[Note: There will be 2 Q&A posts total, covering all the topics brought up during the user-submitted Q&A period. Candidates were limited to 300 words per answer.]
What makes you unique as a candidate? What do you think makes you stand out against the others running for Board this year?
I’m very happy to remain as an individual contributor and continue volunteering my skills within the organization outside of service on the Board of Directors, particularly given my motivation for running was to ensure a properly contested election with viable candidates. At this point, I think that any of the other three candidates would make excellent members of the Board and I’m happy to stand back and let them take center stage to showcase themselves during the election.
Election candidates rarely have clearances to all the Board-level details of the OTW history and inner workings, and may have questionable assumptions about the Org, yet you are still expected to answer public queries about them. What is your strategy in term of research and fact-check to address that?
I have limited myself to answering questions based off of information available to any volunteer within the organization. While the various committees usually welcome candidates to reach out to them when we receive questions regarding their projects and work, I felt that I should let the other candidates who are running on more serious platforms take up that potentially limited bandwidth.
The OTW moves so slowly in part because a lot of work is spread between few people. How do you plan on evaluating the OTW’s recruitment strategy to increase the number of volunteers, alongside improving safety, satisfaction, and balance of work so existing volunteers stay longer?
Broadly speaking, recruitment strategy (including when and how many people to recruit) is up to the individual committees as they are the most familiar with their workload. The Board can and should support them during these times. Where the Board can have greater direct impact would be to continue the work they’re doing to improve the overall organization culture, prioritizing important projects (like the paid staff plan), and assisting committees who are implementing new initiatives that will overall improve the organization (such as the new ICCR subcommittee & organization handbook).
As majority of you have been with the OTW for quite a long time (6-10+ years), how do you prepare yourself to counter the cultural inertia that has been entrenched across various parts of the organisation?
The Board in the recent months and years has done an admirable job of moving and responding quickly to various issues and challenges posed throughout the organization, with assistance from various existing and new committees. I would be happy to contribute to that effort. I feel that the most important way for us to move forward and truly address this will be by adding on paid staff – I’ve been incredibly pleased to see the strides made towards that goal in the past few months in particular.
Past events have resulted in a total devaluation of Board work and Board of Directors — Board of Directors is the legally responsible for the OTW. How familiar are you with the Board purview, duty, mandate in either typical nonprofit background or the OTW specific case?
Quite familiar actually! The Board’s duty is governance. The Board should remain concerned with big picture planning, addressing structural issues within the org, and supporting day-to-day operations by the committees that make up the organization.
Increasingly the ways in which the OTW’s institutional inertia disempowers volunteers and erodes general trust in the OTW have come to light, how do you plan to motivate structural change within the organization?
Big ships steer slow. That’s kind of part and parcel to having grown into as big of an organization as we have today. Many volunteers have made changes which have improved this, and there are a myriad of improvements that we can continue to make all around. “Perfect is the enemy of good” often comes to mind when I think about some of the structural problems in the organization. That being said, there is only so much that one person or group can do to influence the organization as a whole. I feel that the best way to impact and improve the organization in this way is for the Board to continue to be public about their work and the ways in which they improve their own internal culture.
Recent controversies within the OTW have made many fans hesitant to donate their time or money to the organization. What would you say to those fans who are hesitant?
While there have been recent controversies, the organization continues to move forward in order to accomplish its mission. We are continuously changing and evolving on several levels – as individual volunteers, our committees, and the organization as a whole. We hit stumbling blocks and might slow down for a bit, but inevitably we recover and continue the work we’ve done for the past (nearly) 17 years. Work is constantly being done in order to improve the organization internally and externally. If you feel that your time or money can help to support that mission, then we welcome your contributions. However, please remember that while donating time or money is always appreciated, you need to take care of yourself first – the organization will be here another day if you are still open to donating either your time or money.
If you could time travel back to when the OTW started, what would you have changed/warned people about?
- Put more thought into how members can take action beyond simple Board elections.
- Build more concrete methods for holding misbehaving or similarly “rogue” Board members accountable for their actions.
- More closely evaluate the core Archive tagging interface for users (primary vs secondary character & relationship split, procedures for adding new mandatory warnings, etc).
- Keep the characteristics of non-written word media types in mind when designing the Archive interface.