[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.]
What makes you unique as a candidate? What do you think makes you stand out against the others running for Board this year?
I’ll first say that I think all of the candidates running this year care deeply about the OTW and would make great Board members. However, I think two things would make me a particularly strong candidate. First, my professional background in management consulting gives me insight into some of the challenges that the OTW is facing in terms of building out management infrastructure. Given that I’ve worked in process redesign and capability building in the past, I think I can bring the skill and experience needed to drive the implementation of some of the changes the OTW needs.
Second, I’m extremely engaged in the OTW–not just in the two committees that I am a part of, but I also interact frequently with volunteers across other committees and pay close attention to issues that arise. I think this level of awareness will help me a lot as a member of the Board, because I will be coming in with a solid understanding of not just my own areas of work but issues and concerns from volunteers in many committees and projects. I’m also always willing to listen and learn whenever I encounter an issue I’m less familiar with.
Election candidates rarely have clearances to all the Board-level details of the OTW history and inner workings, and may have questionable assumptions about the Org, yet you are still expected to answer public queries about them. What is your strategy in term of research and fact-check to address that?
While I’m part of the Policy & Abuse and Tag Wrangling committees and therefore have the most knowledge in those areas, I’m also very engaged with the broader organization, so I did come into this election with a baseline level of knowledge about a lot of current priorities and activities. However, I’m also very aware that I don’t know everything! If I’m citing a policy or a process, I’ll check documentation to make sure I’m remembering everything correctly. Whenever there’s a gap in my knowledge, I reach out to other people in the OTW. For example, I reached out to volunteers in both AD&T and Systems so I could accurately answer questions in the previous set (huge thanks to those volunteers who took the time to answer all my questions!). I’ve also tried to indicate in my answers when I lack expertise or am relying on the knowledge of others.
Overall, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a lot of support in this process, and other volunteers have offered input and advice and beta-read my answers. I can’t promise to never make a mistake, but I can promise I’m doing everything I can to be accurate.
The OTW moves so slowly in part because a lot of work is spread between few people. How do you plan on evaluating the OTW’s recruitment strategy to increase the number of volunteers, alongside improving safety, satisfaction, and balance of work so existing volunteers stay longer?
The OTW has put a lot of thought into how to improve recruitment, especially in recent years. (Although there are definitely some areas where more recruitment is still needed.) However, from my experience in my committees, recruiting volunteers is only one part of the problem–training and retention also play a significant role. Without being sufficiently prepared to train and retain volunteers, recruitment often looks a lot like pouring water into a leaking pot.
Making sure that we have a good understanding of what new volunteers need in order to make it through training and stay engaged is just as important as bringing in larger volumes of people. Good training is super important, and is a significant lift for committees. Therefore, I want to focus on supporting committees in evaluating and developing their training, as well as making sure they have enough mentors and resources to support trainees. I also know that training can vary substantially across different committees simply because the work is so different. Therefore, it’s important to work with committees individually to understand their needs and build a process that works for the skills and processes their volunteers will be using. Once we’ve built this stronger training infrastructure, it will be easier for committees to recruit more frequently or in greater numbers.
Additionally, I want to encourage processes to understand what causes volunteers to depart. Exit interviews aren’t the norm–and admittedly aren’t always possible, as sometimes people simply disappear–but tracking why volunteers leave could give us a much better understanding of the drivers of turnover in the organization. Having a short, basic set of questions we ask departing volunteers could help us a lot in identifying issues and reducing turnover.
As majority of you have been with the OTW for quite a long time (6-10+ years), how do you prepare yourself to counter the cultural inertia that has been entrenched across various parts of the organisation?
To combat cultural inertia, we need to provide leadership support for change and allow volunteers across the organization to get involved in projects. A big barrier to large-scale change is that a lot of projects get very silo-ed and become the work of a small group of committee leaders. However, no small group of people can do everything in an organization with nine hundred volunteers! Therefore, I think encouraging broader involvement in special projects, and providing support for volunteers who want to get involved and spearhead initiatives, is going to help a lot in countering inertia.
As I’ve mentioned before, I also have a background in change management. That means that I have experience with launching a new initiative or a project redesign with a small group of people, and then working with them to socialize it across the organization. (Socializing change means clearly communicating what changes are, why they’re happening, and getting the rest of the organization trained in and excited about those changes.) A big part of that is clear communication and tapping individuals across different levels of the organization to get involved as ambassadors. Given this past experience, I think I have a good understanding of different ways to implement major changes, even in large organizations with extensive histories like the OTW.
Past events have resulted in a total devaluation of Board work and Board of Directors — Board of Directors is the legally responsible for the OTW. How familiar are you with the Board purview, duty, mandate in either typical nonprofit background or the OTW specific case?
I’m very familiar with the mandate of the Board for a typical nonprofit. I think there’s an understandable hesitancy towards the Board exercising substantial control over the OTW given past events, but despite that hesitancy, the Board does remain legally responsible for the organization and needs to be prepared to take decisive action when it’s necessary.
That being said, I think that the duty of the Board is first to carry out the accounting and legal activities required by the OTW’s nonprofit status. Second, the duty of the Board is to spearhead improvements in the organization, including the creation of new committees and the launch of initiatives that impact the organization as a whole, such as those directed towards overall volunteer management. Third, it’s the Board’s responsibility to supervise all of the committees. This third responsibility should not involve micromanagement: our committees have specific responsibilities to carry out, and they should be able to use their judgment and discretion to carry out those responsibilities. However, when there are issues severe enough that a committee is not or cannot fulfill its responsibilities, it’s the responsibility of the Board to get involved. The Board should also be engaging regularly with committees to support them by providing resources as needed.
Increasingly the ways in which the OTW’s institutional inertia disempowers volunteers and erodes general trust in the OTW have come to light, how do you plan to motivate structural change within the organization?
I discussed in a question above my background in change management and different ways to bring structural change forward. In terms of motivation, I think we’re fortunate to have a number of volunteers who are extremely interested in leading projects and driving change forward. (This is how our Board Assistants Team got started this past year, for example.) I think the Board can help empower these volunteers and provide them support in launching initiatives in the same way that the BAT project got started.
In terms of improving trust, I think a huge part of this is communication. A big step forward this year has been weekly updates from the Board on what they’ve been working on, what projects have been completed, and what projects are ongoing. I want to continue and improve this level of communication, both from the Board and from other committees. Several committees internally publish their meeting minutes, which contain a wealth of information; I’d like to make this practice universal and ensure these minutes are easier to find for volunteers. Providing this level of transparency into what everyone is doing with their time, especially when it comes to projects designed to address identified issues, will help reassure individuals that progress is being made and their concerns are being heard.
Overall, I think encouraging broader involvement in existing projects, supporting volunteers who are not small groups of Chairs in spearheading new projects, clearly communicating activities both within and across committees, and implementing stronger change management processes and socialization will help us drive structural change. We can empower volunteers who aren’t in formal leadership roles to drive forward projects, and this will both decrease inertia and provide more capacity for completing this necessary work.
Recent controversies within the OTW have made many fans hesitant to donate their time or money to the organization. What would you say to those fans who are hesitant?
I think everyone should direct their time and money towards places where they feel they can do the most good or that are important to them. The OTW is far from a perfect organization; however, I do think that there are a lot of wonderful and caring people who are a part of it, that our mission to preserve and promote fanworks and culture is extremely important, and that there’s an organizational will to improve and change. I’ve said before that I think our current Board has taken important steps, and I’ve also seen a lot of efforts across committees to develop and grow as well.
For that to happen, we need volunteers who are willing to put time and effort into an imperfect organization and institute that change. I understand that not everyone is going to be in a position to do that kind of work, but I am, and I would encourage anyone who is to consider getting involved. I wouldn’t be running for Board if I didn’t think that the work we do is important and that it is possible to do better.
If you could time travel back to when the OTW started, what would you have changed/warned people about?
To some extent, I think that time-traveling back to when the OTW started and warning them about issues that have arisen today wouldn’t have helped anything! The OTW was started by a small group of non-professionals; the knowledge that it would grow into a massive organization that needed to become professionalized wouldn’t have meant the early OTW had or could obtain the resources to do so. That being said, I think as the organization did grow, there have been many stops along the way when it would have been very, very nice if we’d started to think about some of these issues earlier and laid more groundwork towards volunteer management, internationalization, and infrastructure. (And on the tag wrangling side, specifically, I would have stopped the very very long pause in creation of non-fandom tags!)
All that being said, outside of an Alternate Universe – Time Travel fic in the Organization for Transformative Works RPF category, none of that is going to happen. So I’m going to focus on the actions that I can take today, both on my committees and as a member of the Board, to continue to develop and grow.