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.
1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?
Why the OTW?
The work that the OTW does has never been more important: documenting the history of our communities; supporting critical analysis of media and fandom; maintaining a stable, non-commercial, maximally-inclusive home for our creative endeavors; and taking legal action to maintain fannish rights now and in the future. These are all things that I am proud to support in whatever way I can.
Why Board?
It’s vital that the OTW continues to mature as an organization so that we can grow sustainably to support our goals into the future – it’s why I stepped up to co-lead the Board Assistant Team (BAT) Committee when it was formed. I have been so heartened, and honestly so proud of all the work that the current Board members have led around the Organizational Culture Survey and the Roadmap of work that has emerged from that. I want to make sure that the OTW Board maintains that momentum, and to drive further changes and improvements to help us work more efficiently, safely, and productively.
Why stand now?
The BAT Committee is now up and running (and will be running a public recruitment round soon, so watch for upcoming recruitment posts!), and I am also in a place in my personal life where I have the time and energy to commit to the Board.
2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?
My commercial background, communication skills, change management experience, and my OTW experience will dovetail well with both the skills of the current Board members and also with my fellow candidates.
Commercial experience
My experience includes overseeing multi-million dollar procurement activities, managing contracts, and running financial analyses. My financial background is not just in the corporate world – my work in the social sector has included things like a partnership funding agreement with a local indigenous group that included developing governance structures to manage this funding. I know that reviewing the OTW governance structures is on the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan, so I am excited to work with the Strategic Planning team to make improvements in this space.
Communication
I have been part of a few major IT transformation programs: I trust the tech and coding experts to identify what is needed and when, and I know how to communicate that out to different stakeholders in language that they understand so that the right things get prioritized. Communication such as this is a critical part of the work the Board does.
Change and Project management
I have also led organizational change – moving financial practice from a dollar-based framework to risk-based thresholds. This involved managing a pipeline of activity and getting buy-in from users, as well as crafting a beautiful rainbow post-it note kanban board to visualize our progress. Change and project management are skills that will be valuable to keep OTW Board work progressing.
OTW Experience
As well as the skills I bring from outside the organization, I have also had the privilege of working closely with the OTW Board and with chairs of the other committees over the last two years. I have seen both the strengths and the challenges that the OTW faces, and have relationships in place to ensure that the right people are consulted and involved.
3. Choose one or two goals for the OTW that are important to you and that you would be interested in working on during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?
At a high level, the two biggest goals I see for the OTW are organizational maturity and internationalization. We have grown by leaps and bounds as an Organization, but our systems and processes have not always grown at the same pace, and we still bear the legacy of our Anglocentric origins.
My professional work involves supporting non-governmental organizations and charities, and I have seen that the OTW’s growing pains are not unique – it’s always a challenge to evolve from a small group of passionate volunteers focused on meeting the immediate needs of their community to a wide-reaching, sustainable organization. Many of the improvements that we need to make in this space have been identified through the Organizational Culture Audit, particularly on the themes of accountability, volunteer safety, global accessibility and cross-cultural sensitivity, and overall management standards. Specific projects to address these are now in progress or in the pipeline, and I am helping to coordinate individual project workstreams in the role of Organizational Roadmap Lead.
The OTW was founded to “provide access to … fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms”, and if we don’t prioritize that access to the many users who read, work, and create in languages other than English, then we fall short of meeting that objective. We have many passionate volunteers chipping away behind the scenes to make localization of the Archive of Our Own (AO3) happen, but it is a technically complex project and certainly not something that I can personally help in coding or translation. What I can do is ensure that engagement from non-English language users is kept as a top priority for the Board, that we mobilize resources to support the technical work required, and that we keep our community informed about how this work is tracking.
4. What is your experience with the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.
I have significant experience with many OTW projects as part of my work in the BAT committee, and I can’t think of a single committee that I haven’t at least had some contact with.
The AO3 will always be my first home, both as a user and as where I started volunteering as a tag wrangler, but becoming BAT Chair definitely opened up more of the organization to me. I use Fanlore frequently as a tag wrangler (for example, to reference and update lists of ship names and abbreviations) and to go down curiosity rabbit holes, and I promote Open Doors (particularly the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project and Fan Culture Preservation Project to save our zine history) at every opportunity.
In terms of how I would collaborate with other committees, I know that Board members meet regularly with the chairs of each committee, and as a chair I have found this to be work well. I strongly believe that chairs (and other committee leadership roles) are the experts in their own committees’ needs, challenges, and opportunities, so should always be the first port of call.
Beyond existing structures, I would like to open avenues for wider Board member collaboration with committees. Specifically, I would love to introduce more formal oversight and accountability between Board members and OTW committee. Many organizations have a Board structure where each executive member has responsibility and oversight for a specific sector of the organization, and I think this could be a useful framework to explore for the OTW. In this “business partnering” approach, each Board member would meet regularly with both the leadership and wider volunteer base of their specific committees to support their committees’ goals. This would also ensure Board members’ time and energy would get distributed around all committees.
5. 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?
From being in the BAT committee, I have seen first-hand what the Board workload is like, so I know what I am signing up for!
Part of Elections’ safeguarding process to maintain probity and ensure a fair election process means that I was required to go on hiatus from my role as BAT chair as soon as candidacy was formally declared. This means that I have already spent the last few weeks handing over all my in-progress BAT committee work to my wonderful co-chair. The workload commitment as a fully trained Board member is similar to the work I was doing as a BAT chair, so while I know there will be a bigger time commitment in the first few months as I learn all the Board ropes, overall this is already a commitment I am familiar with making.
In my other OTW work as a tag wrangler, I reduced the number of fandoms that I wrangle when I stepped up to BAT 2023, and I have a further few fandoms that I could rehome to other wranglers if I need to create more capacity. That being said, tag wrangling has a very flexible week-on-week workload which has allowed me to fit it around the peaks and troughs of BAT committee work, and I use wrangling as a calming activity when dealing with other high pressure work both from the OTW and from external life! Putting on some chill music and getting into the zone, sending tags where they need to go and seeing the number of unhomed tags go down is a great way to de-stress! [/end plug for tag wrangling]