briar_pipe
Hi everyone, and welcome to our final Candidate Chat of 2018!
Once again you’ll have the opportunity to speak with all 4 Candidates: Michelle Schroeder, Natalia Gruber, Lex de Leon, and C. Ryan Smith.
My name is briar_pipe, and I’ll be hosting the candidate side today. On the audience/open_chat side, your host will be my fellow Elections Committee member Jenny.
briar_pipe
Hi everyone, and welcome to our First Candidate Chat of 2018!
In today’s chat you’ll have the opportunity to speak with all 4 Candidates: C. Ryan Smith, Lex de Leon, Michelle Schroeder, and Natalia Gruber.
My name is briar_pipe, and I’ll be hosting the candidate side today. On the audience /open_chat side, your host will be Judy. We’re both members of the Elections Committee.
[Note: Candidates were limited to 300 words for each answer.]
9. What is something nice that you can say about your colleagues that you’re running with/against?
I am super excited about all of the candidates I’m running with!
I really appreciate Lex’s passion for the OTW and its mission, and his willingness to take on any task that needs doing.
I also really like Natalia’s platform, especially her goals of making the OTW’s projects more accessible to non-English speakers and protecting all transformative fanworks.
Additionally, I’m a big fan of Ryan’s experience with different committees, which gives him a better big-picture view of the OTW than I have, and gives him a lot of valuable information about the administrative side of things.
[Note: Candidates were limited to 300 words for each answer.]
5. What are a couple of major issues that you know the OTW board struggles or has struggled with, and how would you personally act to avoid them if elected?
One issue that I know the Board has struggled with in the past is disconnect from the Org itself, but since that’s the next question, I’ll save the full answer for that. Another issue is that people aren’t entirely sure what being on Board entails. This can make it difficult for people to know if they would make good candidates, and can also affect Board handoff when things are less than ideal, like it did a few years ago.
[Note: Candidates were limited to 300 words for each answer.]
1. What do you hope to learn in your time on Board?
What don’t I hope to learn in my time on Board? In all seriousness, though, I’d love to learn more about all the committees I don’t volunteer with or get to work with as part of my volunteering. I like having a big-picture view of things, and hopefully by learning as much as I can about each committee and the organization as a whole, I’ll be in a better position to help the committees with whatever they need from me and the Board.
Michelle Schroeder: Michelle has been in fandom for a little over fifteen years now. Their first fandom was Harry Potter, which led to more and more fandoms and eventually to AO3. They joined the AO3 Documentation committee in 2016, and then the Tag Wrangling and Support committees in 2017. They currently spend most of their time working at an arcade, doing committee work, or reading whatever they can get their hands on – and sometimes all three at the same time!