Category: 2015

Bio

Andrea Horbinski is the Secretary of the OTW Board of Directors and a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2015 she was elected to the position of Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Ada Initiative, which was dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow to Japan and served as the chair of the OTW’s Internationalization & Outreach committee before being elected to the OTW Board in 2012. She joined online fandom in 1999 after writing her graduation speech on her love of Star Wars, and soon became involved in anime and manga fandom as an AMV editor and later a fan translator. She has discussed fandom, anime, manga, and Japanese history and folklore at conventions and conferences on five continents, and her articles and reviews have appeared in The WisCon Chronicles vol. 6, Mechademia, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

Manifesto

1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?

I have acquired a wealth of practical experience through my service on the OTW Board of Directors and on the Board of Directors of the Ada Initiative, and I’m eager to continue to use my skills and expertise to strengthen the OTW and help to support its mission. Moreover, the Board has become a place where my skills and experience are not just valuable, but valued, which makes the choice to run for another term easy.

2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?

The skills and experience I bring to the Board of Directors are a combined three and a half years’ service on Boards of Directors (a year and a half of which is as a Secretary), a total of seven years’ experience with the OTW in various roles, and a broad familiarity with other organizations working in the fields of open source and open culture. For instance, this year I served on the reviewers committee of the Inspire campaign, a Wikimedia Foundation effort to increase gender diversity on Wikipedia and its related projects through funding community-proposed efforts, and I’m also currently the Video Archivist for WisCon, working to digitize and make available the con’s rich history as a feminist science fiction convention. All these experiences have made me broadly familiar with several different organizational models as well as what sorts of policies, structures, and philosophies make for a well-run organization in general.

3. What goals would you like to achieve during your term?

I’m concerned that this question’s phrasing gives people an inaccurate idea of how the OTW Board (or any board) works! As directors, we’re responsible for the overall management and governance of the OTW, so the fundamental goal for any director’s service is to have executed their responsibilities to the best of their ability in order to best serve the organization and its mission. That said, the Board’s overall goal for the next three years is clear: to work to implement the OTW’s strategic plan by supporting Strategic Planning and VolCom in their work, by working with various committees to execute the goals identified in the plan that relate to them and their projects, and by doing the work to carry out the goals related to its own roles. So on one level, that’s the goal I want to work with the rest of the Board to achieve; but more broadly, in three years I want the OTW to be a non-profit organization with a growing budget that is well-positioned for long-term sustainability. To be clear, this is a challenge, but it’s one that we–the OTW as a whole–are completely capable of meeting.

4. What is your experience of the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Please include AO3, TWC, Fanlore, our Legal Advocacy work, and Open Doors, though feel free to emphasize particular areas you’re interested in.

As a member of the Board of Directors I’ve interacted with all of the committees responsible for these projects over the past three years, and in my personal and professional life outside the OTW I interact with all of them in various capacities: AO3 is the primary place where I consume fanfic at this point (though never as much as I’d like!); I’ve published a scholarly article with TWC and have cited the essays it publishes in my own academic work; Fanlore has explained to me many things about fandom(s) that I didn’t know; and the OTW’s legal advocacy work has been very important in working to defend and extend protections for my experience of the internet in various ways, not least among them its efforts to secure DMCA exemptions for vidding practices, since I am a vidder. Open Doors and its work have inspired me to think carefully and critically about archives, archiving, and the value of doing the same for non-digital fandom history, which helped me formulate my goals for my work as the Video Archivist for WisCon.

It’s an unfortunate reality of the OTW Board of Directors as it currently stands that executing our dual responsibilities of governance and management mean that we don’t really have much time to actively collaborate with the committees we’re overseeing. It’s far more often the pattern that committees come to us with proposals for various projects, which we then review: most of our collaboration consists of working with committees in this phase to address concerns they may have missed in their initial proposal(s), sometimes because those concerns involve aspects of organizational operations that they’re not familiar with because they fall under the Board’s purview. I look forward to continuing to work with these committees to grow the OTW’s projects!

5. Choose two topics/issues that you think should be high priority for the OTW, both internally and externally. What do these topics mean to you and why do you value them? How will you make them a part of your service?

One question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is sustainability. The topic first came up for me as part of the discussions about shutting down the Ada Initiative, and though that was the right choice for Ada, it’s obviously not for the OTW: so, what do we need to do to make sure that the OTW is sustainable over the long term, not just three but five or ten or twenty years down the line? There are still a lot of choke points in the OTW where we ask too much of individual volunteers or don’t have adequate provisions for the loss of key people (in a “hit by a bus” scenario, or for whatever reason), and dealing with those failure points is definitely a big part of making the OTW sustainable. Executing the strategic plan will help towards that sustainability as well, obviously, but it’s something I think we on the Board have only started to surface explicitly in our thinking, and we can and should do that more going forward.

Another question I’ve been thinking about is visibility. One thing that I sometimes find frustrating in my conversations with people around the world is that they haven’t heard of the OTW, or if they have, they only know about the AO3–and plenty of AO3 users have no idea that AO3 is a project of and supported by OTW! There’s clearly plenty of scope for the OTW to be more visible in the spaces of open culture and open source activism and to advocate in more visible ways for fandom and fanworks as legitimate activities outside the legal sphere, and doing so would be in service to our mission. That’s easier said than done, of course, but it’s another task that will ultimately strengthen the organization.

6. What do you think the key responsibilities of a/the Board are? Are you familiar with the legal requirements for a US-based nonprofit board of directors?

The key responsibilities of the Board of Directors are stated in the bylaws: the Board is responsible for the overall governance of the OTW in service to its mission, and since the Board has not delegated any of its responsibilities to a paid employee like an executive director or director of operations, that means the Board is also currently responsible for the OTW’s day-to-date management. As Secretary, one of my key responsibilities is to maintain the OTW’s bylaws; thanks to that, my service on the Board of Directors of the OTW and of the Ada Initiative, and my work with other organizations, I am very familiar with the legal requirements for a U.S. based non-profit.

7. How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

I am not currently serving in any other OTW roles.

Elections Committee Note: on Sept. 14, a typo was fixed in the response to question 4 (first paragraph, last sentence) with the permission of the candidate.

Bio

Aline has a Law degree. She has worked in consumer protection and civil law and is currently continuing her education to work as a civil servant. Aline discovered fandom back when Harry Potter was taking over the world and never left. She joined the OTW in 2013 as a tag wrangler and slowly got involved in other parts of the organization; she’s now staff in Support and Translation. In Support, she’s addressed concerns, questions and feedback from users; in Translation, she manages over 150 volunteers and has completed projects with strict timelines in an atmosphere of constant and productive team-wide communication.

Manifesto

1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?

I believe I have valuable experience to bring to the Board as a member of several OTW committees and liaison to yet another. It’s useful to have people from a variety of committees on the Board; different teams have different experiences and needs, and bringing in people who have had contact with how work is getting done successfully in various projects will help Board have a broader perspective on the OTW and its committees.

Also, managing Translation volunteers has given me insight into working with a hugely international and diverse group of people, an experience I hope will help getting the Board and the committees working toward the same goals.

2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?

I have worked for the past year managing volunteers for the OTW’s Translation committee, overseeing independent teams with different needs, goals, and capacities. Some of the diverse tasks required include arranging and leading meetings with people from all over the world; recruiting and training volunteers and staffers; handling 50-100 emails a day on average; writing internal documentation; leading and participating in projects big and small; and collaborating with a large number of committees. Because Translation works with several parts of the OTW, I have learned to work closely with other teams while taking into consideration their needs and specific restrictions. I believe these experiences will be very helpful when stepping up to Board work.

I have carried out a great deal of personnel management and project coordination in the org, and have learned what works and what doesn’t work. I believe right now the OTW needs, more than anything else, the ability to organize itself in a practical and goal-oriented way so our volunteers’ and projects’ objectives can be reached in a reasonable timeframe with a minimal amount of hassle for all involved. I think my experience so far can be very helpful with that.

3. What goals would you like to achieve during your term?

I want to achieve a Board that is more open to feedback and receptive: one that fully acknowledges that committees are in the best position to determine what their day-to-day needs and goals are, and that works towards supporting and enabling these goals without creating unnecessary obstacles or delays. A Board committed to answering questions, proposals and requests in a timely and comprehensive fashion, taking into consideration that everyone’s time and skills are valuable and need to be respected.

I would like to see a Board that is comfortable being open about their plans and explaining the background and content of their decisions to the rest of the organization and the membership. That is able to communicate openly and inform the OTW’s volunteers about ongoing discussions in an accessible and understandable format, and whose members can put grudges and fraught personal histories behind them and work with committees and staff in a productive way.

The OTW would benefit from a Board that accepts that plans and “best practices,” while useful, need to be adapted to the reality at hand and our very particular circumstances; and that habits, procedures and tools should always be subject to change as the OTW grows.

4. What is your experience of the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Please include AO3, TWC, Fanlore, our Legal Advocacy work, and Open Doors, though feel free to emphasize particular areas you’re interested in.

I’m a longtime AO3 user, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I access the site at least once a day—even aside from being a wrangler and part of the AO3 Support team, working closely with all other committees that maintain the Archive. I have also had contact with all other OTW projects to different degrees, be it through looking up an article on Fanlore, translating a news post about Legal’s work, or contacting Open Doors to talk about an archive import announcement.

I think what our projects need is support that empowers them and helps them to do their work as well as possible. The best way to collaborate with any of those committees and projects is to accept first and foremost that each of them is different, and has a distinct culture and environment. As a result, we should listen to what the committees tell us, understand how they work, and plan and act accordingly as much as possible. If, for example, Open Doors needs a new tool, or Fanlore needs more staffers, or AO3 coders need to hire a contractor, we should facilitate these things to allow the committees to do their work.

5. Choose two topics/issues that you think should be high priority for the OTW, both internally and externally. What do these topics mean to you and why do you value them? How will you make them a part of your service?

Accountability: I would like to see a change in how accountability is currently a one-way street in the OTW. Committees are expected to keep open, clear, and up-to-date meeting minutes and agendas; to report monthly on what they have been doing to Board and to other committees; to present well-researched proposals whenever they’re thinking of doing anything; and to document their internal procedures and structures thoroughly. This standard is not followed by the Board and this has to change. The Board should abide by the same level of accountability that is expected of OTW committees—it should lead by example, not lag years behind.

In more practical terms, this means discussing non-personnel matters in open meetings by default, except when explicitly requested otherwise by the committees or people involved; keeping meeting agendas and minutes accessible and understandable, with context and relevant information about decisions made; reporting monthly to all volunteers and committees about what the Board has been working on regularly; and keeping Board’s wiki section up to date with relevant documentation about its internal structure, responsibilities, roles, roadmap, projects and non-personnel matters under discussions. OTW volunteers shouldn’t find out about major org news from twitter or tumblr; there should be internal communication of what’s going on, and currently there is absolutely none.

Cross-committee collaboration: There is far less cross-committee collaboration in the OTW than there could and should be: we lack the tools, the open communication channels, and the flexibility. It makes everyone mostly unaware of what everyone else is doing—and getting anything done together is unnecessarily difficult. We need to work to facilitate more talking between different committees, without tying that to a rigid format or hierarchy. Moving away from choke points in communication can only benefit the OTW and we should do all we can to acquire the tools and create the environment that will make this possible.

6. What do you think the key responsibilities of a/the Board are? Are you familiar with the legal requirements for a US-based nonprofit board of directors?

I’ve done some reading into the legal requirements for nonprofits in Delaware, where the OTW is incorporated, and more specifically with what is expected of nonprofit directors under US law: essentially, legal, management and financial oversight, executed with due care, with loyalty to the membership, and in good faith.

Board has the responsibility to uphold the goals and mission of the OTW and its projects, and to support the volunteers working to achieve said goals. This means not only networking with other organizations and individuals working towards the same objectives, but also making sure all committees and staff have the tools they require to do their work. Board has a duty to supervise the financial well-being of the organization, and to ensure that fundraising, spending and accounting are happening responsibly, honoring all the fans who have entrusted us with their donations. Board should communicate with chairs effectively and behave with integrity and commitment in order to ensure an overall environment of feedback, helpfulness and productivity.

7. How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

I don’t have any chair roles at the moment, and I can step down from my current positions should it become necessary. I intend to wait and see how much work and time Board will demand and restructure my OTW roles as needed taking this into account.

 

At the request of the candidate, this post has been edited to remove personally identifiable information. 

Bio

Alex Tischer, DrMedVet: Is an ECC veterinarian. Grew up in Germany and currently lives in the UK. Has been in fandom since before the millennium and has migrated through more fandoms than can be listed here. The most current ones include Rivers of London, Person of Interest and Mad Max: Fury Road. Has been a member of the OTW pretty much continuously since 2008, volunteering in some capacity for the same amount of time. Apart from media fandom has also somehow ended up in the weird and wonderful world of sports – which are very niche groups that resemble fandoms in surprising ways. When not dealing with sick pets, Alex can be found doing assault courses, climbing and trail running nearly as often as consuming media.

Manifesto

1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?

The current Board has met some structural and internal problems that it has not yet been able to solve in a satisfactory way. On the contrary, it’s reflecting these issues towards the rest of the organisation in its many interactions with our committees. There is a lack of vision, communication, and prioritisation that I find worrisome. Some committees are so bogged down by their own documentation and procedural debt that they cannot make steady progress on their day-to-day tasks, or even define goals for their future. Instead of empowering committees, the current Board is looking to make the situation worse.

We’re still suffering from high volunteer turnover and from serious org-wide structural problems, like a lack of solid financial oversight that doesn’t rely on one sole person to do all of our bookkeeping. I believe that by joining the Board, I could offer and implement reliable changes that would go beyond procedural changes for their own sake, and allow us to truly step into the future instead of constantly trying to reinvent the wheel.

2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?

Over the years, I have been an active member of quite a number of organisations and committees. There, I served in various capacities, ranging from treasurer of a Student Union to member of the Web committee and Health and Safety committee of my professional organisations. All of these experiences have taught me quite a lot about managing people – I remember my days of drawing up the rotas for 40+ clinical postgrads and/or interns. They have also allowed me to learn how to approach a task in different ways, and how to come up with creative solutions to a problem. I believe that the Board severely lacks these problem-solving skills, and I wish to fill that gap.

As for my history within the OTW, I became a Translation staffer over a year ago, after volunteering in various other committees for six years. It has allowed me to truly discover the everyday challenges we must face, and to help overcome some of them at the scale I could work on. It has also allowed me to connect with our other committees, and to get a taste of their ambitions for the future, but also of their limitations. I would bring with me the vision that Board so desperately needs, as well as the knowledge of how our largest committees function and thrive.

Board also suffers from frequent miscommunication problems with our volunteers, staffers and chairs. Straightforward and efficient communication is something my work as a vet, and in the Translation committee itself, with its 170+ volunteers, has taught me how to handle, and I am sure I can help foster a good working environment in the organisation.

3. What goals would you like to achieve during your term?

If I could end my term having moved the org towards more open communication and broken up the siloing of committees in just a small way, I would count it as a win. We really need to strive for more transparency and in-org cooperation, in order to give our users what they truly deserve: a well-oiled machine that can focus all of its energy on bettering its projects instead of losing steam on internal squabbling.

If we’re talking big dreams here, a better framework for providing adequate support to the OTW’s projects would be high on the list. For example, the Journal committee is a group that have mostly been left to their own devices, supported by the Board when needed but otherwise trusted to make their own decisions. They have had minimal turnover in the past five years and are publishing their 20th issue this September. While not every committee should or can be as independent, the Journal committee is an example of how the Board can constructively support a committee by trusting it.

Another good example is the Archive: Board’s focus for the OTW has tended to shift from the AO3 for reasons I cannot understand. Considering how dear this project is to us all, it would seem natural to provide it with the best care and nurturing possible. I would particularly like to bring some of the executive spotlight back on it, so we can truly give our small team of volunteer coders the means to improve the Archive even more, and never again leave them scrambling to maintain it due to lack of funding or tools.

4. What is your experience of the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Please include AO3, TWC, Fanlore, our Legal Advocacy work, and Open Doors, though feel free to emphasize particular areas you’re interested in.

I joined the OTW in 2008, which means I’ve seen the OTW and its committees come into being from the beginning. Over the years, I’ve helped out in a number of committees: as a tester, a wrangler, a Support staffer and a translator. More recently, my work as a Translation staffer has allowed me to learn how to interact with most of our current committees in order to provide them with the support they need while learning more about their individual styles and atmospheres. I’ve found that communicating clearly, answering emails as quickly as possible, and generally staying open and flexible to every possibility are key requirements. The way we approach each committee has to be tailored to their specific needs: collaborating with Legal is necessarily different from working with Journal, just as Fanlore and Open Doors have their own challenges.

The committees are usually quite aware of their weaknesses and strengths, and I think it is important not to try to impose help from above. On the contrary, we need to make sure that the collaboration and support provided are actually wanted and needed. Of course, to ascertain this we need more interpersonal contact than pro forma documentation, which is where our prospects for a productive future seem rather bleak.

It would be particularly difficult for me to emphasise one of our projects, as they all cater to specific and essential needs in fandom. I am happy to see them all thrive, and will keep doing my best to provide any help I can to the committees that nurture them. Being on Board would simply put me in a position to do more for all of them, while solving some immediate concerns such as the lack of mutual respect and understanding in their relationship with Board.

5. Choose two topics/issues that you think should be high priority for the OTW, both internally and externally. What do these topics mean to you and why do you value them? How will you make them a part of your service?

I think sorting out our administrative structure should be a priority. It’s telling that we don’t have a functional unit dedicated to finances. This is an embarrassment to the org externally, and a constant source of worry internally. The fact that people are still willing to donate to our organisation without a reliable finance committee or auditing structure is a testament to the importance and the usefulness of our projects. However, it would be irresponsible to keep relying solely on users’ trust in our good faith; we owe them more than that. The current administrative architecture is holding together through sheer force of will, and thanks to the unwavering dedication of some of our more active chairs, staffers, and volunteers. The least we can do to repay their services is to streamline cross-comm processes and reduce the administrative burdens on user-delivery committees. This would allow us to reduce our volunteer turnover rate, smooth out our production processes, and encourage the release of more content and new features for our users’ enjoyment.

As a more outward-facing goal, we need to work on internationalisation. It’s one of the OTW’s most important aspects for me – connecting fans all over the world in their passion for fandom. Translating all of our projects and acquiring the resources to maintain our Legal Advocacy project outside of the US are wonderful goals, but we can’t achieve them with our current limitations, and so far the solutions Board has put forth haven’t helped. Concentrating all internationalisation thinking in one committee or workgroup with large ambitions but no means to achieve them is not working out in a useful way. I would like to shift the focus of our strategy on this topic, and instead give each committee the freedom to work on these concerns efficiently.

6. What do you think the key responsibilities of a/the Board are? Are you familiar with the legal requirements for a US-based nonprofit board of directors?

Yes, of course I am familiar with the legal requirements. It would be very ill-advised to run for Board without reading the necessary documentation and laws!

Aside from its legal duties, I believe that our Board’s key responsibilities lie in having an operational overview of the OTW. Directors are the ones responsible for keeping financial constraints and strategic goals in mind while overseeing our committees and providing them with the support they need. They have to be the vision of the organisation, but also its driving force.

More concretely, this means Board members should show up to meetings, and do so on time. They need to answer emails in a timely manner, and to foster good relationships with our professional partners (from both other organisations and any companies we have contracts with—we should pay our bills on time, for one), as well as with our volunteers. They are required to stay up to date with the latest major developments in each of our committees, but not to be so involved as to lose sight of our long-term missions. Last but not least, they should ensure that they are accountable for their work, as they are the one true window our users have into the working members of our organisation. This means that Directors must strive for more transparency and honesty, and make a constant effort to make their work, discussions and decisionmaking more open to the membership and to OTW volunteers.

7. How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

I am generally efficient and good at managing my time, which is why I see absolutely no reason to hand over my current seats in the Translation and Support committees if I am elected to the Board. Over the years, I have worked out a productive way to allocate my time to complete my daily tasks, and more. I presently manage to juggle my professional and personal lives with my work in the OTW’s committees with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever. It would be no trouble at all to add a set amount of time for Board work to my schedule, complete with a good margin left to handle unexpected and urgent tasks.

It all comes down to having good organisational skills, and really, what kind of Board member would I be if I couldn’t even handle a bit of timekeeping? It seems like this would be the bare minimum required to sit behind the wheel of an international organisation, considering that dealing with timezones and constraining schedules is an everyday reality for all of us.