[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?
My Bios & Platform post/page answers a majority of your question, but to summarize, I’ve mostly interacted with Support, Translation (primarily via Tag Wranglers serving as translators), AD&T, and as a user/public editor of Fanlore. Since then, I’ve started volunteering with Open Doors, as well as talking with the relevant committees to refine my answers to some of these Q&A questions. I’ve now reached out to the Systems, Legal, and Communications, to name a few.
None of my volunteer roles directly interface with other committees the same way that Board work promises to—though I don’t think many roles in the OTW do, given the Board’s unique position—so while my experience interfacing with other committees is limited to the above, as part of my preparation for becoming a Director I have made efforts to familiarize myself with other committees besides the ones I serve on.
With all that in mind, because committees in the OTW tend to frequently operate within their own spheres, the best preparation for the Director role is, paradoxically, having previously served on the Board. The next best thing, however, is taking steps to familiarize myself with the committees whose work I have interacted with less frequently as a volunteer, which I am doing.
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?
Aside from the obvious obstacles—wallet names, stress, workload, etc.—personally I found that I wished that there was more information on the Board’s week-to-week operations. While the Board training pages are quite comprehensive, they aren’t detailed on the topics that I was personally interested in. I would like to check the feasibility of sharing some more detailed summaries—within reason—about what day-to-day Board work looks like so that Directors-in-training can get a deeper understanding of what they’re signing up for, in terms of both responsibilities and time commitment. Perhaps we could make these pages more clearly documented for aspiring Directors as well?
I think that adding wiki pages that better introduce prospective Directors to the confidentiality-safe specifics of the Board’s work is a good step. Similar steps would include sharing these pages where potential candidates can see them, holding more frequent Board open houses, especially in advance of election season, and fostering a closer relationship with the general volunteer-base so there’s no sense of fear around asking questions about Board work.
In the end, I think running under your real name takes a lot of potential candidates out of the running, but that’s a requirement that’s not going to change. So it’s a matter of what steps we can take to incentivize the rest of the volunteer base to give it a shot.
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?
As I have not yet been inducted into the Board and personally experienced the workload, I can only guess as to why many previous Directors have resigned. Workload makes the most sense, but fortunately the Board and the OTW as a whole have been making good strides on policies to address workload, especially encouraging taking breaks.
I believe that the OTW has a good culture around leaving roles that you no longer can dedicate sufficient time to, whether that be Directorship or extra committee positions/responsibilities, and it allows Directors to adjust their workload as they see fit. I believe that continuing to support this culture and streamlining the processes for adjusting volunteer committee responsibilities will help support both Directors who may have unexpected impacts on workload and other OTW volunteers who may face similar challenges.
For any further ideas I would need to experience the Director workload to share with confidence.
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?
I think mandating a chair term limit is too strong a first step to take. I believe that creating clear tracks to Chair-ship or perhaps Chair Assistant-ship would be a more reasonable first step. A few of our committees already have clear training requirements for these positions. Of course, others of our committees are also much harder to find volunteers for, so in those cases it’s more important to look into expanding our recruitment reach.
As for addressing organizational inertia, I believe rather than trying to replace chairs, we (as an org) could look into ways to engage in transparent check-ins on committee work, progress, purview, and practice. Strategic Planning and OCR (Organizational Culture Roadmap) already produce organization-wide plans for moving forward, introducing goals for many different committees. Simply checking with Chairs and committee leadership teams to see how they’re proceeding with strategic plan goals could help move along with broader organization-wide initiatives and would provide more opportunities to raise and address roadblocks/barriers as they arise while still leaving the committees to self-govern their internal policies. Especially as we move into another Strategic Plan, I would like to look into ways to more frequently check-in with leadership rather than immediately seeking anyone’s replacement.
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?
I am not against volunteers holding multiple positions, even Chairs. Working in multiple committees can introduce you to new friends and coworkers, help interface with more OTW committees than working in a single one might, and provide different volunteer opportunities day-to-day while helping understand what other volunteers do. Current volunteers have a proven track record which makes them appealing applicants. People who want to do more work, have the time and energy for it, and complete it, probably shouldn’t be discouraged from stepping up.
I do think that putting some limits on the types of roles that can be held concurrently would be reasonable. This wouldn’t just help prevent the consolidation of power, it would also help maintain workloads and prevent overwork. I think that once you become a Chair or Co-Chair, it’s important to take a moment to reconsider your commitments, especially to more time-intensive committees or roles.
I think it’s impossible to completely prevent buildups of informal power. Instead it’s important to make sure that there are ways to address the abuse of power when it occurs. ICCR is making good strides towards introducing a clearer way to address misconduct. In my experience with the OTW, one of our greatest strengths when it comes to accountability is each other and our willingness as volunteers to call out wrongdoing when we see it. This should not be our sole method for addressing abuse of power, but it is important to recognize that it does exist, especially as a volunteer-run and member-controlled organization. It’s also important to facilitate transparent, usable channels for volunteers to raise concerns so that they feel comfortable flagging potential situations like this as they arise, and feel supported by the structures we have in place to address them.
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?
I do believe there’s a benefit in auditing purview vs. practice, especially when looking for redundant work that can be consolidated to reduce volunteer workload. I don’t think a one-time audit is necessarily the correct approach though—I would prefer consistent check-ins on committee practice so we can head issues off as they arise.
There is a benefit to keeping certain committees separate, such as Translation and User Response Translation, as it allows for better control over which tasks get assigned where, keeping the workload better divided among the volunteers who wish to deal with that sort of translation.
As for Strategic Planning and Organizational Culture Roadmap, I do think that these committees could work more closely together on some of their similar goals, with additional help from the Board. I believe that this is already in the works, as per the latest (August ‘26) public Board meeting mentioning a goal to form a joint Board-OCR workgroup to continue work on Strategic Planning’s Paid Staff Transition project.
The situation with AO3 Docs is very different from the overlap between the other committees. Docs has no conflicts regarding their purview, and their practice remains under that purview. If the concern is the speed of publishing for AO3 Docs’ FAQs, a purview audit would not accelerate the publishing process. Good documentation takes significant time to produce. For Docs, but also for all committees, one thing we could do is continue to develop strategies to reduce volunteer turnover, which continues to impact work speed as any volunteers who leave the OTW before finishing their training take resources and time without returning anything publicly visible.
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?
The best strategies to apply vary based on the specific committee and why we need it. In the case of ICCR, I feel like greater support and assistance during the initial setup would be an easy first step as more people working on a problem frequently helps with getting it off the ground. Board Directors and the Board Assistants Team have assisted on such projects in the past. The Board is currently working closely with ICCR, and I believe this increased focus has helped greatly with the development of the subcommittee.
Again, more frequent check-ins on committee progress would help things stay on track. At least for me, a sense of accountability keeps me working when something might otherwise fall by the wayside. Combined, I think this is a winning strategy for basic project success, which may suffice for less-complicated projects in committees with straightforward workflows. A number of committees, as well as the Board, also engage in volunteer-public updates, which provide a great way for other volunteers to see progress and ask questions.
Perhaps it’s obvious, but I think a lot of these situations could be addressed with money. We could look to outside contractors and other experts in the field to fill roles and assist with committee training while ramping up. Certainly not every problem can be solved via overwhelming moneypower, but we have money available, some of which could be used to hire these helping hands. Especially in situations as vital as ICCR, looking into ways to ease the burdens of all volunteers seems like a good idea.
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?
The specific struggles with staffing vary by committee—for example, it is harder to find volunteers for Legal or Finance due to the skills requested by those committees whereas Wrangling or Open Doors apps fill up within a day or two—but there’s a few factors that I believe are constant org-wide.
Some recruits, for various reasons, leave the Organization early into their tenure, some even before completing training. Especially for committees that do one-on-one mentoring with their trainees, this has a huge labor and time cost with little to no return on investment. It’s possible to screen applicants for those likely to serve longer, but analysis on that level itself requires a lot of work as well as enough applicants, which smaller committees may not be able to give or have.
I reckon the most effective way to get more volunteers for all committees (and as such, the greatest odds of volunteers for Finance or Legal) is to get more eyes on the openings. This is difficult, as we already post most places we can, including the AO3 news on the homepage, but I’d be interested in checking the feasibility of perhaps adding a banner on AO3 when volunteer positions open. While I think it would get the most possible views, this could also prove too invasive to users who are used to banners primarily appearing during donation drives.
Within the OTW, I would advocate for more frequent check-ins on committee documentation and documentation review. Training materials should be as up-to-date as possible, ideally easy to update, understandable, and consistent across committees where possible. If we make the training process as streamlined as possible, we can reduce the points of failure to applicant selection, and whether the new recruit is able to dedicate their time to the OTW.