Harlan L.B.’s 2025 Q&A

[Note: There will be 1 Q&A post, covering all the topics brought up during the user-submitted Q&A period. Candidates were limited to 300 words per answer.]

How do you understand the role of the Board in the wider context of the OTW?

In my mind, the Board has two different roles that it plays in OTW, one which is fairly standard, and one which is a little bit more specific to OTW. The Board’s first responsibility, certainly its most core one, is the legal oversight of OTW. It must ensure that accurate financials are kept, that its members and volunteers are behaving in legal and ethical ways, seek to raise funds for the organization, and to ensure that the mission of the organization is being adhered to. This is the brass tacks — every non-profit board in the world has these same responsibilities, regardless of what the organization actually does.

Because we have no “executive”, however — no CEO, no President, no Executive Director — and are an entirely volunteer organization, the Board has an additional role to play in our OTW. It must act as the glue between the different committees, helping to make sure that we are all rowing in the same direction. Committees contribute to this — the BAT and strategic planning committees are both heavily involved — and many committees have liaisons to others, especially when they work closely together. In general, I think this is an area that could use some attention; though our current Board is doing yeoman’s work, day-to-day decision-making is typically not a strength of deliberative bodies like a Board.

What is one thing you’d improve in the current Board processes and why?

I confess, from my viewing of the Board’s work from the public side of things, I don’t see anything specifically wrong with the Board’s processes that I could point to and say, “see, this is broken”. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t specific process changes that could be useful, merely that I don’t think I see enough from the outside-in to be able to comment on a specific process fix.

If you could wave a magic wand and have something within the OTW change, what would it be, and what would it take to do it without magical aid?

There is a smorgasbord of internal policy changes that have been being worked on for a while, and while good progress is being made, the interrelationship between them and the number of different committees that are involved means that it can be slow and painful to get it across the finish line. If I could wave a magic wand and have that just be complete, it would save a lot of people’s time and energy. Alas, the Time-Turners were all destroyed — and they only ever went backwards, anyway.

I’m confident that it will still get done, and policy enacted by hex tends not to be policy that’s followed anyway.

What is the biggest concern for ao3, and how will you address it?

Personally, my biggest concern for AO3 (and OTW as a whole) is ensuring that our organization is setup for the long term. I talked about this in my platform, but we need to ensure that we are building a strong base across three axes to be able to ensure that AO3 is around for generations to come: long-term financial management, secure and evolvable technology, and a committed and active volunteer community.

While I intend to work on all of these, the one I think I can provide the most short-term help with is on the financial axis. I’ve personally managed budgets orders of magnitude larger than AO3’s, and though we have strong volunteers in the Finance committee, they have a lot of day-to-day work on their plates that can make it difficult to get their heads above water long enough to look towards the horizon.

Are you committed to preserving the OTW’s and AO3’s protection of freedom of artistic expression for fan creators, and not adding any new restrictions to the works allowed on the AO3 unless required by legal changes?

Yes; I strongly believe in the rights of free speech and free expression, even in cases where I personally find the speech offensive or repugnant. To that end, I believe that OTW should take every legal step possible, proactively and reactively, to continue to be able to host any fan creator’s content. In the event that some content becomes illegal in a particular jurisdiction which OTW is subject to, I would urge my colleagues on the Board that we block access from that jurisdiction rather than cave to their censorship.

That being said, I also believe that the Archive is a place for fans’ creative actions to be showcased. If the Archive begins to see a large influx of purely AI-generated content to the extent that it affects our systems, or users’ ability to find works which they want to read, I would give strong consideration to a policy which would forbid wholly AI-generated content from AO3. I have reservations about such a policy, mostly for practical reasons — differentiating AI-generated and non-AI generated content can be both difficult and unreliable, and determining where the line is drawn between something where AI is used to assist with editing or proofreading versus something generated whole-cloth is a gray area we would need to be able to be clear on.

Given the current rise of censorship in literature and media in the US, where the OTW is based, how do you plan to ensure the safety and continuity of the Archive and all it stands for?

This is a topic that I know the OTW legal committee is closely looking at as different state laws are proposed and passed across the US; as a member of the Board, I would defer to their expertise over my understanding of the situation — I’m not a lawyer, regardless of where I may have stayed last night.

To give my understanding, though: none of the laws passed thus far in the US have prohibited the publication of adult or LGBTQ+ content wholesale, and any law doing so would be unlikely to hold up in court under current precedents — even the majority decision of the recent US Supreme Court case on requiring IDs for adult content admits that there is a constitutional right for adults to view (some) pornography. Of the laws requiring ID in the US, all but one include a threshold which carves AO3 out of its regulation entirely.^*

That being said, unfortunately, the rise of censorship is not merely a US phenomenon. Similar regulations are being put into place around the world, and most other countries have weaker free speech protections than the US still does. As a member of the Board, I would continue to monitor the reports from the legal committee and strongly advocate for us to take a defensive posture whenever possible.

*: The laws, mostly variants of the same template, specify that a “substantial” amount of content be adult before the law triggers the ID requirements, usually set to one-third of the content of the website. AO3 currently has between 18% and 29% adult content, depending on whether you pessimistically assume all unrated content is adult.

I’d love to ask each candidate what they believe makes them a better fit than the other candidates running!

I have had the pleasure of working with both C. Ryan and Elizabeth during my time at OTW, and I can say without hesitation that either of them would do a fantastic job on the Board.

With that said, I believe that I bring some unique skills that are unusual to find elsewhere, including my experience working with and around complex bureaucracies (“bureaucracy hacking”, to use the term of art). As we look to strengthen our financial positions, paperwork is everywhere, and for better or worse, paperwork is a strength of mine. (As an example of just how sick and twisted my mind is: I volunteer helping people with their US taxes… because it’s fun.)

OTW’s best-known project across the general population is Archive of Our Own, but OTW does other initiatives like Fanlore and its legal work. How do you think OTW could do more outreach to raise the profile of these other projects?

AO3 is certainly the crown jewel for our organization, and that is as it should be. Founding and maintaining the Archive is our raison d’être — the reason that OTW was created. That does not, however, mean that the other work that OTW does is not important! Fanlore, our legal advocacy, Open Doors, and Transformative Works & Cultures are all critical functions that no other organization in the world is able to do.

Each of these different projects may want or need different levels of visibility, however. They have different audiences who communicate in disparate ways. Our legal advocacy, for example, primarily has an audience of courts and policy-makers, while Transformative Works & Cultures faces towards academia. Though the general public certainly can read and be involved in the work that they do, the focus should be enabling them to reach their intended audiences.

Fanlore and Open Doors are a little bit different in that they both aim towards the public. Open Doors needs to reach fan-archive owners that may want or need support, and one of the best ways to do that is to make the project widely known about. Our Comms team does an excellent job of working with OD to announce new archive imports on the news section of AO3, and I know there is proactive outreach done by OD to fan archive owners as well..

Fanlore is an incredible resource, but right now, it’s not tied as tightly to AO3 as Open Doors is. While I have some potential ideas (linking tags from AO3 to Fanlore entries, perhaps?), I would need to speak in detail with the Fanlore team about what their wants and needs are before pushing any specific suggestions.