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- Purpose of "Portkey Spotlight" Project:
Since 2008, Portkey staff have urged members to "rediscover what we like about our ships, this site and the fandom.
" This project would assist us all with that by featuring people who've contributed in making Portkey (PK) the fun place we remember it to be. - How do we pick whom to feature?
It's not a scientific process. We basically look around our forum, art and fanfic pages to see whose names crop up in there. Then we also get suggestions from our teammates. A big factor would be if we could get hold of those suggested people soon.
We also consider if the nominees have already been featured in similar projects** or if they're members of Portkey's staff. If they fall under either or both situations, then we'd normally put off featuring them until sometime after our 5th issue.
** like The Anvil Ezine.com's "Harmonian of the Month", which inspired this project - Why don't we survey PK-ers at large on whom they'd like to see featured in future issues?
Because we don't want to set expectations we couldn't deliver. It's easy for anyone to suggest names, but it's hard to track those people down and to interview them later. Hence, if you really want to see someone featured in this project, then your best shot would be to volunteer for that particular interview. - Shortcomings of Interview Topics, Process and Issues
OUR INTERVIEWING SKILLS, OR LACK THEREOF:
Haha, we freely admit that our output wouldn't be magazine-worthy.
See, we're just like any PK member in that we're HP fanatics with family, school or work obligations. Only a couple of us would make good pro journalists.
We therefore ask everyone to excuse our inefficiencies and inadequacies. Some questions might sound redundant, poorly-worded or all over the place. We really wish we could do better, but then we could look at it this way: these interviews are intended to be casual chats between HP friends, not between pro journalists and future celebrities (though our interviewees deserve to be that).
OUR CONVERSATIONS MIGHT FEEL TOO BRIEF OR LACKING SOMEHOW:
This is due not only to our lack of interviewing skills but also to compromises we have to make in order to sustain this project. See, in the past, we've often delayed in initiating our Q & As because we wanted to formulate a complete set of talking points. We've since realized that this practice would threaten this project's sustainability, so we decided to cut time and other pressures by treating each Spotlight issue as conversation starters which any other PK member could join in afterwards in the forums. Therefore, we encourage everyone to continue the conversation by posting your comments or questions on each Spotlight issue's forum thread.
What's that Reply button for? 
OUR UNFAMILIARITY WITH SOME INTERVIEWERS' WORK:
Some of us project staff were not active in the fandom at the time our interviewees were. This results in questions that aren't as customized as we'd want them to be, yet we have to balance this with our desire to give our featured people their deserved place in the sun. If we put off talking to them until we familiarize ourselves better with their fandom output, we might never get to interview them. In our opinion, the best solution would be for other Portkey-ers (that means you, readers) to participate in the Q & A before and after we put them up in the forums.
HOW WE COMMUNICATE WITH OUR SUBJECTS:
We usually ask our interviewees their preferred method of talking to us. We've often used email primarily due to time zone gaps which could go as much as 12 to 15 hours. We also normally start by sending our interviewees plenty of questions, many of which could be bunched together.
ESL (ENGLISH AS A SECONDARY LANGUAGE) ISSUES:
Many of us "interviewer-wannabes" are ESL speakers, so some of our wording may sound stilted, blunt, grammatically wrong, or confusing. Please excuse that as none of it's intentional. We wouldn't mind you pointing out those stuff to us.
OTHER INEFFICIENCIES WITH OUR INTERVIEW PROCESS:
We're really thankful to all the people we've talked to so far for their patience with how we've handled their Q&As. They've often had to wait for weeks before hearing from us again. When they do, they deal with our redundant or poorly-prepared talking points. They're kind enough to understand that we often prepare our questions after we're done with our real life obligations, therefore we're not as alert as we'd like to be in catching mistakes. Some of our teammates work on this project while waiting for their flights, while others before they go to sleep.
Also to date, our team members have had to deal with extraordinary circumstances such as H1N1 quarantines, storm calamities (officially declared by our govt too), moving to another region and preparing for new jobs or additional job responsibilities; on top of things like internet downtimes or power blackouts. - Release Dates:
Expect us to publish interviews 1-3 months after we've initiated contact with our subjects. This is because we naturally expect everyone involved to have limited time for this project.