“There are SO MANY OTW election posts and voting’s THIS WEEKEND and I haven’t read anything I am the worst fandom citizen SOMEBODY HELP.”
There are a number of good posts out there, detailing some of the issues that the OTW is dealing with, and I highly encourage you to check them out.
This isn’t one of those posts. This is a post for people who:
- Have asked me how I’m voting ‘cause they know I go ask people questions and try to find out answers.
- Haven’t had time to read through all of the posts on the OTW and just want someone to say point blank, here is the thing I’m doing and my personal reasons why; you can do it too if it sounds good to you.
- Want to know how they can help. I’m not talking about all the amazing people who are already volunteering their time. I’m talking about the people who are members, or have thought about being members: people who care about the org and its sustainability, and have seen that there tend to be a lot of recurring themes re: the OTW and the challenges that it faces, and want to be a little better informed.
TOPIC THE FIRST: This election.
There’s two open spots for this cycle and basically, you rank the candidates you like. Don’t rank anyone you don’t want to see on the board at all. (That’s the incredibly watered down version; this is the longer version.)
1) Matty Bowers. I didn’t get off to the best start with Matty nearly a year ago, because she is the chair of Abuse, and I was kind of… really irritated with some of that committee’s responses to me regarding the hockey troll situation. But we started to correspond, and I have valued her insights and assistance this year. In getting to know her a bit, I believe that she’s exactly the sort of person the Board needs right now: someone who’s Seen Things, and is determined to make sure the people around her feel and actually are empowered to do their work.
2) Atiya Hakeem. I want someone who is familiar with AO3 coding and the needs of the archive. I went through all the candidate questions and pasted the answers I liked best into a gdoc, and counted up each candidate’s tally. Atiya actually won my ‘most pasted’ count, so that indicates to me that she and I are on the same page with a lot of our hopes and visions for this organization. (What, these are my rankings, okay. These are my methods sometimes!)
3) Alex Tischer. Alex has struck me as being a pretty straight-forward person with a healthy amount of passion for the OTW and its projects. It was actually this answer that sold Alex for me, because I think people underestimate how critical something like this is to this org in particular:
I think that the current Board is lacking any ties to the vast majority of OTW volunteers, and to how our projects work. Most of them have come from small, very siloed committees and have not interacted with the general volunteer pool in a long time. This lack of interaction shows in all their decisions and discussions.
Alex has been succinct and direct in many responses throughout this election and I could see that being particularly useful in improving org-wide communication.
I enjoyed the responses from both Aline Carrao and Katarina Harju as well, but I feel like those first three have the most immediately applicable skillsets and backgrounds at this particular time to move the Board to where I’d like it to be.
TOPIC THE SECOND: Post-election, and the 2016 election.
There are two things I want to explore:
1) Non-profit training. I think we’re kind of screwing over the Board (and subsequently, committees and members) because some of the issues we see recurring stem from non-profit inexperience. I think the Board has conflated a lot of confidentiality concerns with proper process and procedure for non-profits. The only thing I can think to do about it myself is try and gather some experts to put together some totally unsolicited recommendations. Something like: recommendations from interested parties as to developmental training the org can pay for that board members have to undergo.
Obviously, we have no power to MAKE the board do anything. But we can totally put together some sort of proposal of solid ideas, submit it to the board, and then get a response as to how they’ve decided to proceed. If it’s not a response the panel finds satisfactory, then it’s a great question for prospective new board members next year: would they support that panel’s recommendations, and if not, why.
Full caveat: I genuinely don’t know how this would work. I don’t know the legalities; I don’t know what the org already has in place, even. But I want to explore all these things, and I want to do something constructive to say “Hey, we think there’s some issues on the Board that could be alleviated by implementing x training strategies and making it a requirement for all Board members to undergo.”
If you want to help me explore those options, and you have non-profit experience or experience you feel is relevant in this regard, please let me know a bit about you here.
I really doubt we’ll get like, dozens of I VOLUNTEER submissions, but if we somehow do, I’ll probably pick maybe 5-10 people just to keep the group a manageable size.
2) I’m tired of OTW members (like me! I’m guilty of this!) only caring about this org every few years. I mentioned weeks ago that I’ve felt guilty at ignoring the issues I’m aware of behind the scenes and just enjoying this archive without trying to do something to help the situation.
So this is me taking a stab at rectifying part of that. What I’d really like to do is put together some sort of public Google Group where we can have a couple of posts a month. We can talk about things we like that the org is doing and how to support those efforts, and talk about areas where we’re seeing recurring problems and how we can help with those, and try to get out of this cycle that we’re currently locked in where it’s a month of commentary and posts and then years of silence. I want to promote better engagement; I want the members of OTW to start taking more ownership of the org. The burden shouldn’t be completely on the hundreds of awesome volunteers. I think members should take it upon themselves to be a bit more consistently informed. I want something very low volume, to get members (and interested parties who might want to become voting members someday!) talking about this org that we built, and that we want to see be successful far into the future.
To be really clear, this is not going to be some kind of a “I really wish AO3 had x!” (that’s what the Trello’s for) or “This part of the org sucks!” group. This is going to be a spot where we can keep better track of how the org is progressing with issues important to us: budgets, investments, the strategic plan, etc., and just have conversations throughout the year, as opposed to rousing like some slumbering tiger come an actually contested election.
If you want to be notified when that group gets off the ground, or if you want to help figure out the scope of what the group will talk about, go here.
So… yeah. I have a couple of ideas! Maybe they’ll work out; maybe they won’t. I am fully ready for people to tell me that x won’t work, but come and tell me why y will while you’re at it. And VOTE. GO VOTE.
Be ready to do it next year, too.
