Bio
Jennifer H. (they/them) has been in fandom as long as they can remember, from writing meta about Big Bad Beetleborgs for elementary school assignments, to online Buffy and Harry Potter roleplay in middle school, to making very mediocre Alias Livejournal icons in high school. They discovered AO3 in 2014 after a dear internet friend finally got them to watch Supernatural and they’ve been voraciously reading there (and very occasionally writing) ever since. Jennifer joined the OTW as a Tag Wrangler in 2021 and became a Tag Wrangling Supervisor in 2024.
In their professional life, Jennifer has spent the last few years specializing in system and process documentation and training. They also have experience working for an arts nonprofit and have worked in both sales and program management in manufacturing. In their free time they sing as a soprano in their local LGBTQ choir and are learning to play the banjo.
1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?
I have considered running for board for the last couple of years, but this year I am finally in a position with my life and schedule that I can truly dedicate the time needed. The work that the OTW does across its projects to preserve fanworks and fannish history is deeply meaningful to me, and I want to lend my skills and time toward furthering its mission and goals.
2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?
I have over a decade of experience working with cross-functional teams in the manufacturing industry. While this may seem far removed from the work of the OTW, I am sure that my experience breaking through communication barriers between isolated departments will translate well to the cross-committee collaboration and communication in which the Board regularly engages.
I also have experience and skill in defining and documenting processes, which I know is important for many of the Board’s projects. Over the last few years, I have engaged in large projects to gather teams and facilitate workshops to create and document standard processes at multiple companies.
Outside of that I am known for my attention to detail, which I balance with speed and efficiency to complete tasks quickly and properly. For example, since starting my latest position, I was brought onto a stalled project which I was able to push along an additional 16% in my first month. I have since been given ownership of this initiative and continue to track consistent progress towards its completion.
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?
With the continued growth in our user community and volunteer base, the most important goal to me is ensuring the sustainability of our systems and processes, and ensuring that we can support our volunteers to continue the work we do in the long term. Groundwork has already been done to identify many of the steps that we need to take as an organization. I would like to work with the Organizational Culture Roadmap workgroup and others to implement some of these needed improvements.
Additionally, our current Board and Board Assistants Team have been working diligently to strengthen and organize areas of our internal documentation. I would like to continue this work, as well as support all of our committees in doing the same for their more specific training and process documentation. This creates smoother onboarding and training for new volunteers and allows others to step into new roles and continue fundamental work when specific people are unavailable.
Looking specifically at our last post about the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan, I would like to work with committees to make progress on the Succession Planning goal to ensure that the continued functioning and success of any of our committees or workgroups does not rest solely with a few volunteers. I have seen the impact of this in my professional life where I’ve taken over duties that rested on one person and in my continuing efforts to document current processes and best practices that were developed by team members who have since left without imparting their knowledge.
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.
While all of my time volunteering with the OTW has been on the Tag Wrangling committee and therefore centered around AO3, I am also a frequent reader of Fanlore and our Transformative Works and Cultures journal. As a Tag Wrangler, I have collaborated with Open Doors to help ensure imported works in my assigned fandoms are searchable and filterable, as well as worked with Translation to have tags in languages other than English translated so that they could be wrangled properly. I have even helped translate tags into English myself from my second language!
As a Tag Wrangling Supervisor, I have also collaborated with Communications to bring wrangling news posts to the public and respond to user comments, and worked to answer questions brought to us from Support about specific tags.
So much of our work overlaps and affects each other – I find that understanding each other’s goals and work goes a long way toward helping effective collaboration. The best way to know how to support each committee as a Board member will be through listening directly to their needs and working together to find solutions, such as bringing on paid contractors, which our Accessibility, Design, and Technology (AD&T) committee has recently done. I will continue to learn more about each of the projects and committees through our internal documentation and conversation with the committee Chairs and members themselves.
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?
My current workload as a Tag Wrangler and Supervisor varies from week to week in much the same way that I understand from talking to current Board members is true of their work as well. As a Tag Wrangling Supervisor, I can pick and choose which tasks I take and which projects I am involved in, and will be mindful of my bandwidth and limits when making those choices if I am elected to the Board. Additionally, I can always lessen my wrangling workload by wrangling fewer fandoms or splitting the work with a cowrangler as needed if I find that it is becoming too much for me to handle.