[Note: All questions from members and candidate responses appear in the form they were submitted and represent only the views of the individual who wrote them. Questions and responses are not endorsed by the Organization for Transformative Works.]
Dae
Hi everyone, and welcome to our candidate chat for 2024! Today you’ll have the opportunity to talk to all four candidates. My name is Dae and I’ll be hosting the candidate side today. On the audience/open_chat side, your host will be my fellow Elections Committee member disjointed.
disjointed, can you wave so everyone can see you?
disjointed
👋
Dae
Thanks, disjointed!
A transcript of the candidate side of the chat will be posted publicly on our website. The open chat transcript will not be posted there, but its transcripts will remain visible until after the election. During the chat, you may see candidates fix their typos; this is to make Elections Volunteers’ job easier later.
As the candidates discuss each question, audience members can notify disjointed that you have questions for the candidates – either follow-ups or new questions – by raising your hand like this: o/ (for new questions), or o// (for follow-ups to the current question)
A moderator will post the questions in the #questions channel. Please vote on questions you’d most like to see answered by reacting to them in the #questions channel with the :uparrow_otw: emoji. I will ask them during appropriate pauses in the conversation between the candidates. We welcome all questions, subject to the following restrictions:
– Specify who your question is for, or if it’s for all candidates.
– Refer to everyone in the room by their username in this conversation. Don’t use other names you may know them by.
– Please keep questions reasonable and polite, as well as under 50 words (these are our expectations: https://elections.transformativeworks.org/elections-process-behavior-expectations/).
– Please note that we will not accept questions that require candidates to read and respond to any linked posts;
– Make sure your question is not a repeat of one already answered in the platforms (https://elections.transformativeworks.org/category/2024/2024-bios-and-platforms/) or the Q&A (https://elections.transformativeworks.org/category/2024/2024-qa/). If it’s a follow-up to one of those, please say so. Now, I’d like to welcome our candidates and invite them to say hello.
Ryan Smith
Hi all! I’m C. Ryan Smith — you can just call me Ryan. 🙂
Tish S
Hi Everyone! thanks for joining us today!
Erica F
Hi everyone – I’m very excited to be here!
Rachel L.
Hi, everyone! Thanks so much for joining us today. I’m excited to have the chance to chat live with you all.
Dae
Our first question was submitted for Rachel and Tish, in the Q&A submission period:
Rach and Tish both express admiration for current Board’s goals and progress, could you each elaborate on what projects the current Board has taken on that you are particularly in support of?
Rachel L.
Yes, absolutely. The current Board has done a lot of great work, but I especially admire two of those projects. First is the creation of the Board Assistants Team, which has brought the OTW forward substantially in enabling the work of the Board and communicating that work with the organization. It’s a great idea, they got it off the ground really quickly, and it’s made a tangible difference in the capacity of the Board to work on organizational priorities.
Another project is the cultural audit. There’s been discussion of issues for a long time, and this Board has brought us significantly forward in bringing in a team to survey folks and conduct interviews, and are using that to develop a great roadmap. It’s great to see substantive progress being made towards designating and pursuing near-term goals of the organization, especially those that respond to identified issues.
There are other projects, too–I’m a huge fan of the work of the current Board!–but for time’s sake I’ll stop there.
Tish S
I am particularly impressed at the work that has been done to increase accountability and transparency within the OTW. This includes working towards holding all levels of the org accountability by forming the Internal Complaint & Conflict Resolution subcommittee as well as the new procedures that allow volunteers to formally report board member misconduct.
I think that implementing the board Hiatus policy will also help to ensure that we will not have a situation where no one is available to respond to concerns, and providing weekly updates to the volunteers has let us see the work being done on an ongoing basis.
Dae
Thank you both for your answers. Here’s one for everyone:
Can you give an example of a project requiring input/work from other people that you successfully managed to completion? (Either an OTW project or otherwise)
Ryan Smith
(Oh goodness, I hate these kinds of questions. Every example instantly flees my brain in terror…) Anyway, one easy example from the OTW is moving the Development & Membership Committee to using an email/ticketing management solution. This was probably in 2016 or so, so we were one of the first few committees to start using such tools. It required a lot of independent research, as well as testing from all the members of the committee, then the implementation and switchover happened. We also recently added the Elections Committee to the same platform we used, which was particularly helpful due to the overlap on some of the things we worked on together. This was a big project as it required working together to identify the requirements of the tool, then evaluating if it met those requirements (sometimes by creating test instances). I sort of spearheaded that project, but was working with the whole committee throughout that time.
Erica F
I haven’t managed anything to completion in the OTW, although I have opened cooperative projects that are ongoing.
In my day job, our client-contact list and instructions were horribly out of date–the info was mostly correct but the formatting was hard to read and not compliant with our current branding. It was an 8-year-old document with pieces pasted in from other documents, and it showed.
I got permission from my manager to update it, coordinated with the other people in the admin team to figure out what details needed to be included and what needed to be prominent, and contacted our branding team for advice on how to format it, because our current templates weren’t designed for these specific kinds of tables. I did the draft formatting, sent it off to our team, and adjusted the structure according to their advice. Then I sent off emails to the admins in charge of the clients with information that looked outdated, and updated it when they replied.
Eventually we had a new document that was much easier to read and edit; it gets updated every few weeks as the client contacts change.
Rachel L.
Yes; at my prior job, I led a project that involved equipment purchases for an entire organization. That process involved surveying about thirty different sites about their needs, matching all of those needs against the budget for the project, and then designating the equipment we’d be purchasing for each of those sites based on that information. That involved a lot of input from others–both from every site, especially when their requests didn’t match our proposals, as well as experts and leaders in the organization who had a vision for what the end result would look like. We went back and forth several times to make sure needs were being met, and found some ways to share costs when a site wanted something outside the budget (e.g., the site would pay for the extra features they wanted, and we’d provide the cost of the base machine).
By the end, we had equipment purchases designated for every site and got sign-off from everyone on those purchases.
Tish S
Not an OTW project, but at my current job we support a number of distinct business units within one Customer Relationship Management program. Any time changes are needed to the user interface we need to confirm which business units may be affected by the change (done usually by collaboration within my team as well as checking documentation) and then have the different business units agree that the change should be done. This involves speaking with a few different teams to ensure the change is properly presented to the business unit and timing is established so that everyone can be trained. Occasionally we cannot get agreement and need to facilitate making adjustments to the plan that each team can work with, or sometimes going back to the original team with a completely different idea if the change cannot be supported. After 2 weeks of back and forth, I am hoping to be able to add 2 new data points next week .
Dae
Thanks, everyone! Here’s another question for all candidates:
Can you give a concrete numerical estimate of how many hours per week you’ll contribute to board work?
Ryan Smith
Board work can be pretty variable from what I’ve found. You might be able to get away with only a few hours each week, but then the next week it could be a lot more. Of course, it is hard to really estimate anything without having insight into an actual “average” day for a Board member. Guesstimating, I’d say we would probably need to dedicate at least 10 hours per week, if not more. More importantly I think is being able to “flex” your time for when high priority tasks and projects need to be done.
Erica F
I can put in at least 5 hours a week, and expect to average around 7-10, with some weeks being heavier and some lighter, depending on both Board needs and my day job schedule. On weeks when my day job workload is lighter (holiday weeks, or sometimes just light enough that I still have energy after work), I could manage 15 or more.
Tish S
I am estimating around 10-15 hrs each week, I hope to set aside a bit of time each day for routine things, and then longer periods over the weekend. Outside of work my time is pretty flexible, so if needed I will be able to dedicate more time as needed to address any higher priority tasks that have a tight deadline.
Rachel L.
I anticipate contributing ten to fifteen hours per week, on average. As Tish mentioned earlier, the current Board has been implementing more processes to share the load, so it will probably vary substantially week-to-week. But I know it’s a lot of work and time, and I’ve taken a hard look at my schedule to make sure I’m able to put in that work.
Dae
Thank you all. Our next question: For all candidates, which of the current Board roadmap initiatives are you most interested in supporting, and how do you see yourself contributing to it should you be elected? (We have clarification that this is referring to the cultural roadmap)
Ryan Smith
This question will be difficult to answer as the cultural roadmap contents are broadly still considered private volunteer-only information. Broadly speaking, I’m most excited about the “accountability at all levels” theme, which includes some excited and much needed work for the org to undergo to allow for growth and sustainability in the future.
Rachel L.
I’m most interested in supporting the organization-wide management standards. (I do think these are less urgent that volunteer safety and security, but I really don’t have the same expertise in that area!) I’m most interested in this because I think it has a spillover effect towards almost all of the other goals: consistent standards impact cultural sensitivity, accountability, transparency, and are necessary to create a welcoming environment. I have professional experience identifying existing issues and gaps and developing processes to respond to those gaps, so I think I would be able to identify needs there, help us develop a concrete plan, and create a team to bring that work forward.
Erica F
I’m very excited about the cultural roadmap and would like to assist with parts of it, whether or not I am elected to the Board. While I’m looking forward to all of it, the parts I’m most interested in directly supporting have to do with the internal chat culture, collaboration, and org-wide management. (If I had to pick just one: org-wide management standards.) I’d like our internal communities to be less siloed, and touches on several areas in the roadmap.
I believe accessibility and volunteer safety are likely higher priority; those are areas where my support is most likely to be “help find the people who can do the actual work involved, and make sure there’s nothing stopping them.”
Tish S
The cultural roadmap itself has not yet been released publicly but broadly speaking to the items outlined in last weeks board meeting, I would be most interested in supporting Volunteer safety and security as well as org-wide management standards. These items are both areas I feel I could contribute to the most.
Dae
Thank you all for your answers, it’s good to hear about your individual priorities regarding the OTW’s internal goals. For our next question –
To all candidates: all of you have one or more other roles in the OTW, not even counting real life commitments. How do you plan to maintain/step back from other OTW work to be on Board or communicate your availability?
Ryan Smith
Well, I can’t really speak to having more than one role within the OTW. Currently I’m only on the Systems Committee and plan to lean in more to that, not less. I have some flexibility in my non-OTW projects in ways that I could devote more time to Board work if needed. Other than that, I think the current Board has made good steps forward in making clear cut procedures for when an individual has “low availability” that any one could follow.
Tish S
My work as both a tester as well as an Open Doors import assistant do not carry heavy time commitments and I hope to maintain my work there. I do plan to evaluate my time commitment as a Mentor in the Open Doors committee and if needed step back if I feel it will not allow me to dedicate needed time to board work.
Erica F
For Fanlore, I expect to be less involved in active projects, but still participating in the internal chat discussions, and likely doing a number of small edits as I’m working on other projects. They’ll be at the top of my head so it’ll be easy to make small fixes or adjustments to the wiki.
For Open Doors, I plan to clear out some of the pending tasks, and let the team know I won’t have “I can do that tonight” ability for ongoing projects. But the work I do for Open Doors is work I absolutely love and find deeply satisfying. It’s no-drama no-executive-decisions detail work, so it only takes free time, not emotional capacity. I intend to use it as my “refresh” project between tasks that require careful decisions.
Rachel L.
I discussed this a little in my platform, but I am on both the Policy and Abuse and Tag Wrangling teams. I intend to maintain my current work on the Policy and Abuse team; I manage that work by doing a little every day, and I believe I can continue to do that as a member of Board.
For Tag Wrangling, I currently wrangle a number of high-traffic fandoms, and I’ve identified several that I can step back from to reduce the time I spend wrangling. I do intend to continue my work as a Tag Wrangling Supervisor, but I will also stay in close communication with the Tag Wrangling Chairs and we can adjust the regular work I do as necessary based on Board work needs.
Tish S
(Seconding Erica on Open Doors work being “refresh” time, those spreadsheets are fun)
Dae
Thanks everyone for your answers!
We’ve got some individual candidate questions next:
Rachel, when it comes to comparable response times for non-English-speaking users, do you have any concrete data on what the baseline for English-speaking users is (if not, what would your goal for this be) and what kind of additional margin would you find acceptable for non-English-speaking users?
Ryan, you’ve made it clear that you’re primarily running to make sure we have a contested election. Why do you consider that important, either in general or for the OTW specifically? (answers from other candidates are also welcome!)
Looking at Erica’s examples for increasing cross-comms interactions, some appear either be partially implemented or don’t align with a committee’s scope (i.e. Using Wranglers to search for matching fic rather asking them to map tags). Can Erica elaborate a bit on her thinking process for selecting the examples she did?
Tish, in Q&A 2 you talked about plans for structural change in the OTW and mentioned chair rotation, chair track opportunities, and anon feedback on chairs. How flexible do you plan to be on those changes based on individual committees current needs and structures?
Ryan Smith
Contested elections are super important for us to maintain going forward! As we’ve seen in recent years, there have been “controversial” candidates that ran for election. Without contested elections, we have no way to say “mmmm, no, sorry, you’re not acceptable.” If someone stands for election, meets the criteria, and the election isn’t contested, they are by default “elected” to become members of the Board. While this might not matter as a one off occurrence, if it happened multiple times in a row, enough so that such members gained a majority… well. That’s not great. Currently, the only accessible process for removing a Board member requires a majority vote from the Board members. I feel like I don’t necessarily need to point out where problems might arise here?
To spell it out a bit more though, if we want to acknowledge that the Board has the ultimate authority within the org to do whatever they want pretty much, this is an incredibly dangerous road to travel down without having firm, documented methods for holding Board members accountable (in whatever way that might present) by people that are not in-fact within the potentially compromised Board. The events of the 2015 election (https://fanlore.org/wiki/2015_OTW_Board_Election) were only resolved by the entire Board of the time voluntarily stepping down after facing pressure from the volunteers, but that was no guarantee and we still have no procedures for dealing with a similar situation. While the chances of this occurring are not great, they are not non-zero either as history has shown us.
EDIT: correcting the Fanlore link to the right year.
Erica F
I gave examples from my own experience, which I found interesting and enriching. They were ways to connect with other committees and learn something about different parts of the org.
Fic matching is not a tag wrangler’s job, and they should not be required to do it. But if they’re interested–it’s work that needs to be done, and some tag wranglers might be interested in learning how Open Doors works.
We should be looking for volunteers across the org who are available for the tasks we need, rather than letting projects slow down because there is nobody with the expertise and time available in that project’s committee. I’d like us to have more cross-training options, not requirements for volunteers to work outside of their committees.
Rachel L.
For context, I believe this question is about the need to improve response times for non-English speaking users that I discussed in my platform. I can only speak from the perspective of the Policy and Abuse team, but we have very concrete data! Our average response time for tickets regardless of language is 54 days. High-need languages (which right now are Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese) take an average of 31 additional days to respond to users when they require translation (e.g., +31 days compared to an English ticket). For a target, our low-need languages currently take an average of 10 additional days for translation, and that would be much closer to an acceptable additional response time. Overall, our goal is to reduce response time for all users as much as we can, and especially to provide equivalent service for non-English-speaking users.
Tish S
I would be very flexible, my hope would be to give people the opportunity to take a break and know that there was someone capable to step in and cover chair duties and not feel obligated to stay in a role that they may no longer feel able to handle. I know each committee works differently, but I would hope that at a minimum for each committee we had at least 1 to 2 people in a position to step into a chair role if needed, either long term to to cover an extended hiatus, as well as ensure that there are processes in place to ensure chairs and other supervisor roles are taking breaks each year.
Dae
Thanks everyone! Here’s our next question:
For all candidates, you all mentioned some project/work the current Board has undertaken that you appreciate/support, what area do you think Board could most improve on?
Ryan Smith
I think that the major thing to focus on with the Board would be to maybe tone down the “agility” a bit. They’ve done a successful job of navigating some large/complex changes and additions to the organization within the past (less than a!) year. I worry that we might not have the long term ability to sustain that level of “drive”. I feel that we should probably dial in and focus more on specific high priority projects, rather than risking that the Board becomes spread too thin. So maybe the better way to phrase this would be prioritization?
Erica F
While I love the regular updates on progress–both the roadmap and other projects–I’d like to see more space for feedback and discussion. This falls under both making the chat space more welcome, and open & transparent collaboration goals – making sure volunteers have a way to be heard, and making sure the Board is getting input from a wide range of people. (And making sure volunteers know that, and possibly making sure the general membership knows that.)
I’m aware this is not a simple thing to implement, and wouldn’t want that to be prioritized ahead of a lot of the other work. But it might be something the BATs could look into.
Rachel L.
I think the biggest gap that still exists for the Board is having a process for decisive crisis response. I know this is a major priority and progress is being made, which is excellent. But I think that the Board–which is the legal head of the organization–needs to be able to take specific decisive action in response to certain emergencies. We need to have a clear plan that states what those emergencies are, what action to take, and how the Board can do that.
Tish S
While I can see an increase in org-wide communication from the board, I agree with Erica on needing more space for feedback and discussion. As a volunteer who is not privy to higher level committee specific communications, I would like to ensure that there are more opportunities for open discussion.
Dae
Thank you all. Next question is for everyone again:
Old AO3 roadmaps stated that hosting multimedia fanworks such as images was a future goal for the archive. Do any of the candidates plan to work toward this goal?
Ryan Smith
This question would require a lot of buy in from many different parts of the organization. It’s not a simple question unfortunately. How will we host it (in other words, do we need new/more servers)? How will we pay for the expanded technical needs (space & bandwidth) sustainably? Who will be responsible for addressing policy & abuse reports for it? Just to name a few considerations that this would require. I think that we could still manage it, BUT I don’t think this is a “short term” goal with a concrete deadline to meet by any means whatsoever.
Rachel L.
I don’t plan to work towards this goal in the short term. I think this is something that creates a lot of issues (as Ryan noted) that were not fully contemplated when the past Roadmaps were created. On the Policy and Abuse side, it raises substantial concerns. My understanding is that it would create a dramatic jump in hosting costs because image storage requires significantly more bandwith than text. I would support discussion with our Systems, Policy and Abuse, Legal, and other teams on the considerations involved and what we’d need to do, as well as discussion of whether it should remain as a long term goal. But I don’t see this happening in the next three years.
Erica F
I used to very much want hosting images as part of our future plans. I have since seen Denise’s threads on Twitter and Bluesky about how much horrifically illegal content gets posted anywhere that allows image hosting, and I am a lot less sure this is viable.
I would like us to at least look into the option of partnering with an image or fanvid hosting service that, sigh, allows explicit content and doesn’t commercialize it. This may mean it needs to be a paid service – but a paid hosting site that ties to an AO3 account, with a TOS that’s pretty close to AO3’s, would have a lot of value.
However, even considering this as more than an idle possibility is likely put in the background while we look into changes required by the cultural roadmap.
Tish S
I would want to speak with systems and legal to confirm if this is something we can reasonably do. Like Ryan says there are technical implications on hosting that we need to consider in terms of space and bandwith. From legal I would want to know what additional rules we would fall under as a host of these things. I do not believe that we have the resources in place to properly address reports on the content and would require a much larger team if Policy and Abuse were to take on the role to address these. This may be a longer term goal, but not something I see being possibly in the short term.
Dae
Thanks everyone! Here’s our final question for the session:
For all candidates, any plans to establish a procedure for getting a fandom tag for OW authors on Ao3 who later self-published the work in question, and have an active fanfiction following? Currently all those fanfics are synned to the OW, which messes with search.
Ryan Smith
If that’s true, I definitely think that it’s something that needs to be evaluated by the Tag Wrangling Committee. I don’t know if they have any specific procedures to deal with such situations, but as we’ve seen this is becoming more and more common. I would definitely want to bring this to the attention of the Tag Wrangling Committee and urge them to look into developing policy to address it. (Please note that my last first hand tag wrangling experience was in 2013, so y’know. It’s been a bit.)
Rachel L.
Hello, I’ll answer this as a Tag Wrangler! I can’t give you any specific answers about a specific tag, but if you submit a Support ticket identifying the tag that you believe is incorrectly wrangled, our team will look at it and evaluate whether there’s something we can do. We may not have a specific procedure in place for the kinds of tags you describe specifically, but our support ticket procedure is there to look at any issues reported. That may not result in an immediate response, but it will let the Committee know to look into it.
Erica F
I would like to see fandom tags for self-published works, even if content related to those works started on AO3. I would like the Original Works fandom tag to get review and possibly changes; it’d be nice for people who like OW to be able to find what they want to read. (I’d like a lot of no-specific-fandom tags to be wrangled in ways that let them be easier to discover.)
But sorting out how that could or should work is a matter for the Tag Wrangling committee; as a member of the Board, I’d be able to say “this is something important to a lot of our users; can you look into its viability and let us know if there’s something that needs to be done to support it?”
Tish S
I would want to speak with Tag Wrangling about the implications of making any changes to the existing tags. Overall I support adding additional tags to make searching for works easier for readers as well as additional tools for creators so that they can present their works as they would like.
Dae
And that’s a wrap for this year’s candidate chat! Thank you to everyone, candidates and audience, for your participation and thoughtful Q&As. Thanks also to my fellow Elections volunteers disjointed, Cookies, Emma, Jeanne, and Sveritas for modding the open chat and facilitating behind the scenes. We’ll have the transcript of this room up on the website within a few days. Have a great day, everyone!