Is the website live? No. (Although we’re about to be on the other side of our domain troubles.) Is the dataset complete? Almost! Still, this is the week of finishing touches. It has to be. For me, as outreach and UX design lead, it meant writing website copy and preparing as much as I can for when we do launch the website early next week. 

Our plan was always to re-engage our community via email sends. Some research helped me decide that I wanted that to happen via Mailchimp, which would allow us to add a sign-up field to our website footer. The other half of our outreach strategy consisted of spreading our links — to the website, the GitHub, the Are.na board and (why not, I thought) the email sign-up — like spores in the wind with the goal of planting them in as many high-touch places as possible. If all a link can do is sit there and wait to be clicked, I want that to happen somewhere where it might be found by someone who would appreciate where it leads to. But these seeds needed a package, something to keep them bundled together as we passed around our feeds. I impulsively started throwing together a Linktree page during the last hour of our second-to-last class and I was pleased to learn that it also had a handy QR code generator that offered all the customization features I was looking for all semester. 

All of this was being built with Thursday’s showcase, and nothing else, in mind. I’d been obsessing over how to make the path from presentation to email sign up as frictionless and inviting as possible:The Linktree is the business card; the website is the storefront; everything else is a billboard. The end of our presentation will display our QR code, in our signature colors with our logo integrated. When audience members scan, it will lead them to our Linktree, a visually seamless extension of our website, that will prompt them to subscribe to our newsletter and include links to the website, the dataset repository, and the Are.na board. A welcome email will automatically plant more links into their inbox, for future reference or immediate use.

Turns out, a couple hundred dollars is the difference between future reference and immediate use. Free trials of premium features across both platforms – Mailchimp and Linktree – made sure we had everything we needed to keep it all together through Thursday. To consider the possibility of spending down the budget, meant picturing ourselves a year from now, when the annual subscriptions would lapse and we’d have to decide if the money was well-spent. Would we be telling people to subscribe to our newsletter in May 2027? Would the renewal notice remind us of something we abandoned a year ago?

As I tested the Linktree and added my teammates as admins to the Mailchimp, I documented the passwords, API keys, hex codes used, emoji Unicodes. I downloaded the png’s of the customized QR code in our two main colors into our shared Google Drive and wondered how any of us would be able to navigate it should we find ourselves in need of some link or bit of information at any time in the near or distant future. What kind of posterity was I planning for, and why did this question suddenly eclipse the urgency of being ready for Thursday’s showcase?

As I waited for the group chat to respond to these questions, I found myself adding a “Post-Mortem One-Sheet” to our shared document. One place that would make it easy to ensure that are links remain unbroken, that anything with the words “AI Hallucinations Project” has the right colors and the right emojis, that the QR code always works and that if anything needs to be refreshed or retrieved, it wouldn’t take any digging. All this busywork that required me to refer back to some decisions made over the last few weeks — retrieve links, approved color HEX codes, recall the typefaces we used for the website, etc., — made me realize the bulk of the project was already behind us. Despite the final-mile-stress, most of the work had indeed already been done and, at the very least, we have one long Google doc full of links, blog posts, and meeting notes to prove it. And I can’t think of a better time to start making plans for how to preserve it all.