[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 kind of research did you do about board work specifically before deciding to run? Thanks!
The Board has quite a comprehensive section on our internal wiki which documents most of the Board responsibilities, purview, and general workflow. I’ve read these pages quite extensively, and keep up to date with general Board updates through our private messaging software. I did not speak with any current Board Directors before deciding to run.
With AO3 exiting beta, what is your/Board vision regarding next steps of AO3 development and how do you plan to assist in Board capacity to accomplish them?
Accessibility, Design, & Technology’s archive development is primarily self-directed. Their projects come from within, other committees, and from user requests. Sometimes committees will request features, and as a Director I may be involved in passing committee-requests on to AD&T while interfacing with Chairs or helping said other committees with their work, but I do not expect to be especially involved with directing specific development projects nor do I have any personal development wishes for AD&T at this time.
In terms of supporting AD&T beyond general Directorial communication, I would like to look into the current progress on our various paid staff initiatives to see if there’s anything I can do to help expedite the research processes. These plans are held by their own committees, and Directors don’t directly manage committee work, but I believe progress on paid staff initiatives is the best specific action we can take to support AD&T (as well as the Systems committee).
Most importantly, I want to make sure that avenues of communication are kept open and active, especially surrounding projects that relate to Archive development so that AD&T and Systems volunteers are aware of these proceedings as much as is feasible.
How do you plan on addressing generative AI in fandom spaces? Given the recent challenges/issues from AI-scrapers, spambots, etc, do you have a vision/plan to strengthen Ao3’s site security and protection of fanworks?
The OTW Board has previously made a statement on AI scraping and generative AI. The stances in that post remain true, and works produced via generative AI remain allowed on AO3. Beyond the interpretation of the terms of service, the complete ban on AI-produced works that many have proposed would be impossible to enforce with our current volunteer numbers, not to mention the potential for abuse by users. Already, abuse is cast towards creators suspected of using generative AI, and that would only become more frequent were an outright ban on AI-generated content introduced.
As for data scrapers and spambots, our Systems and AD&T committees continue to make excellent efforts to curb both spam and scraping. Unfortunately, as also mentioned in the above-linked statement, it’s a fine line between targeting the bots and not affecting real users. It’s impossible to run a public website without allowing the public to view it, and strict measures may also affect accessibility tools. Anything that either Systems or AD&T need from the Board in order to actualize these defenses I would be happy to provide once inducted.
AO3 – the archive that eats other archives – has gone mainstream (making headlines when exiting beta), yet with the amount of soft power and sway the OTW has gathered over the years, OTW has done very little to support fandom community outside of AO3. Any plan to change this?
Though my personal goals as a Director lie more with the internal workings of the OTW, I want to push back on the claims here slightly. I believe that AO3 has been mainstream for several years, at least since 2021 and the COVID traffic boom, but perhaps as early as 2016 when we broke 1 million users. We are more mainstream now than ever before as one of the most-visited websites in the world, but if anything, such a viewership increase has likewise increased the need for additional support for the Archive of our Own.
Certainly if you look purely at the numbers in our 2026 Budget, we overwhelmingly spend on AO3. However, given the comparative size of the Archive compared to our other projects and the costs associated with web-hosting and purchasing new servers (especially in 2026), I feel this is an appropriate use of our money. To be frank, AO3 is the largest, most expensive, and—in my eyes—also most fandom-supportive of our projects.
With that said, I would be remiss to not also mention that we do have multiple other fandom-supporting projects and committees! You can see our major projects here, which include Open Doors—which has its own fannish preservation sub-projects—Legal Advocacy; the Fanlore wiki for all things fandom; and Transformative Works and Cultures, our own peer-reviewed fandom journal! But wait, there’s more! Our Communications committee also runs both Fanhackers—a place for fan research studies—and OTW Signal for “stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects”, as well as coordinating the OTW’s presence at conventions!
Are there any plans for OTW to start working more with non-AO3 archives, regardless of what software they run on? Or supporting indie archives in situ instead of waiting for them to need rescued via Open Doors?
Such projects often are the purview of specific committees rather than Board work, and I do not believe we’ve announced any plans in this vein. If such a project is something that you want to see, please get in contact with the OTW or encourage archive admins to get in contact. You can email suggestions like this to the Board or reach us through our contact form, as well as reaching specific committees should your request be better tailored to, say, Open Doors or AD&T. I of course can’t guarantee anything, especially not before even being inducted, but reaching out is the most important step should you have a specific request in mind.
Posting non-text works to AO3 currently requires hosting the materials off-site. While in many cases this is not a problem, AO3’s TOS is far more permissive than most image hosts, which creates difficulties uploading certain kinds of fan works. Do you have any thoughts on this situation?
Given the rapidly rising price of storage, the Archive’s already sizable server costs, and our bandwidth limitations, I do not feel comfortable advocating for the OTW to start self-hosting user media at this point in time. It’s simply not realistic to pursue.