To everyone who gave this a go: thank you so much! Constructive criticism is not a new thing, but running this event was new to me. Thank you for being patient with me and bringing a lot of thought and generosity.

I think everyone has received their 2+ pieces of feedback, but please tell me if I'm wrong so I can fix that. This round is roughly over, but it's never quite over as long as people who signed up are still interested in feedback. See the open-for-concrit tag. You can take that tag off your own post any time, or ask me to.

What worked / Improvements

How did this work for you, and how might you have liked it to work instead?

I have a few notes on my thoughts. Responses or completely different thoughts are welcome.

Mod notes

Hand-matching. I made this more complicated for myself than I had to, and started to contemplate AO3 matching or google forms, but by the end of matching, I was fond of hand-matching again. Sending out assignments gradually worked for me. I think the sign-up form was overcomplicated. One question I would definitely include if making a similar form in future is "Do you want to read smut? Do you want to read non-smut? Do you want to read both smut and non-smut?" I know people are willing to read outside their comfort zone sometimes, and I appreciate that, but porn/not porn was a fairly frequent divider in sign-ups.

Platform for sign-ups. I think there are benefits to individual Dreamwidth posts. How did you find them? I think the process of people submitting a sign-up, then me approving them and telling people to make their own post, was a bit cumbersome for everyone and could be improved. For example, I could just set posts to moderated and approve them.

Platform for concrit. I think the principle of "post where your recipient asks you to" generally works. I was very grateful for people who posted in places that weren't DW comments and then promptly told me where they'd posted - that was really helpful. Commenting on the recipient's DW post to say "Note for mod, I have posted where asked" or whatever would probably work too, and be a little easier to keep track of.

Platforms in general. I discovered I am woefully unfamiliar with fanfiction.net. I also noted that my instructions on posting to Dreamwidth were lacking - ie, you have to join the community to post to it. Some general notes on platform features might be a helpful resource - maybe?

The concrit guide. This was meant as a starting point if you were stuck or uncertain, rather than strict rules. I'm not sure how helpful it was - for one thing, my impression is that everyone taking part this round already had grounding in and confidence about how to give feedback. Is it needed at all? Improvements welcome.

Replying to concrit. Does there need to be any mod guidance about that? I saw skill and thoughtfulness in giving concrit, but I also got the impression people were pleased or relieved to be told their thoughts had been useful. I'm not going to make a "you must reply" policy, but I'm happy to frame it as a normal thing, or make suggestions about how - "Try not to argue with your concrit giver, they can't change their first impression..."

Fandoms. This came up, so: I know this would be exponentially more useful to some people if matching on fandoms, but I don't think that's possible for a small event drawing from multifandom participants.

Btw, thank you specifically to the two people who signed up to get assignments only - that made things a lot easier for me as a mod.

Madness

I was thinking I'd make this post and leave it a few days, then put up a single Madness post where people could comment requesting feedback. No new requests after X date. Keen? Tell me! And if so, please check back.