[Note: There will be 2 Q&A posts total, covering all the topics brought up during the user-submitted Q&A period. Candidates were limited to 300 words per answer.]
What makes you unique as a candidate? What do you think makes you stand out against the others running for Board this year?
I have been aware of and involved with the OTW the longest of the candidates, almost since the beginning. I was there for Fanlib and Strikethrough and, before those, the collapse of the Detention archive. I watched the development of the core principles AO3 was built on, and how they became policy, and how and why certain phrasing was incorporated into AO3’s Terms of Service.
I have a paralegal degree and I keep up with several law blogs that post about copyright issues. I’m aware of some of the legal issues the OTW faces and why there are both legal and social reasons not to budge on the “no commercial links” rule.
I have a list of administrative changes I’d like to either establish or discuss, with the potential of sharing publicly why some changes won’t happen. Some are internal enough that I can’t discuss them in public, but some are not. The ones that can be discussed include: Updating the roadmap (as I mentioned in the previous set of questions), more visibility for TWC, improving the AO3 TOS phrasing to avoid some of the confusion when people don’t realize they are breaking the rules, reviewing our internal communications processes to allow better focus on the problems that need fixing.
Each of my co-candidates brings their own strengths and their own agendas. I am not claiming my experiences and plans make me the superior candidate, just that I have skills and approaches that make me unique.
Election candidates rarely have clearances to all the Board-level details of the OTW history and inner workings, and may have questionable assumptions about the Org, yet you are still expected to answer public queries about them. What is your strategy in term of research and fact-check to address that?
When there are specific details I don’t know, it’s easy to contact other committees in the OTW, and all of them have someone who’s willing to help candidates understand what they do and what their needs are.
It’s not always easy to figure out which committee is in charge of which information, and that is one of the things I’m hoping to address — to set up better internal maps of the various projects and teams.
We do have an internal wiki that documents committee activities and projects, and lists who’s in which committee and often subcommittees. It’s sometimes out of date, but there are volunteers who work to keep the currently active topics accurate. The biggest problem is that if you don’t know which committee is in charge of a topic, you may not know how to search for it.
However, our internal communication systems do have easy ways to contact committees, and posting in the wrong area will get helpful pointers about “you need to talk to [committee] or message [name] about that.” As candidates, we can get information about how things are managed. What we lack is understanding of how the day-to-day processes work in practice, and we can only get that through experience.
The OTW moves so slowly in part because a lot of work is spread between few people. How do you plan on evaluating the OTW’s recruitment strategy to increase the number of volunteers, alongside improving safety, satisfaction, and balance of work so existing volunteers stay longer?
This likely starts with an overview of our current situation: Asking people to track their volunteer time, when that’s possible; setting up charts that show how many people are on each committee and what tasks the average volunteer does; looking at our list of wanted changes and estimating how much time those take. We need info before we can make changes in our current processes.
What I suspect is: We need a few more people with specific skills, and a lot more efficiency. We need better ways of tracking what’s being done and informing others about it, so people aren’t doing the same work, or waiting for something that’s already been done, or waiting for something that another volunteer has set aside for a while. We need better info about who’s-doing-what so we can hand off parts of various projects to other volunteers.
By “a few more people,” I don’t mean “recruit as normal and add a few extras.” I mean that each committee may need to increase by 5–10% or so, which is 1-2 people in some committees and maybe several dozen in tag wranglers. (But: Tag wranglers and translation both need different training processes before they can increase their numbers dramatically.)
We need to be able to do open, year-round recruitment, and right now, we don’t have the infrastructure for it. We need to be able to bring in people when we notice gaps in coverage, rather than noticing the gaps, putting in a request for recruitment, and getting new people within six months. We probably need a paid administrative/HR team that isn’t trying to do their OTW work around school or a day job.
As majority of you have been with the OTW for quite a long time (6-10+ years), how do you prepare yourself to counter the cultural inertia that has been entrenched across various parts of the organisation?
The OTW was designed for stability, to proceed despite people insisting it was unnecessary or immoral or doing everything wrong. And the last 15+ years have shown it has what’s needed for longevity. Yay.
Stability, however, can lead to stagnation. With any organization, there’s a tendency to believe, “If a problem hasn’t been addressed in years, it’s probably just background grumbling that can’t actually be fixed.” This can be inaccurate in any org, but in one designed with a strong “wait it out” policy, it’s deadly.
We lose volunteers and their skills, and damage the fandom community we’re trying to support, when we ignore long-term problems. We wind up hitting the trust thermocline for some volunteers, sometimes in groups — and in those cases, there is no “fix it” because the damage was done months or years earlier.
Sometimes, it seems the reaction has been a shrug, missing that whatever drove them away is still bothering other volunteers, and that we can and should change things.
The current Board is working on changing this — addressing long-standing issues of internal culture — and I would like to be part of that. As someone around since nearly the beginning, I can offer insight into the processes established because they fit the limitations we had at the time, and continued from inertia, versus the ones created to cover a particular need that may still be relevant. For those, we need to find new ways to address any problems they allow or create.
I’d like to have better communication outlets — more external communication and interaction, and better internal options for sharing and fixing small grievances before they stagnate and become toxic. I will be discussing the options for those with other Board members and volunteers.
Past events have resulted in a total devaluation of Board work and Board of Directors — Board of Directors is the legally responsible for the OTW. How familiar are you with the Board purview, duty, mandate in either typical nonprofit background or the OTW specific case?
Legally, the Board runs the OTW, and is responsible in some ways for everything that happens with the organization. Internally, the Board is just another committee, one with a particular set of responsibilities. Those responsibilities include setting policies and establishing committees, but the Board itself does not control the work being done by those committees.
Internally, until recently, there has been very little direct interaction between most committee members and the board, but this is changing — the new BATs (Board Assistant Team) and weekly updates on Board activity helps volunteers understand what’s going on at the org-management level. Externally, the Board is a faceless group that almost never interacts directly with the public: They make news posts but don’t discuss them.
So the distrust of the Board is understandable: When problems don’t get fixed, the Board is considered at fault, and explanations for why not have rarely been public.
I want to work on fixing that, both continuing the current practice of weekly updates, and coordinating more publicly with other committees and the non-volunteer membership so it’s more clear what the Board does, and why they make the decisions they do.
I am aware of the legal responsibilities of nonprofit Boards, and those are rarely the issues that cause public outcry. Sometimes legal compliance gets brought up, but it’s usually an afterthought, a kind of stick: “If they won’t pay attention to what we need, we’ll complain to the IRS or other government agency about it!”
I am less concerned with the technicalities of the Board’s responsibilities than the lack of public trust, which can’t be fixed by complying with the law. The changes we need are not about our mandate but about communication and cooperation.
Increasingly the ways in which the OTW’s institutional inertia disempowers volunteers and erodes general trust in the OTW have come to light, how do you plan to motivate structural change within the organization?
We need an org-wide shift in awareness: We need to acknowledge that longstanding issues need more attention, not less, than whatever recent conflicts have come to light. This is hard to focus on — it always feels more urgent to deal with what’s being brought up today, especially when the older issues may predate any of the current or incoming Board members.
This means we need to review complaints over the last several years, including ones that involve people who have left the org, and treat them as active current issues if they haven’t been addressed and resolved to the satisfaction of the current volunteers. (Or most of the current volunteers; some issues will not get 100% acceptance no matter how good the solutions are.)
Addressing those problems will require reviewing our communications policies, our team structures, our volunteer training, and our relationship with the public. It’s a daunting set of tasks, and I understand why it’s been allowed to slide, and why efforts to change have been moving slowly.
It doesn’t need to be quick. The OTW isn’t designed for quick change. It just needs to be steady — and that, we have practice with. We need regular reminders that the changes have good reasons behind them, and that we all want a more diverse, more equitable organization. We need the OTW to serve the interests of many fan communities of many types, to be a place where all volunteers feel valued and respected.
We have to be as fiercely protective of our volunteers — recognizing their merit, cherishing their diversity — as we are of the fanworks at AO3.
Recent controversies within the OTW have made many fans hesitant to donate their time or money to the organization. What would you say to those fans who are hesitant?
My first thought is, “Whatever is making you hesitate — write up the details, including what fixes would make you not hesitate, and contact us about it.” But I suspect that would get a swarm of “I would donate if you got rid of the incest fic at AO3,” and we are not going to do that.
We are unlikely to make any policy changes, especially related to the AO3 TOS, for the purpose of getting donations. The OTW has always been very solid about “this is who we are; these are our goals; if you like them, feel free to send some money our way.”
So it’s more like, “If you would consider volunteering for OTW, or you are a volunteer, but because of recent controversies, are unwilling to volunteer or have been reducing your active time in the org — please articulate that.” Ideally (for the Board and other committees), that would include “This is what bothers me, and here’s why, and here’s the fixes I want you to implement.” But not all problems come with simple fixes, and people outside the org may not have any way of suggesting viable changes.
Example: We cannot implement “have more people of color as committee heads,” because the OTW does not gather demographic data about our members. We’re not going to require that people reveal their identities, nor limit committee heads to people who are comfortable doing so. But: We can create anti-racist policies, both by discussing them with a broad range of volunteers, and by hiring external consultants to help us shape the policies.
It’s going to be hard, awkward, uncomfortable work. We need people who are annoyed at past decisions to help guide us to better ones in the future.
If you could time travel back to when the OTW started, what would you have changed/warned people about?
I would warn about the abuses we have discovered using AO3’s features, so we could plan better for ways to avoid them. I don’t know how much we could’ve prevented, but we could’ve prioritized features to deal with them. We knew there would be abuses, but we didn’t know what forms they would take. Now we do:
Hostile gifts. Deliberate mistagging, both as harassment and for popularity. Commercial links hiding in all sorts of places. Bot comments. Harassment in comments (which we knew would happen, but didn’t realize what kinds would be common). Fic-finder and “give me a prompt” posts. Threats to readers who disagree with the author. Spamming public domain works. “Test post” works.
I would push the idea that we really need a “media type(s)” category in the work entry form: Fic, art, nonfic, lyrics, fanvid, game… it’s so much harder to add those in later, and for now, people tagged them all in so many different ways that they’re near-unfindable.
We needed a tagging guide. Our initial thought was “let people tag however, and we’ll syn things so they connect properly.” (That is still the policy.) But without telling people how tags worked and how syns worked, people tagged things in ways that made them unsearchable. “Steve/Bucky” works fine. “Steve/Bucky and Tony/Pepper” does not.
We should’ve had main/secondary characters and relationships fields. We never imagined people would tag every single character that made an appearance in a 150k word story.
We needed better instructions for 13-year-olds using the archive alone, who’ve been online for years but have never read a TOS, who believe that all websites operate roughly the same way.
These are all issues that would’ve been easier to deal with from the start. Those we haven’t addressed yet, we should.