[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.]
How familiar are you with all OTW projects and committees, including but not limited to AO3 and Fanlore, have you work with them in any capacity that could prepare you for Board work?
As far as OTW projects goes, I am most familiar with AO3, having been a reader of the site since 2014. I have also been reading our Transformative Works & Cultures journal almost as long. I have used Fanlore as a reference for fandom history and terminology since before I knew it was associated with the OTW. Since joining the OTW as a volunteer I have also followed along with our Legal Advocacy project, following their news posts eagerly, and with Open Doors, again via news posts, but also assisting with tag mapping for my fandoms as a wrangler.
As a volunteer, I follow along with all of our committees and workgroups via their public channels in our internal chat tool. I really like knowing what is going on in the organization, even if I don’t always understand all of the technical speak from our Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) committee! I am the kind of person who likes to have as much information as possible, and I believe that my awareness of the OTW’s work across projects and committees, if not any specific work I’ve done with them, helps prepare me to assist them as a Board member.
Additionally, as mentioned in my platform, I have worked most closely with Communications and Support in my time as a Tag Wrangling Supervisor, which has helped prepare me for communicating with the public as a representative of the OTW.
Board members are elected from existing volunteers, and the Elections committee often reports difficulty finding candidates. How would you improve the volunteers’ understanding of what Board service entails, so more people feel prepared and willing to run in the future?
More transparency regarding the workload and types of work the Board does would be good not just for helping prepare future potential candidates for the job, but also helping all volunteers to understand the way the organization works. The recent practice of sharing a bi-weekly update on Board work’s progress with volunteers has been a great step in that direction. There have also been significant updates to the internal documentation, spearheaded by the Board Assistants Team (BAT), which are incredibly helpful and allowed me to prepare my expectations for the role before declaring candidacy.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the understanding of the work involved is the biggest barrier we face in finding candidates. The necessary requirement to serve under your legal name is an especially difficult one for many people in fandom, where we mostly are known by pseudonyms that we do not want potentially connected to our legal identities. This is unfortunately not a requirement that can be changed. Our Elections committee has been wonderful throughout this process with their resources and advice for protecting our fannish identities, but there is still a risk. Additionally, in recent years there have been incidents of harassment of candidates during the election, which were unfortunate and disappointing to see, and I can understand how that could deter potential candidates.
Board members are required to continue serving in their previous committee roles alongside their many Board responsibilities. In recent years, several Directors have stepped down before completing their terms. Do you think these expectations contribute to turnover, and what changes would you suggest to improve Board retention?
I believe that having to maintain at least one role in the OTW outside of Board duties is important to staying connected to the day to day work of the organization. Many roles allow volunteers to decrease the amount of time they are spending on their duties, and Board members who hold multiple roles do not need to stay in all of them while serving their term.
Regarding the former Board members who stepped down, many of them cited personal reasons for doing so, and ultimately we cannot say for sure how much the workload expectations contributed to their decisions. There have been changes in the last couple of years that I believe will help reduce turnover – since 2024 there has been a new requirement for all Board members to take at least one two-week break each year. The addition of the Board Assistants Team to assist with the administrative side of Board work has been a huge help overall from what I have heard as well.
As the OTW doesn’t mandate chair term limit, some volunteers have been chairing for decade. Some would argue that there are certain correlations between organisational inertia and the prolonged lack of leadership turnover. How would you address all of these during your term?
As a volunteer organization, it can be difficult to find people to fill positions with such a high commitment like chairing. It is unfortunately not practical to enforce term limits as it currently stands, especially for our smaller committees. As mentioned in the most recent board meeting (minutes will be posted here), all committees are now encouraged to have multiple Chairs, and establish Chair Assistant and Chair Track positions to help distribute the responsibility and workload as well as make succession planning easier and make it more possible for chairs to step down and hand over the work. Some committees already have at least some of these in place, and I would continue to encourage any remaining committees to follow suit.
Volunteers in the OTW can hold multiple roles across committees; this includes Board members and committee chairs. These also hold significant influence over recruitment/staffing, workflows, and policy decisions. How can the organization prevent the risks of concentrated informal power, conflicts of interest, burnout, and unclear accountability?
Some committees do have limitations on how many concurrent leadership roles you can hold, especially those where a conflict of interest could arise. For instance, you cannot remain a member of the Board Assistants Team if you are running for or serving on Board, and Tag Wrangling Supervisors cannot be the Chair of another committee. I would encourage all committees to consider similar policies as makes sense to them to help keep volunteers from holding too many leadership roles at one time. This would be, as you note, to help prevent both concentrated power and conflicts of interest, as well as burnout for the volunteer themself.
Would you consider doing audit on OTW committee purviews vs. actual practice, when the OTW currently has: 2 Translation committees; Strategic Planning and OCR handling multiple overlapping work and projects; AO3 Docs who couldn’t publish much needed FAQs such as searching and filtering after multiple years of drafting?
The Board regularly meets and collaborates with all committee Chairs to discuss their work and needs. I look forward to learning more about each individual committee and how to help them fulfill their purposes and accomplish their goals, including where they overlap and can collaborate.
The OTW seems to have a history of committees/subcommittees/workgroups facing challenges in becoming sustainably operational, like ICCR (Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Subcommittee) recently. This seems to be in part due to limited early-stage support, including documentation, training, and staffing. What strategies should the organization use to ensure the sustainable development of its committees in the future?
We have had several new committees and subcommittees form in the last few years with varying degrees of smoothness. I would encourage and support the development of general centralized resources for getting a new committee off the ground, including documentation and training templates, as well as assistance in running a first round of recruitment. A workgroup could potentially be formed to review what went well and what didn’t with the recent new committee establishments and then gather and consolidate existing resources from current committees for internal wiki documentation as well as options for training methods and documents.
Some of the smaller OTW committees are understaffed: this limits their training capacity and makes recruitment difficult, which in turn creates a cycle of persistent understaffing. Training length and quality also vary between committees. What can the Board and committees do to address the recruitment bottleneck and training imbalance?
I think many of our committees could benefit from a sharing of resources for recruitment and training. As mentioned in a previous answer, training up multiple Chairs and establishing Chair Assistants would spread out the workload for creating and improving the training documentation and programs and allow for more sustainable recruitment cycles. It is important to have a strongly established baseline and effective training before pushing for recruitment to ensure higher retention, confident volunteers, and a more balanced workload.