Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Hey guys,

It's been a minute since my last update, so I figured I'd post an update here about what's been going on in my Gaia Life.

My New Role
I'm now officially the "Technical Lead" for the Sponsorship and Events teams. My responsibilities are very similar to what they used to be, except now I'm taking more charge in how things are done and on the scheduling of the team. It's affording me a lot of opportunities to streamline the process with the team -- streamlining the experience both for the salespeople/developers and for the end user.

Sponsorships
We've done a lot of good stuff with sponsorships lately -- aside from working with some really cool sponsors, like Halo Wars, Sonic, Coraline, etc. (BTW, if you haven't seen Coraline yet, I strongly recommend it. As many of you know, I love Neil Gaimain, and the movie did his work justice!)

On the development side, we've greatly reduced the time it takes to deliver on a sponsorship. What this means for you guys is that we've freed up the developers to focus on other things, like:

• Making sponsorships less confusing (soon, you will get your item directly from the theater - no need to start a quest, no need to go back and talk to an NPC)
  
• Developing new sponsorship tools/games to make them less repetetive - like doing minigames, custom sigs, releasing functional items, etc.
  
• Making sponsorships more stable
  
• Gaia Events. The sponsorship team and the event team have some amount of overlap on the production side (i.e., they share the same developers and artists) so these improvements in efficiency mean that we can dedicate more resources to events.
  

With some notable exceptions, our Sales team is also focusing more strongly on getting sponsorships that:

• Appeal to core Gaia users, such as video game sponsors, Anime sponsors, fantasy/sci-fi movie sponsors, non-lame movies and products, etc.
  
• Add something useful to the Gaia site. I mean, if you guys like it, then you'll use it, and the sponsors want you to like that they were a part of that.
  
• Won't piss you guys off
  

Of course, there will always be sponsors that DON'T fit into these categories -- but we'll continue to try to make stuff that is as unintrusive as possible and adds to your experience here when possible.

I have another post in the works about past events and upcoming events, and more about what 2009 looks like compared to 2008, but I'll save those for the next few weeks!