And now for (some of) the news you’ve all been waiting for: the details of the OTW’s 2009 Election Season!
We have great news for you: two fabulous people are joining the OTW Board! Because only two candidates came forward, we won’t be holding a contested election this year. However, they are both awesome and eminently qualified for Board service. Without further ado, let’s introduce them!
Elizabeth Yalkut is a student at Columbia University in New York City. She has worked in development, marketing, and strategy for nonprofit legal and theater organizations, is a long-time American Civil Liberties Union volunteer, and currently works for the Educational Technology department at Barnard College. Elizabeth has been a staffer with the OTW since 2007 and has been particularly instrumental on our Content Policy committee, where she helped to research, write, and publicly workshop our complex, fan-friendly, and highly-readable AO3 Terms of Service as well as general policy documents across the OTW. She also serves as a member of our Development committee, and was asked, as someone intimately familiar with Archive policy, to chair our Abuse committee at the beginning of 2009. Food is one of her fandoms: Elizabeth blogs about food at A Very Uncommon Cook, serves as treasurer of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society, and currently enjoys the hell out of Merlin, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Elizabeth plans to work on outreach (organizational, fannish, international), accessibility, and education during her term on the Board.
Allison Morris works in a public library as a public services supervisor and has a BA in Japanese Literature from the University of Michigan. An OTW staffer for two years, Allison currently chairs the OTW Webmasters committee, which is responsible for building and maintaining all of transformativeworks.org, including the OTW blog, donations software, Open Doors subsite, and elections subsite; this requires her to work closely with the Drupal and CiviCRM open source software communities, as well as with people involved in a broad selection of OTW projects. This year, Allison also serves as co-lead with the Tag Wranglers subcommittee and heads the cross-committee Merchandizing workgroup which organized and is carrying out the OTW’s new donation premiums. A lifelong fan, Allison is particularly interested in not only works that transform canon but also fanworks that honor the work of other fans and transform other fanworks, like remixes, podfic, recs, and meta, among other fan arts. She has been a devoted creator and advocate of podfic; she built and maintains the Audiofic archive, providing a stable, permanent home for a constantly growing collection of podfic — currently ~3700 recordings covering ~290 fandoms, including readings in five languages — and she has conducted several podfic workshops at cons. She has many theories concerning robots, clones, and John Sheppard, and has presented on those and related subjects at WisCon and Writercon, as well as informally to whomever will listen.
Allison plans to work on increasing the OTW’s profile among technical women’s organizations as well as on creating a grantwriting team.
We would like for all of you to get to experience their awesomeness yourselves (or bask in it again, if you’ve already met them) and to ask questions about the details of the experience and ambition they bring to the table. They are your Board members – come say “Hi!” To this end, we’ll be hosting a chat at 1400 UTC on 24 October 2009.
Time clock for this event is here:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=24&year=2009&hour=14&min=0&sec=0&p1=0
The chat will take place in our Public Discussion room on Campfire, which can be accessed via this URL:
https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/28473
Alas, the tea and coffee we can provide will be only virtual, but you are welcome to bring your own mug to the computer.
Although we didn’t get to hold a competitive election this year, we are delighted to have attracted two such marvelous new Board members. Welcome, Elizabeth and Allison!
If there’s anything we didn’t cover here that you’re concerned about, or if you want any more information, please respond to this with any questions, comments, or objections you may have. You can reach Elections by leaving a comment on this blog post or any of its mirrors, or by using the Elections contact form; you can reach the Board by leaving a comment on this post or its mirrors, or by using the Board contact form.