[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.]
Some candidates mentioned internationalisation in their platforms. Where do you see the OTW at in this regard, in particular when it comes to current challenges and roadblocks?
The OTW is an international organization with international users; it’s up to us to improve the services that we provide to ensure that non-English-speaking users can have the same experience. In my view, there are three main areas where the Archive in particular needs to improve: providing a translated interface, improving Support and Policy & Abuse response times for non-English users, and improving usability of non-English tags.
In terms of interface translation, AD&T and Translation have been making a lot of progress behind the scenes. Interface translation sounds deceptively simple until you start to get into the edge cases; static pages that always say the same thing are pretty easy, for example. But for messages that change or text that only shows up in certain circumstances, there can be complexities in making sure that text is coded in a way that it can be “read” to be translated and making sure that text is translated correctly. For example, if a language pluralizes differently depending on the numbers involved, then what looks like a basically-identical sentence in English won’t always be translated the same way. But our teams have been working through this with our email interface, which will be a massive step forward for the interface. (Huge thanks to the AD&T folks who talked through this with me; if anything isn’t 100% accurate, it’s me, not them.) As a member of the Board, I’d hope to stay engaged with this process and be available to address any unforeseen roadblocks that arise.
The current Board has already been working to help Support and Policy & Abuse develop ways to improve response times for non-English-speaking users. This has been deeply appreciated, and if elected, I’ll be excited to help continue this project and hopefully see improvements in this area.
The OTW has come under fire recently for not doing enough to protect fans, especially nonwhite fans from racism. How would you address this issue and how would you balance not policing darkfic creators with not allowing thinly-veiled harassment, or singling out people of color/their allies unfairly?
There are really two separate issues at play here: preventing targeted harassment, and improving individual control over experiences on the Archive. Our goal is to prevent malicious harassment: nonwhite fans should be able to use the Archive without fear of experiencing harassment, thinly-veiled or otherwise. To this end, our harassment policies are very strict about content that a user can’t avoid. Users should have complete control over who can comment on their work, and harassing comments are a serious violation of the Terms of Service. Similarly, our policies forbid slurs and threats towards other users in tags, usernames, and other spaces that other users can’t easily avoid.
But racism exists, and may be present in works whether users intend it as harassment or not. Additionally, different users will have different views on the meaning and intent behind fanworks. I want to enable all users–including and especially users of color–to have a better experience on the Archive by continuing to develop and provide tools that allow users greater control over their own experience. The mute and block features are a significant improvement that allow users to prevent others from contacting them or keep other users’ works from appearing in their search results. This not only removes a number of potential vectors for harassment, it also allows users to avoid seeing works by users they find upsetting or even merely annoying.
These policies shouldn’t prevent users from writing fics about fraught topics, including those that may make some other users uncomfortable: instead, I hope we can provide users with the ability to avoid seeing these works through filters and muting tools. In combination with our policies preventing deliberate harassment, I hope we can make the Archive a welcoming space for fans of color.
What would you like to see the OTW do going forward to protect fans and volunteers from parts of the world under peril (e.g., Congo, Palestine, Sudan)?
The OTW thankfully has a strong history of recognition of the importance of information security for fans; for many, it’s important that they be able to keep their online activity separate from their real identity. This is especially important for those who live in areas of conflict or under governments with ideologies counter to the mission and content of the OTW.
On the user side, minimal collection of information has always been a key feature of AO3; we retain the absolute minimum amount of information from users to enable them to engage with the site. Features like orphaning and anonymous collections are also helpful in allowing users to limit information available. I would like us to continue to develop features with this ethos in mind, and engage with digital security experts to make sure our site is as secure as possible.
On the volunteer side, I think we’ve made major strides in improving actual practices to improve volunteer safety. A major step was moving to organizational email accounts so that no one’s personal email is linked to their volunteer profile. I want us to continue to evaluate our practices in terms of collection and retention of information and account security to make sure our users and volunteers have the strongest identity protection that we can offer.
With the looming risk of Project 2025, what are your proposals to protect writers’ freedom of expression?
The Archive has always been committed to being a place to host fanfiction of all kinds, especially LGBTQ+ and explicit material that has historically been subject to censorship. We’re fortunate to both own our own servers–meaning that there is no service provider who can restrict the kind of content we host–and have a Legal team that is prepared to advocate for fan writers. I have confidence that the Archive will continue to carry out this mission regardless of the political shifts that might occur.
Censorship law is on the rise in the US. Do you have a strategy to mobilize the legal team to try and prevent it from impacting Ao3’s usability?
I’m happy to be able to tell you that Board members don’t need to do anything to mobilize the Legal team–they’re already on it! Our Legal Team members are experts in this area of law, and they are always keeping an eye on both prospective laws and pending cases that might impact fandom as a whole as well as the Archive specifically. As Legal continues to do this work, as a member of the Board, I will try to be a resource for them and help provide resources to facilitate their advocacy when necessary.
what are your opinions on censorship, specifically limiting what kind of works creators can share (loli/shota, noncon, studentxteacher, incest, beastiality, etc)
The Archive was created to host all kinds of fanworks. As our Terms of Service says, “You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled.” That being said, images may receive stricter scrutiny; for example, explicit user icons and certain photographic or photorealistic images are not allowed. But when written fiction is censored, it’s often the work of and depicting marginalized groups that is censored first; I have no interest in going down that road.
Users who prefer not to read underage or rape/noncon content can filter it out using our major Archive Warnings. Other tags can also be excluded from search, and we’ve added more features to allow users to block and mute other users who post content they may prefer not to see. I believe we should continue to add features to allow users to customize their experience, not restrict what kinds of fiction that users can share.
What will you do to protect fanworks from being stolen by AI content farms for profit on YouTube, etc?
The Archive already has some measures in place to prevent bot scraping. We use a robots.txt file to opt out of some scrapers. We also use rate limiting and tools available through Cloudflare to block bots with bad intentions as well. Our Systems team also keeps an eye out and can intervene when our traffic flow indicates that there’s something unusual going on, or take manual action against known bad actors.
Unfortunately, there’s no technical solution that makes this kind of theft impossible. When they do happen, though, you own any work you post and it’s a copyright violation for anyone to post it without your permission. Since you do own the copyright on your own work, though, we can’t request takedowns for you. Fortunately, we do have a wonderful Legal team, and you should also reach out to them if you have questions about sending a DMCA takedown notice or other aspects of enforcing your copyright.
otwarchive and AO3 have been in beta since 2008. The AO3 roadmap was last updated in 2013. Version 0.9.0 was released in 2012. What is your position on exiting beta in terms of organizational will, timeline, and operational improvements required to reach 1.0?
As you noted, the AO3 roadmap is more than ten years old, and I think our targets have changed in that time. However, I think some of the goals for 1.0 remain very present: a fully translatable interface and an install package that’s implementable by less experienced developers remain a priority for us. (I’ve discussed the translatable interface in-depth in an answer above.)
I don’t have a precise answer on timelines: We have amazing AD&T and Systems teams, but they’re all volunteers, so there’s obviously capacity limitations. The Archive is also huge, and addressing issues (like the DDOS attacks last summer) and making quality-of-life improvements (e.g., improving our search features) sometimes take priority over larger feature development. We’ve also prioritized some extremely important features, like blocking and muting, that don’t appear on that roadmap at all. As Board, I’d love to work with AD&T and Systems to provide an updated roadmap that demonstrates current priorities, and work with these teams to facilitate building the additional capacity they may need for some of these priorities.
Any candidate here who will try to implement a statistical breakdown of views/kudos/comments on chapter per chapter basis like the “other” site? I feel like that would complete this site. Also, it would allow authors to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. That will be so cool 🙂
I agree this could be cool! I don’t think this is a high priority for our development team; there are other features that have a much larger impact on user experience. But I trust that our wonderful AD&T team will continue to prioritize and develop features that improve the experience of our users, and as a member of the Board I’ll try to support them however possible.