Bio
Harlan L.B. (he/him): has been in the fandom community since he first stumbled on a Lord of the Rings slashfic — mostly as a reader and obsessive packrat, but occasionally as a fanbinder. He joined OTW to work as a tech volunteer for the Open Doors project in 2018 and has worked there (except for a one year hiatus) since. In early 2024, he was appointed as the Cybersecurity Delegate to the Board (CSD) and performed an audit on the security of the OTW, delivering the report to the Board in May 2025.
Outside of OTW, Harlan works as a consultant helping federal, state, and local governments make technology actually work for its users and for the public. He has worked in information security and software engineering for over two decades, including as a C-level executive and as a senior security architect. He is also a contributor to the free software and open source community, currently serving as a Debian Developer.
Platform
1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?
I’ve been considering running for the Board for several years now, but I was concerned that my personal and professional responsibilities wouldn’t leave me enough time to do the role justice. The work that OTW does, however, is deeply important to me, and so I have decided to step back from some of my other work to stand for this position.
2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?
Though most of my six years volunteering with OTW has been relatively narrowly focused, becoming the CSD gave me a unique opportunity to talk to volunteers around the entire organization. Besides my experience at OTW, I have experience working with both small and large-scale budgeting in the corporate and government sectors, as well as serving in leadership roles in the early stages of a few non-profits. I also have served on a non-profit board in the past and have extensive experience in software vendor acquisition and management.
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?
For me, the biggest goal that I want to achieve for OTW is to ensure that the organization and its resources are set up for the long term — I want to make sure that the works that we have been entrusted with are here for not merely years, but generations to come. This work will involve looking at OTW’s resources — financial, technical, and volunteer — and ensuring that we are setting each on a sustainable path. Without all three of these threads being balanced and strong, we can’t expect that OTW will be able to continue to provide its resources over the coming decades. This is a project that will cut across all of OTW’s committees. It isn’t something that I, or even the Board, will be able to do alone; it will require help from our volunteers, our donors, and our members — but together, we can make sure that OTW stays here, supporting the transformative fanwork community.
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.
In terms of volunteering, I’ve only officially worked on the Open Doors committee and, as the CSD, the Board Assistant Team. My work there has been relatively silo’ed – a bit of overlap with the Tag Wranglers, but the technical volunteers for OD don’t have a whole lot of cross-committee collaboration as a general rule. While working as the CSD, though, I have had the pleasure of working with committee chairs and members from across the entirety of OTW, particularly with the AD&T, Finance, and Systems committees. I’ve followed the work of the Legal team with interest, though it’s not something I can really contribute to myself!
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?
If elected to the Board, my work as the CSD would continue in much the same vein as it has — simply from the other side, helping to turn the recommendations into actions to be taken by the various committees. Now that the major report has been completed, the day-to-day time required is substantially lessened. I don’t anticipate a substantial time-conflict between my work as CSD and a potential position on the Board. As for my work in open doors, for better and for worse, Open Doors imports can be a complicated and slow process. There are several stages where work needs to be done, handed off to another group, and then started up again later. This leaves natural breaks in the process where time can be spent on other work for OTW.