It is an ongoing situation with the Organization for Transformative Works, regarding both actions and the lack thereof regarding substantive and meaningful change in the organization and its major tools, such as the Archive of Our Own, toward preventing racist harassment of volunteers and fans on the tools and through the organization, as well as several other notable failures of the organization for things that seem like basic management of a website with user-generated content. With the upcoming Board elections coming up, there is increased scrutiny and materials about the conduct of current Board members and those who wish to become part of it.
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erinptah attempts a summary of the most recent things that have been happening with regard to the Organization for Transformative Works and the election season and continued attempts to hold the organization accountable on topics of making the place less racist.
While the named candidate infairestcat's Reasons why I will not be voting for Audrey R. in the OTW Election and don't think you should either has since withdrawn her candidacy for the OTW Board, it is an instructive piece on what should be considered the bare minimum of competency and knowledge for a person who wants to run for the board of an organization such as the Organization for Transformative Works, with the worldwide remit and fans that such a Board member will come into contact with.
The most recent issues and affairs seem to have centered on a few different persons, and they are, to many degrees, inter-twined in their stories and accounts, because they all are on the receiving end of or are protesting racist treatment by the Board of the OTW. (So there may be some repetition.)
( Deliberately provocative questions for a Chinese Board candidate and the disciplinary process invoked to tone police a volunteer trying to hold the Board and Organization accountable for their promises )
The point, as it always has been, is that the OTW continues to need significant work in recognizing the ways that it privileges whiteness over everything else, and to put in systems that will prevent this privileging and will result in both greater awareness of what it is doing, while also requiring improvement and enforce consequences on those who refuse to improve or who abdicate their responsibilities toward improvement.
One of the possible actions that can help might be a complete bylaw reform that tailors the OTW much more effectively to what it is now, rather than what it was when it started, which could allow for better governance through structural reform by the members and possibly paid staff, rather than requiring it to come solely from the Board.
An additional, and much more familiar to me, angle about this situation is the understanding of AO3 as a universal archive is going to cut off some of the possible solutions that will make the place better for fans of color to avoid harassment. I appreciatedawn_felagund explicitly pointing out the parts of AO3 where they say their mission is maximum inclusivity, and how that viewpoint shapes their willingness to archive things that are distateful and even flagrantly offensive. That's very familiar language to me, because it's literally the language of the Freedom to Read Statement and several policy documents that your public library has and still takes as their operating documents.
( And now comes the GLAM Nerdery )
None of this GLAM nerdery excuses the problems of the OTW Board, or the vectors of harassment currently in use, or the extremely poor taste of people using offensive symbols as names, as pictures, and of creating offensive works. None of this would invalidate the need to continue trying to do better and to ask for others to do the same. But I hope it does help make clearer where some of the philosophical contentions might be, and how it's possible that people may be talking past each other because they have different ideas of what the purpose of AO3 is and what kind of power they believe the OTW has to bring about their conception of AO3 and/or the OTW. The OTW still needs to eject and expel the people who are behaving in racist ways toward their volunteers, regardless of where they are in the organization, needed to find someone competent on dealing with DDoS attacks and CSEM yesterday, and needs to make visible progress or at least visible efforts toward progress on the promises they made about handling offensive content on the Archive and the vectors of attack currently in use. Whether than involves bylaws revisions, outside auditing, the creation of paid staff to manage the volunteers and their labor (and, quite probably, to make payments on the technical debt and structure the codebase to be better, easier to use, and capable of getting new features and tools), I don't know. And also, it might mean the re-creation of various archives of our own as the primary places to store works and perform the social functions of fandom. (It's not that I think of siloing as a solution, but that it's also a regular function that groups who are attacked in large gathering spaces to create smaller, better-run and more tightly-managed groups as a way of providing breathing space and social space without the noise of the larger group.)
We can hope the new Board members will be able to do some of these things. But we should not place all our hope in those new Board members, and instead continue efforts to hold the OTW accountable and to help the people in our own circles to understand the harmful tropes in our lives and perpetuate them less in our lives and our works.
erinptah attempts a summary of the most recent things that have been happening with regard to the Organization for Transformative Works and the election season and continued attempts to hold the organization accountable on topics of making the place less racist.While the named candidate in
fairestcat's Reasons why I will not be voting for Audrey R. in the OTW Election and don't think you should either has since withdrawn her candidacy for the OTW Board, it is an instructive piece on what should be considered the bare minimum of competency and knowledge for a person who wants to run for the board of an organization such as the Organization for Transformative Works, with the worldwide remit and fans that such a Board member will come into contact with.The most recent issues and affairs seem to have centered on a few different persons, and they are, to many degrees, inter-twined in their stories and accounts, because they all are on the receiving end of or are protesting racist treatment by the Board of the OTW. (So there may be some repetition.)
( Deliberately provocative questions for a Chinese Board candidate and the disciplinary process invoked to tone police a volunteer trying to hold the Board and Organization accountable for their promises )
The point, as it always has been, is that the OTW continues to need significant work in recognizing the ways that it privileges whiteness over everything else, and to put in systems that will prevent this privileging and will result in both greater awareness of what it is doing, while also requiring improvement and enforce consequences on those who refuse to improve or who abdicate their responsibilities toward improvement.
One of the possible actions that can help might be a complete bylaw reform that tailors the OTW much more effectively to what it is now, rather than what it was when it started, which could allow for better governance through structural reform by the members and possibly paid staff, rather than requiring it to come solely from the Board.
An additional, and much more familiar to me, angle about this situation is the understanding of AO3 as a universal archive is going to cut off some of the possible solutions that will make the place better for fans of color to avoid harassment. I appreciate
dawn_felagund explicitly pointing out the parts of AO3 where they say their mission is maximum inclusivity, and how that viewpoint shapes their willingness to archive things that are distateful and even flagrantly offensive. That's very familiar language to me, because it's literally the language of the Freedom to Read Statement and several policy documents that your public library has and still takes as their operating documents. ( And now comes the GLAM Nerdery )
None of this GLAM nerdery excuses the problems of the OTW Board, or the vectors of harassment currently in use, or the extremely poor taste of people using offensive symbols as names, as pictures, and of creating offensive works. None of this would invalidate the need to continue trying to do better and to ask for others to do the same. But I hope it does help make clearer where some of the philosophical contentions might be, and how it's possible that people may be talking past each other because they have different ideas of what the purpose of AO3 is and what kind of power they believe the OTW has to bring about their conception of AO3 and/or the OTW. The OTW still needs to eject and expel the people who are behaving in racist ways toward their volunteers, regardless of where they are in the organization, needed to find someone competent on dealing with DDoS attacks and CSEM yesterday, and needs to make visible progress or at least visible efforts toward progress on the promises they made about handling offensive content on the Archive and the vectors of attack currently in use. Whether than involves bylaws revisions, outside auditing, the creation of paid staff to manage the volunteers and their labor (and, quite probably, to make payments on the technical debt and structure the codebase to be better, easier to use, and capable of getting new features and tools), I don't know. And also, it might mean the re-creation of various archives of our own as the primary places to store works and perform the social functions of fandom. (It's not that I think of siloing as a solution, but that it's also a regular function that groups who are attacked in large gathering spaces to create smaller, better-run and more tightly-managed groups as a way of providing breathing space and social space without the noise of the larger group.)
We can hope the new Board members will be able to do some of these things. But we should not place all our hope in those new Board members, and instead continue efforts to hold the OTW accountable and to help the people in our own circles to understand the harmful tropes in our lives and perpetuate them less in our lives and our works.
