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I don’t use a disclaimer on my fiction, but I figure I should do so here, even though you already know this: herein is my unofficial opinion.
I remember when the OTW was starting up there was a discussion about “representing fandom.” I think everybody who volunteered at that point was pretty clear that we couldn’t and didn’t want to do that, in the sense of saying “we express what fandom is and wants,” because nobody could do that, because fandom is big and varied and self-contradictory, because fandoms (like Soylent Green) are made of people. I understood our goals to be more modest than that, albeit also ambitious, mainly: (1) work towards sustainability in fannish infrastructure, so that big chunks of online fandom wouldn’t disappear if a single person couldn’t continue to maintain them, (2) provide one relatively easily findable place that people could go for information that would be fan-friendly, whether they were journalists seeking to understand this strange phenomenon and explain it to the readers at home or fans interested in learning what the law has to say about fanworks.
In terms of advocating for fandom generally, the role I always saw for us was not that, or maybe I don’t know what that means. I saw us as a backstop: as in the Robert Frost poem, I wanted the OTW to be a place that, when you had to go, they had to take you in. Our resources should be useful if you wanted them, regardless of your fandom.
Many people have been vital to what we’ve built so far, and many of them have been behind the scenes: writing code, raising money, answering Support tickets, dealing with Abuse issues (true unsung heroes because they do a really stressful job and can’t talk about details!), maintaining the website and dealing with performance issues, coordinating volunteers, making sure the bills get paid, talking to fans one on one about legal issues, and so on. I strongly believe that a key priority is bringing volunteers in and helping them develop specific skills, most obviously in coding and related fields because the Archive is a big people-intensive project, but there are plenty of other needs as well. On Wikipedia, to take an outside example, there are people who just do grammar/style editing, and others who focus on contributing content; both of those are helpful to that project, and we need an even greater variety. We need to recruit more people to learn and do these things, without spamming other communities or giving the impression that our aim is to “take over” fandom, because it's really not.
We can only do what we have volunteers to do. This means that bottlenecks can develop quickly, and that we need an ongoing idea of our real capabilities. For example, I would love to have more non-US lawyers on the Legal team. It’s a real constraint to have to tell people that we can usually only provide US information and guidance. Sadly, I can’t confer law degrees, but there are many instances in which we can train volunteers. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability, and that’s really important, but for me sustainability means recruiting and training for specific skills as well as building a donor base to keep the lights on.
What I want from the Board is support for people who are following their passions, without micromanagement. I have only worked directly with some of the candidates, so I’m only going to speak about people with whom I've had extended interactions.
( Naomi Novik and Betsy Rosenblatt )
I remember when the OTW was starting up there was a discussion about “representing fandom.” I think everybody who volunteered at that point was pretty clear that we couldn’t and didn’t want to do that, in the sense of saying “we express what fandom is and wants,” because nobody could do that, because fandom is big and varied and self-contradictory, because fandoms (like Soylent Green) are made of people. I understood our goals to be more modest than that, albeit also ambitious, mainly: (1) work towards sustainability in fannish infrastructure, so that big chunks of online fandom wouldn’t disappear if a single person couldn’t continue to maintain them, (2) provide one relatively easily findable place that people could go for information that would be fan-friendly, whether they were journalists seeking to understand this strange phenomenon and explain it to the readers at home or fans interested in learning what the law has to say about fanworks.
In terms of advocating for fandom generally, the role I always saw for us was not that, or maybe I don’t know what that means. I saw us as a backstop: as in the Robert Frost poem, I wanted the OTW to be a place that, when you had to go, they had to take you in. Our resources should be useful if you wanted them, regardless of your fandom.
Many people have been vital to what we’ve built so far, and many of them have been behind the scenes: writing code, raising money, answering Support tickets, dealing with Abuse issues (true unsung heroes because they do a really stressful job and can’t talk about details!), maintaining the website and dealing with performance issues, coordinating volunteers, making sure the bills get paid, talking to fans one on one about legal issues, and so on. I strongly believe that a key priority is bringing volunteers in and helping them develop specific skills, most obviously in coding and related fields because the Archive is a big people-intensive project, but there are plenty of other needs as well. On Wikipedia, to take an outside example, there are people who just do grammar/style editing, and others who focus on contributing content; both of those are helpful to that project, and we need an even greater variety. We need to recruit more people to learn and do these things, without spamming other communities or giving the impression that our aim is to “take over” fandom, because it's really not.
We can only do what we have volunteers to do. This means that bottlenecks can develop quickly, and that we need an ongoing idea of our real capabilities. For example, I would love to have more non-US lawyers on the Legal team. It’s a real constraint to have to tell people that we can usually only provide US information and guidance. Sadly, I can’t confer law degrees, but there are many instances in which we can train volunteers. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability, and that’s really important, but for me sustainability means recruiting and training for specific skills as well as building a donor base to keep the lights on.
What I want from the Board is support for people who are following their passions, without micromanagement. I have only worked directly with some of the candidates, so I’m only going to speak about people with whom I've had extended interactions.
( Naomi Novik and Betsy Rosenblatt )
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