Category: 2025 Bios & Platforms

C. Ryan S.’s Bio & Platform

C. Ryan S.

Bio

C. Ryan S.: Ryan’s earliest memories of being in fandom stem from watching Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! in the early morning hours before school with his dad. He can remember talking about the shows and games with other children in his class and feeling that familiar sense of camaraderie that we all feel today. If asked though, he would point out that his first true encounter with fandom at large wouldn’t occur until years later in 2008 when he began using online forums for text-based roleplaying games & Fanfiction.net for his early fanfic consumption. Ryan first started volunteering for the OTW during his first year in university in 2013; due to personal circumstances, he left the OTW for a while before returning to service in 2015. Since then, he’s graduated from university with a Bachelor’s of Science in Information Technology and begun working as a security engineer. Read More

Elizabeth W.’s Bio & Platform

Elizabeth W.

Bio

Elizabeth W (she/her): first discovered fandom in early high school through the Bits of Ivory Pride & Prejudice archive. While she has never written a fanwork herself, she did learn HTML to create a naïve yet heartfelt Buffy/Angel Geocities webpage, which has long since been lost to the sands of time. Elizabeth has been volunteering for the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) as a tag wrangler since 2022, and has been a chair of the Board Assistant Team (BAT) from its founding in 2023 until going on hiatus for this election. When not involved in OTW work, she is a commercial manager in the public sector, plays the bassoon and contrabassoon, and enjoys swimming, hiking, camping, and playing too many video games. She has read 5,486,061 words of fanfic so far this year.

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Harlan L.B.’s Bio & Platform

Harlan L.B.

Bio

Harlan L.B. (he/him): has been in the fandom community since he first stumbled on a Lord of the Rings slashfic — mostly as a reader and obsessive packrat, but occasionally as a fanbinder. He joined OTW to work as a tech volunteer for the Open Doors project in 2018 and has worked there (except for a one year hiatus) since. In early 2024, he was appointed as the Cybersecurity Delegate to the Board (CSD) and performed an audit on the security of the OTW, delivering the report to the Board in May 2025.

Outside of OTW, Harlan works as a consultant helping federal, state, and local governments make technology actually work for its users and for the public. He has worked in information security and software engineering for over two decades, including as a C-level executive and as a senior security architect. He is also a contributor to the free software and open source community, currently serving as a Debian Developer.
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