The Problem with OSO

So, OSO 8 is out, as well as OSO short 3. And the OSO game is almost done, which I thought I'd never get to say. We finally got the ad revenue donations all sorted out. What next? The voting period is over, so we should start working on writing OSO 9, right?

Well, OSO 8 took a really long time to make. Unacceptably long, according to many of you. And, you're right. How can a project as big as OSO, with so many animators and artists take longer to make than a BFDI episode of comparable length? And that's what I'm here to explain. But we need to go back to the start.

Why does OSO exist?

As we all know, OSO was created by Hexagon, an elusive figure in the OSC who's always causing things to happen. I went and sought out Hexagon and asked why:

... oh. Okay, well,

Why should OSO exist?

I was brought onto OSO as the third admin. At the time, I was more concerned with whether we could make OSO, rather than whether we should. And I came up with the basic structure for task assignment that we still use today. Over the years, I've realized it's important to ask why OSO should exist, and here's what I arrived at: OSO is where anyone in the OSC, at any skill level, can make their first mark.

The OSC is a big place, and everyone wants to put together a crew and make their own show. But sometimes, when you're starting out, it's hard to find a crew to be in, and it's hard to find people to assemble into your crew, especially when you have no portfolio. I do think "portfolio" is a needlessly professional-sounding word, but I wasn't sure how else to put it. OSO lets you demonstrate your hard-earned skills to the community, and it lets you hone them too.

My idea of OSO is that you should be able to always find something to do. You don't have to worry about thinking of ideas to animate, there'll always be some shot that needs you. If you want to develop practice as an audio engineer, well, you don't need to go hunting for voice actors now! It's an idealistic vision of OSO, one that OSO hasn't always been able to provide, but to me that's what it should be. What it can be.

But maybe not what it is.

Why does OSO struggle to exist?

The reason OSO takes so long to make isn't that there's "too much animation to do". No, actually it seems like there's always people eager to animate on OSO. The problem is assigning. And that's not the fault of our assigners either. If I were to blame anything, I guess it would be the assigning process, the one I came up with in 2019.

The Pipeline: an Assigner's job

For most steps in OSO, the assigner has to look at the list of people who signed up for a job, and start handing out assignments through discord DMs. They tell the assignee a lot of things. Here's the link to the thing you need to work on, here's the format that you need, here's your deadline, ask if you agree to the deadline, manage the deadline, grant extensions or revoke the assignment, you sent this in the wrong format, here's how to insert audio into flash, and so on.

It's not a problem that the artists need to be told these things, OSO is a place to learn and grow, and realize stuff about working in animation as a team that might not be obvious when working on your own.

The actual problem is that this is basically a full time job, or, it would be, if assigners were expected to assign at the speeds that the community expects.

Surely, there must be a better way to do this! And it's not like we haven't looked into it. We tried considering various automated solutions, but the infrastructure just isn't there. We would need to program a whole new bot for handling assignments, or maybe a website, or something, but either way, it's not something we can just snap our fingers and have ready.

Does that mean it's impossible to improve the system? No, it's not impossible. That's what we're here to figure out.

Makings of an Assigner

Because the role of an assigner is so important, it's very hard to find people who can do it. Lots of people are eager! But in order to be a good fit, you need to match the following criteria:

1. Willingness

Obviously it has to be someone who actually wants to do it. But they'll also need to want to do it for... basically forever. Every time an episode of OSO is finished, the people want more.

2. Capability

Not just anyone will do. It has to be someone with a good enough understanding of the various programs the artists use, that they can answer questions properly. They also need to be well-organized, and know how to use a filesystem, and spreadsheets at an advanced level. And most of all, they have to be good at communicating, not just to the artists, but to their fellow assigners, and everyone else involved.

3. Maturity

It's unethical to put someone in this kind of position if they're not an adult. But even people who've just turned 18 have important life responsibilities around them, like finishing high school, going to college, getting a real job, and so on. Ideally, an assigner would be someone a lot older than 18.

But who even matches all three criteria? In the OSC, we're running out. And even if we did find people who matched all three, it would be really taxing on them. And it has been, and if nothing changes, it will continue to be. It's a lot of work!

I mean, like I said, it's basically a full time job, for no pay. It isn't something anyone should be doing for free. But no one is ever going to get paid to do OSO. And that should never change.

An aside on OSO economics  

The OSO channel makes ad revenue. YouTube's policies state that even channels that aren't monetized still run the same number of ads, but those ads go straight to YouTube's pocket. So the OSO community decided a long time ago that we'd enable monetization and donate all of the earnings to charity, instead. To this day, 100% of the channel's earnings have been donated, and we won't go back on that.

There are a lot of reasons OSO can't switch to paying people with that ad revenue, instead of donating it. Not only is it mired in ethical problems without clear solutions, but it goes against the values of the project to turn it into a source of income. There shouldn't be a profit incentive to make OSO.

OSO has deadlines, but those are at the small scale, for individual artists with their individual tasks, and their purpose is to motivate the artists and teach time management skills. Assigners are instructed to be lenient with deadlines and offer extensions. But more importantly, at a bigger scale, OSO doesn't have planned episode release dates. If OSO became someone's livelihood, or, many people's livelihoods, we would need to force episodes to come out at a consistent schedule, to make sure people could be paid, and that would create crunch. The purpose of OSO isn't to make as many episodes as possible. The purpose is to be fertile ground for artists in the OSC to flourish.

It also wouldn't be good to, say, only pay the admins and assigners. This is going to sound obvious. But the people on top shouldn't monetarily benefit from the passionate work of teens in the OSC.

So no one gets paid. And that's how it should be. But that means it's hard to motivate assigners to do a job's worth of work for free. And that burden falls on admins too.

The future of OSO

We have to admit that part of why OSO can be slow at times is that admins can't put 100% of their focus on the project. Admins necessarily have to be adults, but that means they have lives and jobs that they need to focus on, more than a volunteer project.

Naturally, hearing about this, your first thought is probably, "well, if the current ownership of OSO doesn't feel like making it, why not find new owners?"

I'd love to find new owners for OSO. But it can't be just anyone. It needs to be someone who's economically stable enough to put the focus into the project that it deserves. It has to be someone who loves the OSC enough to always want to keep it moving. It has to be someone with an intimate understanding of the whole animation production process, so they can stay flexible and make important decisions. It has to be someone who can conduct themselves with the proper level of professionalism to be in charge of a project with such a large number of volunteers. And it has to be someone who's not faint of heart, because they have to moderate that large number of volunteers, and all of the interpersonal conflict that spins out from it.

There could very well be no one on earth willing to do this for free, and I should be clear that if we can't find a realistic and ethical path forward for OSO, it might have to get cancelled.

So let's talk

So let's talk. OSO can't keep going like this. For OSO to continue to exist, something needs to change, and we want to hear from you, the community, how we should do that, who should be in charge of it, and where to go with it. We've reached the limit of what we know how to do to keep OSO going, and, in the spirit of OSO, or perhaps the spirit of the OSC as a whole, we've decided it's up to the community to decide what happens.

Comment on this video^{(well, go back to the video and do that)} with your thoughts, or join the discord for the discussion. We want to hear from everyone. Young and old, from within the OSC and from outside of it too. My only wish is that OSO stays a place for young artists to grow, or dies trying.