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So What's Up With The OTW Anyway
I am glad to see there is still so much interest in what's up with the OTW!
The Organization for Transformative Works is a smallish, fannish, entirely volunteer-run community/arts/advocacy nonprofit with a staff and membership who are scattered around the world and communicate amongst each other entirely online.
If you have any experience with grassroots nonprofits that should tell you more that you want to know about what's been going on.
Oh, you wanted more than that?
Okay, then, but disclaimers first: I am a staff member on the OTW's Tag Wrangling Committee, who is writing this instead of overdue staff work. (I also did a very small amount of AO3 coding work, way back in the day.) My only contribution to the recent unpleasantness was reblogging stuff on Tumblr and filking "Do You Hear The People Sing" in chat. Everything I say here is my own opinion, may be various levels of ill-informed, and does not reflect the official positions of the OTW as an org or the opinions of any other staff member.
My usual policy is "if I post it publicly, link it all you want" but I would like to request for this post, as a kindness please don't link it publicly anywhere? Feel free to share with friends if you want but I'm not well-informed enough that I'm comfortable with being The Entire Internet's Source on this.
(Also the above probably gives the impression the rest of this post is going to be way juicier than it actually is.)
First, have some background for people who aren't very familiar with the Organization for Transformative Works. The OTW was founded around the time that LJ started deleting fannish journals, by some fans who wanted a central fannish organization that didn't depend on one for-profit corporation deciding fandom was profitable, or on one individual fan deciding they had the money and energy and time to keep up a personal website. They wanted a home for fandom that would be independent, nonprofit, and self-sustaining. Thus, the legally recognized 501c(3) incorporation; and the websites where the OTW owns the servers.
The OTW has quite a few projects, the most visible of which include:
The Archive of Our Own: The purpose of the AO3 is so that, someday, the very last relativistic exploration ship will come home, having spent twenty years subjective time in space and a million years in Earth time, and find an Earth that is empty and scoured clean of life, except for one persistent little satellite still beeping along in orbit, and they will take it on board, and find the oldest data socket on it, and download the contents, and the ship's Captain will go, "Freakin' yes! LancelotLover69 did manage to post the last chapter of my favorite AU mpreg epic before the Earth was destroyed, at long last I get to find out how it ends!"
In the meantime they try to provide a usable fic archive for current fans too.
Open Doors: The purpose of Open Doors is to help people whose fanwork or fanwork archives are in danger of being lost to find a way to move it to a safer and more stable home. Because it would be utterly tragic if that ship's captain never got to read her final chapter just because it was hosted on an independent archive on the OortCities cloudnet, which went down in the 50,000s because it was outcompeted by the HyperKuiperSpace xlog network, instead of on the AO3.
Fanlore: Fanlore is an open, crowdsourced, multiply authored wiki that attempts to document and explain fannish history, culture, and language, so that when the Captain and her crew finally settle down in an enclave on an alien planet with their precious data satellite, the locals will have at least some chance of figuring out wtf they're talking about.
Legal Advocacy: It is Legal's job to navigate the myriad and changing Earth governments to do their best to ensure that fans will be able to keep making and sharing fanworks right up until the last government on Earth falls.
Transformative Works and Cultures: TWC publishes a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for people to have serious and rigorous discussions about fandom and what it is and what it means, and at some point in the next million years I promise I will get around to finally reading an issue.
(Sorry, TWC people. I am sure it is good! It's just when I have the brain for srs academia reading, I always have to choose between fanmeta and, like, a paper on the mating habits of sea slugs, and it's going to be sea slugs every time.)
...what I am saying is that the OTW is pretty epic.
Anyway, that's the outward-facing work of the OTW. Internally, OTW is more-or-less organized as below, with people higher up having more responsibility, more BS to deal with, more boring admin and management work, and less time left to actually do fannish stuff or participate in fandom; and people lower down having more interesting work, less opportunity for input, and less knowledge of what's going on in the org as a whole. (To some extent people at the top have more decision-making power, but OTW is really committed to internal consensus whenever it can, so there's less effective power at the top than you might think, which is probably part of why it often takes for freakin' ever to get stuff done.)
1. Board and officers.
2. Committee chairs.
3. Committee staff, and inter-committee liaisons who coordinate between them.
4. Non-staff volunteers (only on some committees, but substantially more numerous than staff).
5. Members and the public.
I am on level 3, committee staff, and do not ever plan on moving up, so I don't necessarily know that much more than the general public about what goes on at the higher levels (except supporting my own committee chairs when I can.) One of the ongoing problems in the Org (at least since I've been a volunteer, which is since a few months after it started, more or less, usually less) is a lack of understanding between the different levels of that chart, and between the different committees, caused mostly by the fact that the org is online-only with no real shared social space.
This is already way better than it was, and is improving every day - part of the reason that the recent unpleasantness went down as quickly and neatly as it did is that we were already in the process of moving to a new communications platform which has made it much easier for people on different committees to socialize and coordinate.
Anyway, there are a lot of committees, but they can be sort of put in groups:
AO3-centric committees
Abuse - handles abuse complaints, mostly from Archive users.
Accessibility, Design, & Technology - designs, codes, and tests our software, mostly the AO3.
AO3 Documentation - writes and maintains AO3 documentation.
Support - Answers questions and requests from users, mostly about the AO3.
Systems - keeps the servers from going down in flames, mostly because AO3 is overloading them.
Tag Wrangling - tries to keep it at least mostly possible to find stuff on the AO3 despite the best efforts of users.
Because these committees are all trying to keep the same website afloat, they have to work together a fair amount, and have a lot of shared experiences. This list also includes most (but not all) of the committees who use large numbers of non-staff volunteers.
Other Projects
Fanhackers - this was a blog but tbh I have no idea if it's still active in some way.
Fan Video & Multimedia - Advocates for vidders and vidding.
Journal - Makes TWC happen.
Open Doors - Reaches out to people who run endangered fannish archives and helps them figure out how to save the content they are curating (whether that's with the AO3 or somewhere else.)
Wiki - Makes Fanlore happen.
Most of these coordinate somewhat with other committees (such as Open Doors and AO3, and Vidding and Legal) and use the OTW's organizational resources, but to a large extent, at least from what I can tell, they don't interdepend nearly as much as the AO3 ones. Most of them have relatively small staffs and no non-staff volunteers.
General keep-the-Org-going committees
Communications - handles both official in-Org communications and the Org's official communications with the public.
Development & Membership - deals with fundraising/membership drives and all the bureaucracy involved with being a 501c3 with membership rolls.
Elections - Runs the Board elections.
Financial - Does financial stuff.
Internationalization & Outreach - Works to reach out to fan communities that aren't already well-served by the OTW.
Legal - Makes sure the OTW is not breaking the law. Also does some of the legal advocacy work.
Strategic Planning - Tries to make sure the OTW knows wtf it is doing and why.
Translation - Makes sure official OTW communications are available in multiple languages; coordinates with internationalization projects in all committees.
Volunteers & Recruiting - Basically does the HR stuff for recruiting and inducting new staff and volunteers across committees, and deals with personnel problems that can't be handled within committees (whether it's technical difficulties with using a mailing list or interpersonal conflicts on a staff).
Web Strategy, Design & Development - Maintains all the OTW websites and databases that aren't handled by other committees.
These do a lot of the boring, background work that keeps the OTW functional and means individual project committees don't have to do it on their own. Most of them don't have large non-staff volunteer corps either, with the notable exception of Translation. Because they are non-glamorous, and don't involve much actually doing fannish stuff, they often have a lot of trouble recruiting, and have a core of staff who have been there forever and do nearly all the work.
No, this is not the list of committees I would have made if I was in charge, but it's what we've got.
Each committee has chairs who coordinate their own staff and report to the Board.
So: the Board. For the record, most of the committees could keep doing what they're doing just fine for quite some time with no Board at all, as long as there was someone to write checks to keep the websites up. The Board isn't involved in the day-to-day work of most committees at all. That doesn't mean we don't need a Board, it just means it's not as urgent and desperate to lose the Board as it would be if we, say, suddenly lost all of the Systems or Fanlore or Volunteers & Recruiting staff. Here's some of why we need the Board:
1. As a 501(c)3, we're required by US law to have an elected Board of Directors.
2. To provide oversight and advice to the committee chairs.
3. To find and keep a good balance between all the committees and projects.
4. To coordinate and lead large-scale changes in the Org.
When those things aren't working well, the OTW staff and volunteers can keep ticking along, but everything gets cumulatively harder and cumulatively more stressful and burnout among everyone involved comes faster and harder.
Those things are, for the record, really hard.
With a whole brand-new board coming in, we have an amazing opportunity to figure out why those things keep not working, and what we can change to keep the Board from burning out so fast that they can't help the rest of the staff not burn out.
That is not going to be very easy, either.
Basically we went really quickly from being in the second act of Les Miserables to being in the second act of Hamilton.
There are a lot of people invested in making it work, though! And duels are no longer legal in Jersey, so there's that. The most important thing is that both staff on the Org, and interested members and watchers, keep interest and energy up in figuring out what to do, and then in making and maintaining changes.
Some good things that are already happening: as I mentioned above, a lot of the committees are moving to a new communications platform that is going to make a lot of things faster and easier, and I think is really going to help staff and volunteers keep invested in the work of the OTW as a whole, not just their committee's work.
Also, Board members are required to be committee staff (I am not sure I agree with this, I would prefer we get new board members like the SCA does with its kingdom leaders,single combat to the death, have them have a one-year training term before becoming a full board member, which would make it a lot easier for non-Staff to figure it out, but Board-from-Staff is what we've got.) Just because of the way the numbers work out, in terms of staff-vs-volunteers, this meant that a disproportionate number of Board members in recent years have been pulled from the committees in my third set up there. (Also because people in those committees have already demonstrated a willingness to do the boring soul-killing admin work.)
But that meant there's been a real disconnect between the volunteer experiences of many recent Board members, and the volunteer experiences of the vast majority of the people who work for the OTW, who are in the large AO3 and project committees that have a lot of direct contact with AO3 users and fans the projects serve. I feel like that's been a contributing factor in a lot of the culture clash. But both of the newly elected board members have served in several types of committees, as both staff and volunteers, and so have, iirc, everyone else who survived to the end of the election. So I have high hopes that by itself will make things a little easier.
Things that I am fairly sure the new Board is going to prioritize, once it gets itself in place:
-Rebuilding the Finance committee and getting the financials in better order.
-Changing bylaws and restructuring procedures so that what happened this election is less likely to happen again, and we have better ways of handling it if it does.
-Continuing to improve communications and relationships between all parts of the OTW.
There are lots of other things that could be done as well, and I know the new Board is really excited about a lot of them, and will be working hard to make changes and listen to what the members are excited about. (Mind you I only have a vague idea what they are because I am lazy and already knew who I was voting for based on having worked with them, so I did not read most of the candidates' election posts, oops.) I also know that the new Board is committed to letting what is already working keep working, so there is no need to worry about your specific favorite part of the OTW going away suddenly.
Here's more things that I personally hope happen, though:
-Efforts to maintain the membership's engagement beyond the AO3 and contested elections, whether it's through something as complicated as the member fora that people have been talking about for years, or as simple as turning the existing internal email newsletter into something members can subscribe to.
-Making better use of the money we have, whether that's hiring more paid consultants, putting more discretionary funds directly in the hands of project committees, or setting up some sort of endowment to start to fund the satellite.
-Simplifying the organization of the staff, and consolidating and simplifying the internal tools that are used.
-Revitalizing the non-AO3 projects with enthusiasm, resources and publicity, and hopefully getting to the point where we can think about starting new projects that will directly benefit fandom as it stands now.
-an AO3 app for Android
Anyway, so there you have it, that's what's up with the OTW. A lot of the basics above are covered on the OTW website, and I thought about linkifiyng it, but I'm lazy and you can probably find the information yourself if you want the less colorful versions.
You are welcome to ask questions in comments, but tbh pretty much everything I actually know (and quite a few things I don't actually know) are included above, so I may or may not be able to answer them.
The Organization for Transformative Works is a smallish, fannish, entirely volunteer-run community/arts/advocacy nonprofit with a staff and membership who are scattered around the world and communicate amongst each other entirely online.
If you have any experience with grassroots nonprofits that should tell you more that you want to know about what's been going on.
Oh, you wanted more than that?
Okay, then, but disclaimers first: I am a staff member on the OTW's Tag Wrangling Committee, who is writing this instead of overdue staff work. (I also did a very small amount of AO3 coding work, way back in the day.) My only contribution to the recent unpleasantness was reblogging stuff on Tumblr and filking "Do You Hear The People Sing" in chat. Everything I say here is my own opinion, may be various levels of ill-informed, and does not reflect the official positions of the OTW as an org or the opinions of any other staff member.
My usual policy is "if I post it publicly, link it all you want" but I would like to request for this post, as a kindness please don't link it publicly anywhere? Feel free to share with friends if you want but I'm not well-informed enough that I'm comfortable with being The Entire Internet's Source on this.
(Also the above probably gives the impression the rest of this post is going to be way juicier than it actually is.)
First, have some background for people who aren't very familiar with the Organization for Transformative Works. The OTW was founded around the time that LJ started deleting fannish journals, by some fans who wanted a central fannish organization that didn't depend on one for-profit corporation deciding fandom was profitable, or on one individual fan deciding they had the money and energy and time to keep up a personal website. They wanted a home for fandom that would be independent, nonprofit, and self-sustaining. Thus, the legally recognized 501c(3) incorporation; and the websites where the OTW owns the servers.
The OTW has quite a few projects, the most visible of which include:
The Archive of Our Own: The purpose of the AO3 is so that, someday, the very last relativistic exploration ship will come home, having spent twenty years subjective time in space and a million years in Earth time, and find an Earth that is empty and scoured clean of life, except for one persistent little satellite still beeping along in orbit, and they will take it on board, and find the oldest data socket on it, and download the contents, and the ship's Captain will go, "Freakin' yes! LancelotLover69 did manage to post the last chapter of my favorite AU mpreg epic before the Earth was destroyed, at long last I get to find out how it ends!"
In the meantime they try to provide a usable fic archive for current fans too.
Open Doors: The purpose of Open Doors is to help people whose fanwork or fanwork archives are in danger of being lost to find a way to move it to a safer and more stable home. Because it would be utterly tragic if that ship's captain never got to read her final chapter just because it was hosted on an independent archive on the OortCities cloudnet, which went down in the 50,000s because it was outcompeted by the HyperKuiperSpace xlog network, instead of on the AO3.
Fanlore: Fanlore is an open, crowdsourced, multiply authored wiki that attempts to document and explain fannish history, culture, and language, so that when the Captain and her crew finally settle down in an enclave on an alien planet with their precious data satellite, the locals will have at least some chance of figuring out wtf they're talking about.
Legal Advocacy: It is Legal's job to navigate the myriad and changing Earth governments to do their best to ensure that fans will be able to keep making and sharing fanworks right up until the last government on Earth falls.
Transformative Works and Cultures: TWC publishes a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for people to have serious and rigorous discussions about fandom and what it is and what it means, and at some point in the next million years I promise I will get around to finally reading an issue.
(Sorry, TWC people. I am sure it is good! It's just when I have the brain for srs academia reading, I always have to choose between fanmeta and, like, a paper on the mating habits of sea slugs, and it's going to be sea slugs every time.)
...what I am saying is that the OTW is pretty epic.
Anyway, that's the outward-facing work of the OTW. Internally, OTW is more-or-less organized as below, with people higher up having more responsibility, more BS to deal with, more boring admin and management work, and less time left to actually do fannish stuff or participate in fandom; and people lower down having more interesting work, less opportunity for input, and less knowledge of what's going on in the org as a whole. (To some extent people at the top have more decision-making power, but OTW is really committed to internal consensus whenever it can, so there's less effective power at the top than you might think, which is probably part of why it often takes for freakin' ever to get stuff done.)
1. Board and officers.
2. Committee chairs.
3. Committee staff, and inter-committee liaisons who coordinate between them.
4. Non-staff volunteers (only on some committees, but substantially more numerous than staff).
5. Members and the public.
I am on level 3, committee staff, and do not ever plan on moving up, so I don't necessarily know that much more than the general public about what goes on at the higher levels (except supporting my own committee chairs when I can.) One of the ongoing problems in the Org (at least since I've been a volunteer, which is since a few months after it started, more or less, usually less) is a lack of understanding between the different levels of that chart, and between the different committees, caused mostly by the fact that the org is online-only with no real shared social space.
This is already way better than it was, and is improving every day - part of the reason that the recent unpleasantness went down as quickly and neatly as it did is that we were already in the process of moving to a new communications platform which has made it much easier for people on different committees to socialize and coordinate.
Anyway, there are a lot of committees, but they can be sort of put in groups:
AO3-centric committees
Abuse - handles abuse complaints, mostly from Archive users.
Accessibility, Design, & Technology - designs, codes, and tests our software, mostly the AO3.
AO3 Documentation - writes and maintains AO3 documentation.
Support - Answers questions and requests from users, mostly about the AO3.
Systems - keeps the servers from going down in flames, mostly because AO3 is overloading them.
Tag Wrangling - tries to keep it at least mostly possible to find stuff on the AO3 despite the best efforts of users.
Because these committees are all trying to keep the same website afloat, they have to work together a fair amount, and have a lot of shared experiences. This list also includes most (but not all) of the committees who use large numbers of non-staff volunteers.
Other Projects
Fanhackers - this was a blog but tbh I have no idea if it's still active in some way.
Fan Video & Multimedia - Advocates for vidders and vidding.
Journal - Makes TWC happen.
Open Doors - Reaches out to people who run endangered fannish archives and helps them figure out how to save the content they are curating (whether that's with the AO3 or somewhere else.)
Wiki - Makes Fanlore happen.
Most of these coordinate somewhat with other committees (such as Open Doors and AO3, and Vidding and Legal) and use the OTW's organizational resources, but to a large extent, at least from what I can tell, they don't interdepend nearly as much as the AO3 ones. Most of them have relatively small staffs and no non-staff volunteers.
General keep-the-Org-going committees
Communications - handles both official in-Org communications and the Org's official communications with the public.
Development & Membership - deals with fundraising/membership drives and all the bureaucracy involved with being a 501c3 with membership rolls.
Elections - Runs the Board elections.
Financial - Does financial stuff.
Internationalization & Outreach - Works to reach out to fan communities that aren't already well-served by the OTW.
Legal - Makes sure the OTW is not breaking the law. Also does some of the legal advocacy work.
Strategic Planning - Tries to make sure the OTW knows wtf it is doing and why.
Translation - Makes sure official OTW communications are available in multiple languages; coordinates with internationalization projects in all committees.
Volunteers & Recruiting - Basically does the HR stuff for recruiting and inducting new staff and volunteers across committees, and deals with personnel problems that can't be handled within committees (whether it's technical difficulties with using a mailing list or interpersonal conflicts on a staff).
Web Strategy, Design & Development - Maintains all the OTW websites and databases that aren't handled by other committees.
These do a lot of the boring, background work that keeps the OTW functional and means individual project committees don't have to do it on their own. Most of them don't have large non-staff volunteer corps either, with the notable exception of Translation. Because they are non-glamorous, and don't involve much actually doing fannish stuff, they often have a lot of trouble recruiting, and have a core of staff who have been there forever and do nearly all the work.
No, this is not the list of committees I would have made if I was in charge, but it's what we've got.
Each committee has chairs who coordinate their own staff and report to the Board.
So: the Board. For the record, most of the committees could keep doing what they're doing just fine for quite some time with no Board at all, as long as there was someone to write checks to keep the websites up. The Board isn't involved in the day-to-day work of most committees at all. That doesn't mean we don't need a Board, it just means it's not as urgent and desperate to lose the Board as it would be if we, say, suddenly lost all of the Systems or Fanlore or Volunteers & Recruiting staff. Here's some of why we need the Board:
1. As a 501(c)3, we're required by US law to have an elected Board of Directors.
2. To provide oversight and advice to the committee chairs.
3. To find and keep a good balance between all the committees and projects.
4. To coordinate and lead large-scale changes in the Org.
When those things aren't working well, the OTW staff and volunteers can keep ticking along, but everything gets cumulatively harder and cumulatively more stressful and burnout among everyone involved comes faster and harder.
Those things are, for the record, really hard.
With a whole brand-new board coming in, we have an amazing opportunity to figure out why those things keep not working, and what we can change to keep the Board from burning out so fast that they can't help the rest of the staff not burn out.
That is not going to be very easy, either.
Basically we went really quickly from being in the second act of Les Miserables to being in the second act of Hamilton.
There are a lot of people invested in making it work, though! And duels are no longer legal in Jersey, so there's that. The most important thing is that both staff on the Org, and interested members and watchers, keep interest and energy up in figuring out what to do, and then in making and maintaining changes.
Some good things that are already happening: as I mentioned above, a lot of the committees are moving to a new communications platform that is going to make a lot of things faster and easier, and I think is really going to help staff and volunteers keep invested in the work of the OTW as a whole, not just their committee's work.
Also, Board members are required to be committee staff (I am not sure I agree with this, I would prefer we get new board members like the SCA does with its kingdom leaders,
But that meant there's been a real disconnect between the volunteer experiences of many recent Board members, and the volunteer experiences of the vast majority of the people who work for the OTW, who are in the large AO3 and project committees that have a lot of direct contact with AO3 users and fans the projects serve. I feel like that's been a contributing factor in a lot of the culture clash. But both of the newly elected board members have served in several types of committees, as both staff and volunteers, and so have, iirc, everyone else who survived to the end of the election. So I have high hopes that by itself will make things a little easier.
Things that I am fairly sure the new Board is going to prioritize, once it gets itself in place:
-Rebuilding the Finance committee and getting the financials in better order.
-Changing bylaws and restructuring procedures so that what happened this election is less likely to happen again, and we have better ways of handling it if it does.
-Continuing to improve communications and relationships between all parts of the OTW.
There are lots of other things that could be done as well, and I know the new Board is really excited about a lot of them, and will be working hard to make changes and listen to what the members are excited about. (Mind you I only have a vague idea what they are because I am lazy and already knew who I was voting for based on having worked with them, so I did not read most of the candidates' election posts, oops.) I also know that the new Board is committed to letting what is already working keep working, so there is no need to worry about your specific favorite part of the OTW going away suddenly.
Here's more things that I personally hope happen, though:
-Efforts to maintain the membership's engagement beyond the AO3 and contested elections, whether it's through something as complicated as the member fora that people have been talking about for years, or as simple as turning the existing internal email newsletter into something members can subscribe to.
-Making better use of the money we have, whether that's hiring more paid consultants, putting more discretionary funds directly in the hands of project committees, or setting up some sort of endowment to start to fund the satellite.
-Simplifying the organization of the staff, and consolidating and simplifying the internal tools that are used.
-Revitalizing the non-AO3 projects with enthusiasm, resources and publicity, and hopefully getting to the point where we can think about starting new projects that will directly benefit fandom as it stands now.
Anyway, so there you have it, that's what's up with the OTW. A lot of the basics above are covered on the OTW website, and I thought about linkifiyng it, but I'm lazy and you can probably find the information yourself if you want the less colorful versions.
You are welcome to ask questions in comments, but tbh pretty much everything I actually know (and quite a few things I don't actually know) are included above, so I may or may not be able to answer them.