The OTW is happy to announce that we have four highly qualified candidates who have stepped forward to fill the three seats open on the Board at the end of the 2010 term.
The initial candidates’ chat was held at 0200 UTC 21 October 2010. Read a transcript or view a screenshot here.
The second candidates’ chat was held at 2100 UTC 24 October 2010. Read a transcript or view a screenshot here.
Hele Braunstein
Hele Braunstein is a student of biological sciences and a life-long fan. Coming from a fannishly inclined family (of the sci-fi & fantasy books and table-top RPG variety), her first contact with fandom was stumbling into Harry Potter discussion sites while looking for book release dates. A self-proclaimed lurker, she quickly became involved by reccing and betaing fanfic, and eventually started writing it herself when she found her way into the Jane Austen fandom.
She has always been interested in fan-organized endeavours, and volunteers in various capacities with Perfect Imagination, the Jane Austen Fanfiction Index, and the Regency Encyclopedia. She’s currently in a great many fandoms, including Jane Austen, Harry Potter, X-Files, Firefly, Naruto, Hikaru no Go, Monster, Iron Man, Battlestar Galactica (2003), and The Breakfast Club.
Hele first volunteered with the OTW as a tester in January ‘08, and two months later began work as a Spanish translator. She later left the testing team to focus on translation, accepting a position as staff on the Translation Committee. She currently chairs the Spanish team and liaises with other language teams; her remit includes recruiting new translation volunteers and working with them to form new teams. She was instrumental in founding and establishing the OTW’s International Outreach Committee. Her focus continues to be on translation issues and she takes an active interest in the development of the Archive of Our Own, which includes discussing technical details with AD&T and volunteering as a tag wrangler. As a latinoamerican, Spanish-as-mother-tongue fan, and a member of diverse fandoms with different platforms and fandom cultures, her work in the OTW has focused on advocating for international and panfandom accessibility.
She plans to use her time on the Board to advocate for greater international and panfandom inclusiveness in OTW projects and policies by focusing on their underlying structures and on multilanguage features for non-English speaking fans and for those who use English as a fannish lingua franca.
Francesca Coppa
Francesca Coppa is director of film studies and associate professor of English at Muhlenberg College, and a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works. She is running for a second term on the OTW Board for two reasons: first, to provide some continuity between the original board and the OTW boards of the future; and second, to help the OTW accomplish the goals outlined on the Vidding Roadmap (for which she has been the OTW’s primary advocate). Over the last three years, Francesca has been primarily responsible for OTW’s communications, which includes writing or vetting most of the org’s mission statements, annual reports, blog posts, web pages, media queries and interviews, and email.) She has also done such things as: founded both the Open Doors and Vidding committees, including the Fan Culture Preservation Project and the Oral History of Vidding project; served as liaison to several other OTW committees including Journal, Web, and Wiki; maintained wireframes for ADT; served as spokesperson for the OTW in venues such as NPR and the mainstream print media, as well as at academic and legal conferences; worked closely with Legal to obtain a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers, including vidders; testified at the Library of Congress in favor of same; and directed documentaries on vidding for MIT and oral history videos for the Oral History project. She is currently co-editing a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan/remix video.
Ira Gladkova
Ira Gladkova is a web designer and developer with a degree in Linguistics from Reed College. A lifelong fan, Ira has always had a keen interest in cross-pollination of fandom communities and in bringing different fans together; as an artist, writer, reccer, meta-holic, and budding vidder with interests spanning most media formats and two languages, she is fascinated by diversity within and across fandom communities.
Ira’s OTW involvement began as a volunteer in the Tag Wrangling, Testing, and Coding projects. During that time, she developed systems for tracking and effectively carrying out complex wrangling work, wrote documentation and tutorials to aid her fellow wranglers, contributed to major policy decisions, and was a vocal proponent for an internationally-minded representation of animated and sequential media. She advocates for standards and accessibility in her web development work, and contributed significant front-end improvements to the Post New page. She was instrumental in creating and developing a free-standing Support Committee, serving as the initial co-chair; that work included formation of a team of staff, drafting policies, developing standard procedures and responses, and research and early development of an AO3-native support infrastructure and the software necessary to make that infrastructure a reality. She continues to serve with Support, carrying that project forward.
Ira established a newsletter for One Piece with the aim of bringing fans from different services together. She currently serves as staff on a Final Fantasy panfandom newsletter and helped it grow from LJ-only to multi-service and internet-wide; she also co-moderates a yearly panfandom, multimedia Final Fantasy gift exchange currently spanning over 30 canon entries in over a dozen universes. In addition to One Piece, Final Fantasy, and a lifelong interest in anime, manga, and video games in general, she currently rolls all over Fullmetal Alchemist, the Ace Attorney series, Psychonauts, Avatar: the Last Airbender, and the Vorkosigan Saga. Her heart goes out to all fellow tl;dr gen writers everywhere.
She is planning to use her time on the OTW Board to continue striving for accessibility, efficiency, and inclusiveness within the organization, with a particular focus on advocating for anime, manga, and gaming fandom perspectives.
Kristen Murphy
Kristen Murphy chairs the OTW’s Webmasters committee, on which she’s served since its formation in 2008. As Webmasters chair, she leads the team that builds and maintains transformativeworks.org and coordinates with numerous committees to support and promote their work on the Web. Among her responsibilities are long-range planning, development of training materials, project management, and personnel management. She is also a tag wrangler for the Archive of Our Own, and she regularly assists the Development & Membership committee with their projects.
Kristen has spent her life as both a fan and an activist. She wrote her first protest letter in kindergarten when PBS stopped airing The Electric Company, and she became interested in fair-use issues in 1996 when she took part in a successful campaign to save a popular fannish Web site. She participates in multiple fandoms as a writer, beta reader, and podficcer, and is invested in fandom’s survival as a dynamic, diverse, and non-homogeneous assemblage of large and small interrelated cultures.
Kristen works as a student services assistant at Indiana University, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in higher education and student affairs. Her professional experience includes issuing news releases, conducting interviews, supervising a weekly podcast, and organizing a national conference.
She plans to use her time on the OTW Board to create initiatives to support the organization’s long-term stability and sustainability, including the development of new training resources for staffers and volunteers and the expansion of outreach to diverse fannish communities.