier topic on this subject, I can't afford it now, and so I wiped out.
Of course, bookworm filled the position, but he was already a key player on the team. (In fact, I'd argue that his appointment didn't really change his impact so much as recognize it.) Back in the day, when there were lots of members and you could always find someone to fill a gap, you might have been able to characterize this as a straight swap (bookworm for Bob), but here it was more like the team just losing someone and not getting a replacement. When a person you lose is also a person who you hoped would drive activity, in an activity-oriented term, that's a hit. Then there were other circumstances that came up that caused y'all to have even less time, yourselves, than you already had. No amount of experience or brilliance
(and I feel confident saying term 39 Bren/bookworm could match up against any other team in ToO history in those areas) is enough to overcome the lack of time to act on those qualities.
If you had someone who was more stable and balanced than me, even if they weren't as 'spectacular', you could have spread the activity across the term more evenly, so things would have gone smoothly throughout the term and you'd have ended on a 'high note'. As it is, I think the term took on something like a rocket's trajectory - an incredible surge powered by an unsustainable engine, then a glide down after running out of energy. Maybe the average performance was the same as if it were steadier, but with a recency bias, what you remember is how it ended. (It also doesn't help that I pumped our expectations up sky-high early on, so that almost anything less than a miraculous, forum-rejuvenating, record-setting term would have seemed to fall short.) But if we more fairly and objectively analyze your accomplishments, we can see that the team was still notably successful:
Social Media Advocacy - ✓
St. Patrick's Day event - ✓
Live Chats - ✓ ✓ ✓; you had three, and since the original platform post only mentioned one, that's technically three times as much as promised.
Forum Changes - ✓
Random Tidbits - ✓
Anniversary - ✓
This doesn't count or provide details for a lot of little things that set the stage for future improvements. While you haven't been re-elected, you do have a mandate (as assistants to the administration) to continue your efforts to further the forum. That means that there's some room to finish some of that 'unfinished business'.
Even if things might not have gone exactly how you or I hoped when the term started, they plausibly went better than some of our members expected a few months back
. There's a lot to 'B' positive about!
