election questions
Okay guys, I have managed finally to get all caught up, pant pant, so you can see my answers on the elections site or here:
Off the top of your head: How many staffers does the Org have? How many non-staff volunteers?
Unless I'm misremembering from last year's annual report, I'm pretty sure we had about 100 staffers and a few hundred volunteers at the time, and I expect things haven't radically changed.
Part 2: Considering the many comments I'm reading about understaffing and volunteer burnout, how many additional staffing positions on existing committees would you anticipate adding in your term? Additionally, what concrete steps will you work to implement to prevent burnout, to increase staff/volunteer satisfaction, and to increase internal transparency?
I don't actually agree that we are suffering an unusual wave of burnout beyond the endemic, and we really have a pretty big staff and volunteer base.
That said, some committees really do need more help: my impression from the sidelines this year is that volcom is still in a bind, and I know AO3 support and the systems committee have been hurting at times this year for lack of help. But adding people is a lot harder than it sounds if you have a committee like this that requires a lot of technical knowledge or absorbing a lot of procedures. First of all it's harder to find a volunteer who is interested, and then when you bring a new volunteer aboard you have to invest significantly more time to train them (which is then time that can't be spent on a different volunteer), which means the cost in the not unusual case when the volunteer then drifts away is a lot higher for those committees.
For Support, the upcoming Support Board which will open up archive support will I hope solve their staffing issues and also make the job more fun and engaging. This is a project that is underway and I hope we'll see it come to fruition in the next year.
For Volcom, honestly, what I think has been really needed from the beginning is a giant heaping dose of automation for the rote work of getting volunteers set up, so the staff can plug in a name and email and push a button and the person gets set up automatically. Unfortunately, building this automation is a tough problem because it basically requires code that can talk to all of our other tools, several of which don't have good APIs, and if you think it's hard to get coders for a shiny public-facing archive they themselves often use, imagine how much harder to get coders for an in-house automation tool involving a lot of grinding trudging through incomplete third-party documentation for a dozen tools. :P But as ADT grows bigger and we have fewer things on fire in terms of the archive software , I would really love to see the team try and take this on for Volcom: if a few coders can be spared to work on it together, that could make up for some of the toughness of the problem.
I do think that in a smaller and more immediate step, we could make Volcom's lives easier by doing a broad org-wide assessment of all our tools and pruning the ones we don't really need or consolidating ones that could be done that way.
Systems is tough. Experienced sysadmins willing and able to give us significant amounts of time are hard to recruit, no two ways about it, and we are really lucky to have the few awesome sysadmins we do have. We've tried to train people in-house, but in Systems (unlike in Ruby on Rails coding for the archive) it's just too big a jump between being a newbie to where you can actually do productive work for the team, and as a result the time cost to the current sysadmins of training a sysadmin from scratch becomes too high to be practical. Sadly I don't see an easy solution beyond keep on banging the steady recruiting drumbeat, although we could make a push to bang it louder and more prominently, and also to just keep in mind in-house that the Systems team are under a tough load that can't easily be relieved, and bend over backwards to accommodate their needs.
Anyway, those are three specific examples, but I hope that gives some insight into how I generally approach staffing problems.
As for improvements in satisfaction and internal transparency, I had some comments beforehand that I think are actually relevant to this question which didn't make it into the chat and are now posted on my journal: my current best ideas include adding 1:1 meetings where possible, a monthly report down from the board emailed to all members including liberal giving of kudos, and reducing gatekeeping within the organization to decrease frustration and empower individual volunteers.
(2) How do you see the OTW as being accountable to its assorted constituents--fandom at large; users of the OTW's projects (AO3 and fanlore users; readers and writers of the journal; recipients of legal aid; volunteers; staff; etc.) What would you do on the board to make sure that all those groups have the information they need when they need it?
It's a tough balancing act among all those interested parties, for sure. I think in a practical aspect on the new project level where the Board often operates with the biggest impact (whether that new project is something being done internally or something being added to our slate of projects intended for the public), we need to make sure it fits into our overall mission in a coherent way, we have to decide how it weighs against other projects we could also do, we have to articulate the goals clearly and in the right forums to enable the affected people to read and make informed opinions about it, we have to listen with an open mind to critical response without letting ourselves be wrongly daunted, and we have to make sure the work involved won't exceed what our people are up for and what our other resources can bear.
(1) I was happy to hear some of the candidates specifically mention outreach as one of their concerns in the chat transcript. However, I'd like to ask /all/ of the candidates if they could detail any ideas they have for specific plans of action that can be taken in the upcoming year to help the OTW reach out to fannish communities outside Western media journaling fandom.
(2) The OTW still seems to have trouble connecting with large numbers of people outside of Western media fandoms, particularly anime/manga fandoms. Do you have any concrete ideas about how the OTW should improve outreach towards anime/manga fans?
(3) for all candidates: what are their concrete plans for outreach to underrepresented sections of fandom?
I think the idea I mentioned recently on my journal of a "distributed" OTW Con (a bunch of smaller cons at disparate locations networked together) would be a great outreach opportunity. I've only just started thinking about this, but here are some ideas: take as the theme the diversity of fandom, have showpiece opportunities for different fannish communities and have each con actively invite presenters from different communities/traditions; spotlight each geographically separated con in turn.
I also think the archive is going to be our best gateway drug for the org for people who might not have been sold up to now, and a great way to recruit is with the gentle touch of identifying killer archive features for different communities and providing those killer features.
As an example, one of the big things that I've seen repeatedly in comments from anime & manga fans in particular is that the look of the archive turns them off. So as lim and I have been reworking the archive front end (which had to be done for accessibility and maintainability reasons also), we have also worked to radically improve skinning flexibility and long-term support, as well as making skins available for not-logged-in users, and this is rolling out any minute now. (In fact I'll have a sample manga skin screenshot up on my journal shortly. :D) ETA: in next post!
Another concept I've drafted for ADT (still early) is for a private-messaging system in the archive that could also be used by the roleplaying community, where chats could easily be polished-up and edited into actual works. (Would also hopefully be useful for beta-while-you-write, round robins, similar things.)
(Also although I stress this isn't my own work, I want to mention for those who have been waiting for this one, that coder
rebecca2525 is FINALLY making our translation feature happen. For those who don't know, we have tried I think -- four? times now to build translation systems. They have all collapsed in smouldering ruins for tldr technical reasons, but we finally hope to see this one early in the new year. Once we have that, that creates a lot of new opportunities for International & Outreach and for opening the archive to broader participation.)
I don't know how appropriate a question this is, but sanders was suggesting having monthly chair meetings and discussion posts manned by volunteers, and already in Systems we are finding it burdensome with our load to attend to some of the administrativa demanded of us, such as the two-hour org-wide. There were, at some point, chair meetings that were occurring that we found burdensome and, truthfully, irrelevant to us, and we were grateful when these dropped off. I don't doubt the above would be helpful for transparency, but how would sanders propose to ameliorate the increased overhead to the various committees, some of which aren't perhaps prepared for it?
Actually, I think I talked about this a bit in the previous round of questions, but to add, I think we need to be open and flexible to the needs and working styles of different committees just generally, and in particular committees that are either perennially or temporarily time-strapped.
Earlier this year the servers were named in a problem-filled poll, and the way it was handled and the outcome upset many people. This situation brings up questions about the OTW's priorities, fandom diversity, and transparency. (Take a pause to appreciate my Oxford comma.) If you were involved in this discussion, what was your input and how did you encourage the board to vote? If you were not, what would have been your input and vote as a board member? What will you do to prevent something like this from happening again? (Please be specific in regards to fandom diversity and transparency.) Are you in favor of voting transparency, and therefore accountability, for the board?
I only heard about it pretty much after the fact because I was busy with new baby, so I start with the caveat that any situation is much easier to kibitz from the sidelines when you're not involved in the decision and also don't have all the pieces, so you have to take my after-the-fact thoughts with that very large helping of salt, and I offer them with apologies to the folks I know who struggled through it at the time.
My ideal public solution would have been to have the Board swiftly post an apology to let people know hey, we didn't think this all the way through, it's not worth anyone being sad or feeling unwelcome, so we're calling the whole thing off (in some way, whether by changing the names or just canceling the whole thing). I would have wanted this post to explicitly center the blame for both the original mistake and for the subsequent disruption on the Board rather than the organizers, and also to try and shift focus to the much happier aspect of the situation: awesome new servers for everyone to benefit from no matter whether their fandom was gigantic or tiny.
Internally, I would have had the Board apologize hugely to the organizers, ask them to understand that the Board has to make the final call and sometimes override, and if there were lingering bad feelings would have done a change of liaison to give the committee a fresh start to their relationship with the Board.
I know that some of those involved were concerned about overruling the results being unfair to the participants, who had known the rules in advance, and that it would also cross a line in terms of violating our own procedures and creating a sense of uncertainty among users about whether we would stick to our own announced rules in future. And I get that, absolutely, and find it a compelling argument.
But the thing is, in this case the actual server names themselves were not user-facing and would never be seen outside of a sysadmin browsing our files if then. The poll was intended only to pass the time while the machines were installed -- to produce good feelings. If it wasn't producing good feelings, the whole thing was a bust anyway. So given that, my overall feeling is as long as we were fully open and honest about cancelling and why, it would be okay.
That said, I also feel strongly that the server names were too minor an object to allow the debate to drag on. Any decision is better than no decision when either way the end has no significant consequences and the arguing is both eating time and burning bridges throughout the org. So fundamentally in this case I would have been working for a quick resolution, and prepared to "lose" on my ideal solution.
Which leads into the second part of the question for me, where if by voting transparency you mean tallies of Board votes, my answer is no. At least in my experience there weren't a ton of votes -- we mostly did a round of "ayes" when we had to officially approve a new slate of chairs or a financial expenditure or something else that for legal reasons we needed to approve formally. I believe a lot in working by consensus and resorting to votes only when an intractable situation is developing. And so that is exactly the case where I wouldn't want the process to be exposed, because that's when it's really hard and you need people to be able to communicate honestly within the team, and when you need people to be more and not less willing to lose.
And I also feel pretty strongly that this idea sets up the wrong model for the Board. For the health of the org, the Board needs to be a team and not a legislature, and IMO decisions should come out as united Board decisions. Of course it's good for Board members to disagree and debate, to have different priorities and different groups that they intuitively think of more than others or want to make sure are getting served, because that keeps the org balanced and avoids our overlooking things and increases our font of creativity, but that's not the same thing as coming onto the Board with an adversarial mindset towards other Board members, which can only take a giant axe to any kind of productivity.
The copyright (fair use) advocacy issues that the OTW works on and the TWC journal are two of the aspects of OTW's mission that are near and dear to my heart and a significant part of the reason why I have volunteered for and donated to the OTW. How do you think the OTW board as a whole can continue to support and further encourage these and similar projects? What about these projects do you personally value and what relevant skills/interests/experiences will you bring to your term on the Board that can help in this area?
I love these projects but I haven't personally had a lot to do with them other than feeling that they were clearly part of our initial core mission and then standing on the sidelines cheering madly and holding out cups of Gatorade to the other Board members (Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa) who respectively took point on these and liaised for those teams.
I do think one important thing about the Board is to have at least some people who are natural liaisons for core projects, who have at least some experience participating in that general area and are also deeply interested in that particular area, because it just saves so much time and pain communicating with teams doing specialized work. I think it would serve the legal advocacy projects well to have Betsy on the Board, for instance, and I hope that when Francesca finishes her term one of our awesome TWC staffers will be up for running for the Board to keep providing the academic perspective.
A current known challenge of the organization seems to be volunteer retention and burnout. For example, the majority of the Archive of Our Own's coding is done by a small number of developers. For all candidates--what practices would you change in the committees you work with to bring in more volunteers and empower them to become long-term, regular contributors? How would you use a board position to do the same org-wide?
Actually, on the archive, 47 coders have committed code to the archive over the life of the project, 22 have committed in the last year, we have 15 committers with more than 100 commits and 3 with more than 1000 commits. Ohloh ranks the archive team in the top 10% of open source projects. We do have a limited amount of highly active senior coders, who are the ones best able to take on a major project that integrates with a lot of other things, but this too has been creeping up at last where now we have 3-5 active senior coders as compared to 1-3 at the beginning.
So honestly, I wouldn't change a ton there; I think ADT is doing great at the slow-and-steady building of a resilient project team, for which btw I give enormous credit to Maia, Lucy P, and Elz and Amelia for creating the kind of atmosphere where people want to come and work.
That said, more broadly I feel that the way that the org retains volunteers long term is, you accept that people are going to come and go -- you have generous policies to support it, and a culture of respect for people's free time and wanting to do other things, so people feel like they are not chaining themselves to a wall if they do sign on.
You keep in mind when recruiting that this is effectively an unpaid second job. It's easy to feel disheartened from a recruiting perspective when people show up, poke around a bit, and drift away -- but we are in fact asking people to work for free! So it is not that surprising when someone who is all for the org and our projects and likes us and thinks they might want to do some work, turns out to not really be up for sinking in large amounts of their free time. You don't take that drifting-away personally, and you don't let it make you give up on recruiting and welcoming, and you welcome BACK with open arms and visibly so people know that any time they might come back, even if they've vanished previously, they'll be welcome.
You make the work as much fun as possible, you keep procedures lightweight and unobtrusive, you eliminate as many sources of frustration as possible, and you try and create hospitable environments for people to come into.
And for a more detailed specific thing -- the Coders chatroom is a great example, people are always hanging out there so it's easy for people to drop in. Our off-topic Water Cooler chatroom hasn't really worked the same way for our other staffers/volunteers, probably because it's not actually geared for stuff to happen in -- it occurs to me one thing we might do to enable a similar experience for people in other parts of the org would be to sort of cluster committees that have some related projects and work going on, and give them shared chatrooms for anyone from those cmtes to hang out in and get work done. It would also be a great way to let people mingle with other volunteers across committees and build more org-wide relationships.
I've also mentioned previously that I'd like to see us lower the gatekeeping in general to empower basically any volunteer who wants to get something done, and that I'd like us to expose our internal documentation so (among other good effects) prospective volunteers could see what they would be getting into even before they have shown up.
I’ve been hearing a lot of interesting ideas from the candidates, but at the same time, some of these ideas make me worry. For example, the suggestion to open up the wiki to the public: something like that is not at all simple and is absolutely extra work and a matter of extreme effort; it would require, as an absolutely key part of the whole proposal, volunteers across multiple committees to review the entire wiki. When I hear this and other suggestions tossed out right next to statements about volunteer sustainability and burnout, saying we don’t have enough people for various tasks, this is really troubling to me and I fear that a lot of these great ideas create more work that results in losing more people. As a candidate, how do you plan to balance these needs? I’m hearing a lot of ideas, but how do you plan to incorporate these into an approach that helps our sustainability?
I find it's generally more problematic and stressful (and less stable) to add things that require sustained long-term effort, even if relatively small, than things that need an initial burst of work but then are over. So for instance, if we're looking for a solution that increases transparency, I would lean towards spending the initial time and effort to open up the wiki as opposed to put an ongoing burden on committees to create an initially smaller but ongoing increase in their outward communication to achieve similar levels of transparency.
Of course, the answer for this or any such idea that when the Board sits down with it and looks in detail at what would be involved, you realize that it's either just not feasible, or not enough payoff for the work involved. Then you consider how possibly the idea might be scaled back or trialled in a less painful way. For instance, the opening of the wiki could be trialled by say opening up just the ADT section of the wiki (nearly all technical stuff, basically nothing confidential or needing review) and seeing how much it's used, what if any issues arise. If it really proves effective, then you could gradually move one after another committee in that direction.
(BTW, although I get you are using this just as an example, in this case, the internal wiki is already open to all our volunteers -- that's hundreds of people many of whom have just volunteered in passing. If there is anything in there that is actively confidential, it shouldn't be there anyway, and we can still keep the wiki non-googleable for the very real distinction between "readable by someone who comes and dives in actively" and "findable for typing your name in google".)
ETA: and
copracat has just told me that actually that's not the case anymore, on volunteers able to see the whole wiki, and there are different access levels set up, which I had remembered being something we wanted but didn't have. So I am all wrong on the absence of confidential information, but on the bright side it should be pretty easy to do the opening up by sections. :D
There's been some discussion since the first chat about the time commitment required for serving on the Board, and what that means for Board Members who also have other roles within the OTW. How will you balance your role as a Board Member and committee liaison with your other commitments within the organization?
The way I have from the beginning. :) I do have less free time than I did before baby, but I also wouldn't be chairing again and the full scope of the challenges code will finally be in after this year, so I think it will be manageable. (The first year when I was chairing both Board and ADT and having something like 2-4 weekly meetings was tough, I will say!)
The thing is, you need productive people on Board. Productive people are usually already doing stuff in their RL, and already doing stuff for the org. And often the work they're doing is work they enjoy. I love coding; if I wasn't doing it for the archive, I'd be doing it on something else. So for myself, I will still be coding if I'm on Board, I'll probably just focus more on smaller and more discrete chunks of code and more bugfixing instead of new features, which would also not be a bad thing for the project as a whole to have a senior coder on.
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Off the top of your head: How many staffers does the Org have? How many non-staff volunteers?
Unless I'm misremembering from last year's annual report, I'm pretty sure we had about 100 staffers and a few hundred volunteers at the time, and I expect things haven't radically changed.
Part 2: Considering the many comments I'm reading about understaffing and volunteer burnout, how many additional staffing positions on existing committees would you anticipate adding in your term? Additionally, what concrete steps will you work to implement to prevent burnout, to increase staff/volunteer satisfaction, and to increase internal transparency?
I don't actually agree that we are suffering an unusual wave of burnout beyond the endemic, and we really have a pretty big staff and volunteer base.
That said, some committees really do need more help: my impression from the sidelines this year is that volcom is still in a bind, and I know AO3 support and the systems committee have been hurting at times this year for lack of help. But adding people is a lot harder than it sounds if you have a committee like this that requires a lot of technical knowledge or absorbing a lot of procedures. First of all it's harder to find a volunteer who is interested, and then when you bring a new volunteer aboard you have to invest significantly more time to train them (which is then time that can't be spent on a different volunteer), which means the cost in the not unusual case when the volunteer then drifts away is a lot higher for those committees.
For Support, the upcoming Support Board which will open up archive support will I hope solve their staffing issues and also make the job more fun and engaging. This is a project that is underway and I hope we'll see it come to fruition in the next year.
For Volcom, honestly, what I think has been really needed from the beginning is a giant heaping dose of automation for the rote work of getting volunteers set up, so the staff can plug in a name and email and push a button and the person gets set up automatically. Unfortunately, building this automation is a tough problem because it basically requires code that can talk to all of our other tools, several of which don't have good APIs, and if you think it's hard to get coders for a shiny public-facing archive they themselves often use, imagine how much harder to get coders for an in-house automation tool involving a lot of grinding trudging through incomplete third-party documentation for a dozen tools. :P But as ADT grows bigger and we have fewer things on fire in terms of the archive software , I would really love to see the team try and take this on for Volcom: if a few coders can be spared to work on it together, that could make up for some of the toughness of the problem.
I do think that in a smaller and more immediate step, we could make Volcom's lives easier by doing a broad org-wide assessment of all our tools and pruning the ones we don't really need or consolidating ones that could be done that way.
Systems is tough. Experienced sysadmins willing and able to give us significant amounts of time are hard to recruit, no two ways about it, and we are really lucky to have the few awesome sysadmins we do have. We've tried to train people in-house, but in Systems (unlike in Ruby on Rails coding for the archive) it's just too big a jump between being a newbie to where you can actually do productive work for the team, and as a result the time cost to the current sysadmins of training a sysadmin from scratch becomes too high to be practical. Sadly I don't see an easy solution beyond keep on banging the steady recruiting drumbeat, although we could make a push to bang it louder and more prominently, and also to just keep in mind in-house that the Systems team are under a tough load that can't easily be relieved, and bend over backwards to accommodate their needs.
Anyway, those are three specific examples, but I hope that gives some insight into how I generally approach staffing problems.
As for improvements in satisfaction and internal transparency, I had some comments beforehand that I think are actually relevant to this question which didn't make it into the chat and are now posted on my journal: my current best ideas include adding 1:1 meetings where possible, a monthly report down from the board emailed to all members including liberal giving of kudos, and reducing gatekeeping within the organization to decrease frustration and empower individual volunteers.
(2) How do you see the OTW as being accountable to its assorted constituents--fandom at large; users of the OTW's projects (AO3 and fanlore users; readers and writers of the journal; recipients of legal aid; volunteers; staff; etc.) What would you do on the board to make sure that all those groups have the information they need when they need it?
It's a tough balancing act among all those interested parties, for sure. I think in a practical aspect on the new project level where the Board often operates with the biggest impact (whether that new project is something being done internally or something being added to our slate of projects intended for the public), we need to make sure it fits into our overall mission in a coherent way, we have to decide how it weighs against other projects we could also do, we have to articulate the goals clearly and in the right forums to enable the affected people to read and make informed opinions about it, we have to listen with an open mind to critical response without letting ourselves be wrongly daunted, and we have to make sure the work involved won't exceed what our people are up for and what our other resources can bear.
(1) I was happy to hear some of the candidates specifically mention outreach as one of their concerns in the chat transcript. However, I'd like to ask /all/ of the candidates if they could detail any ideas they have for specific plans of action that can be taken in the upcoming year to help the OTW reach out to fannish communities outside Western media journaling fandom.
(2) The OTW still seems to have trouble connecting with large numbers of people outside of Western media fandoms, particularly anime/manga fandoms. Do you have any concrete ideas about how the OTW should improve outreach towards anime/manga fans?
(3) for all candidates: what are their concrete plans for outreach to underrepresented sections of fandom?
I think the idea I mentioned recently on my journal of a "distributed" OTW Con (a bunch of smaller cons at disparate locations networked together) would be a great outreach opportunity. I've only just started thinking about this, but here are some ideas: take as the theme the diversity of fandom, have showpiece opportunities for different fannish communities and have each con actively invite presenters from different communities/traditions; spotlight each geographically separated con in turn.
I also think the archive is going to be our best gateway drug for the org for people who might not have been sold up to now, and a great way to recruit is with the gentle touch of identifying killer archive features for different communities and providing those killer features.
As an example, one of the big things that I've seen repeatedly in comments from anime & manga fans in particular is that the look of the archive turns them off. So as lim and I have been reworking the archive front end (which had to be done for accessibility and maintainability reasons also), we have also worked to radically improve skinning flexibility and long-term support, as well as making skins available for not-logged-in users, and this is rolling out any minute now. (In fact I'll have a sample manga skin screenshot up on my journal shortly. :D) ETA: in next post!
Another concept I've drafted for ADT (still early) is for a private-messaging system in the archive that could also be used by the roleplaying community, where chats could easily be polished-up and edited into actual works. (Would also hopefully be useful for beta-while-you-write, round robins, similar things.)
(Also although I stress this isn't my own work, I want to mention for those who have been waiting for this one, that coder
rebecca2525 is FINALLY making our translation feature happen. For those who don't know, we have tried I think -- four? times now to build translation systems. They have all collapsed in smouldering ruins for tldr technical reasons, but we finally hope to see this one early in the new year. Once we have that, that creates a lot of new opportunities for International & Outreach and for opening the archive to broader participation.)
I don't know how appropriate a question this is, but sanders was suggesting having monthly chair meetings and discussion posts manned by volunteers, and already in Systems we are finding it burdensome with our load to attend to some of the administrativa demanded of us, such as the two-hour org-wide. There were, at some point, chair meetings that were occurring that we found burdensome and, truthfully, irrelevant to us, and we were grateful when these dropped off. I don't doubt the above would be helpful for transparency, but how would sanders propose to ameliorate the increased overhead to the various committees, some of which aren't perhaps prepared for it?
Actually, I think I talked about this a bit in the previous round of questions, but to add, I think we need to be open and flexible to the needs and working styles of different committees just generally, and in particular committees that are either perennially or temporarily time-strapped.
Earlier this year the servers were named in a problem-filled poll, and the way it was handled and the outcome upset many people. This situation brings up questions about the OTW's priorities, fandom diversity, and transparency. (Take a pause to appreciate my Oxford comma.) If you were involved in this discussion, what was your input and how did you encourage the board to vote? If you were not, what would have been your input and vote as a board member? What will you do to prevent something like this from happening again? (Please be specific in regards to fandom diversity and transparency.) Are you in favor of voting transparency, and therefore accountability, for the board?
I only heard about it pretty much after the fact because I was busy with new baby, so I start with the caveat that any situation is much easier to kibitz from the sidelines when you're not involved in the decision and also don't have all the pieces, so you have to take my after-the-fact thoughts with that very large helping of salt, and I offer them with apologies to the folks I know who struggled through it at the time.
My ideal public solution would have been to have the Board swiftly post an apology to let people know hey, we didn't think this all the way through, it's not worth anyone being sad or feeling unwelcome, so we're calling the whole thing off (in some way, whether by changing the names or just canceling the whole thing). I would have wanted this post to explicitly center the blame for both the original mistake and for the subsequent disruption on the Board rather than the organizers, and also to try and shift focus to the much happier aspect of the situation: awesome new servers for everyone to benefit from no matter whether their fandom was gigantic or tiny.
Internally, I would have had the Board apologize hugely to the organizers, ask them to understand that the Board has to make the final call and sometimes override, and if there were lingering bad feelings would have done a change of liaison to give the committee a fresh start to their relationship with the Board.
I know that some of those involved were concerned about overruling the results being unfair to the participants, who had known the rules in advance, and that it would also cross a line in terms of violating our own procedures and creating a sense of uncertainty among users about whether we would stick to our own announced rules in future. And I get that, absolutely, and find it a compelling argument.
But the thing is, in this case the actual server names themselves were not user-facing and would never be seen outside of a sysadmin browsing our files if then. The poll was intended only to pass the time while the machines were installed -- to produce good feelings. If it wasn't producing good feelings, the whole thing was a bust anyway. So given that, my overall feeling is as long as we were fully open and honest about cancelling and why, it would be okay.
That said, I also feel strongly that the server names were too minor an object to allow the debate to drag on. Any decision is better than no decision when either way the end has no significant consequences and the arguing is both eating time and burning bridges throughout the org. So fundamentally in this case I would have been working for a quick resolution, and prepared to "lose" on my ideal solution.
Which leads into the second part of the question for me, where if by voting transparency you mean tallies of Board votes, my answer is no. At least in my experience there weren't a ton of votes -- we mostly did a round of "ayes" when we had to officially approve a new slate of chairs or a financial expenditure or something else that for legal reasons we needed to approve formally. I believe a lot in working by consensus and resorting to votes only when an intractable situation is developing. And so that is exactly the case where I wouldn't want the process to be exposed, because that's when it's really hard and you need people to be able to communicate honestly within the team, and when you need people to be more and not less willing to lose.
And I also feel pretty strongly that this idea sets up the wrong model for the Board. For the health of the org, the Board needs to be a team and not a legislature, and IMO decisions should come out as united Board decisions. Of course it's good for Board members to disagree and debate, to have different priorities and different groups that they intuitively think of more than others or want to make sure are getting served, because that keeps the org balanced and avoids our overlooking things and increases our font of creativity, but that's not the same thing as coming onto the Board with an adversarial mindset towards other Board members, which can only take a giant axe to any kind of productivity.
The copyright (fair use) advocacy issues that the OTW works on and the TWC journal are two of the aspects of OTW's mission that are near and dear to my heart and a significant part of the reason why I have volunteered for and donated to the OTW. How do you think the OTW board as a whole can continue to support and further encourage these and similar projects? What about these projects do you personally value and what relevant skills/interests/experiences will you bring to your term on the Board that can help in this area?
I love these projects but I haven't personally had a lot to do with them other than feeling that they were clearly part of our initial core mission and then standing on the sidelines cheering madly and holding out cups of Gatorade to the other Board members (Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa) who respectively took point on these and liaised for those teams.
I do think one important thing about the Board is to have at least some people who are natural liaisons for core projects, who have at least some experience participating in that general area and are also deeply interested in that particular area, because it just saves so much time and pain communicating with teams doing specialized work. I think it would serve the legal advocacy projects well to have Betsy on the Board, for instance, and I hope that when Francesca finishes her term one of our awesome TWC staffers will be up for running for the Board to keep providing the academic perspective.
A current known challenge of the organization seems to be volunteer retention and burnout. For example, the majority of the Archive of Our Own's coding is done by a small number of developers. For all candidates--what practices would you change in the committees you work with to bring in more volunteers and empower them to become long-term, regular contributors? How would you use a board position to do the same org-wide?
Actually, on the archive, 47 coders have committed code to the archive over the life of the project, 22 have committed in the last year, we have 15 committers with more than 100 commits and 3 with more than 1000 commits. Ohloh ranks the archive team in the top 10% of open source projects. We do have a limited amount of highly active senior coders, who are the ones best able to take on a major project that integrates with a lot of other things, but this too has been creeping up at last where now we have 3-5 active senior coders as compared to 1-3 at the beginning.
So honestly, I wouldn't change a ton there; I think ADT is doing great at the slow-and-steady building of a resilient project team, for which btw I give enormous credit to Maia, Lucy P, and Elz and Amelia for creating the kind of atmosphere where people want to come and work.
That said, more broadly I feel that the way that the org retains volunteers long term is, you accept that people are going to come and go -- you have generous policies to support it, and a culture of respect for people's free time and wanting to do other things, so people feel like they are not chaining themselves to a wall if they do sign on.
You keep in mind when recruiting that this is effectively an unpaid second job. It's easy to feel disheartened from a recruiting perspective when people show up, poke around a bit, and drift away -- but we are in fact asking people to work for free! So it is not that surprising when someone who is all for the org and our projects and likes us and thinks they might want to do some work, turns out to not really be up for sinking in large amounts of their free time. You don't take that drifting-away personally, and you don't let it make you give up on recruiting and welcoming, and you welcome BACK with open arms and visibly so people know that any time they might come back, even if they've vanished previously, they'll be welcome.
You make the work as much fun as possible, you keep procedures lightweight and unobtrusive, you eliminate as many sources of frustration as possible, and you try and create hospitable environments for people to come into.
And for a more detailed specific thing -- the Coders chatroom is a great example, people are always hanging out there so it's easy for people to drop in. Our off-topic Water Cooler chatroom hasn't really worked the same way for our other staffers/volunteers, probably because it's not actually geared for stuff to happen in -- it occurs to me one thing we might do to enable a similar experience for people in other parts of the org would be to sort of cluster committees that have some related projects and work going on, and give them shared chatrooms for anyone from those cmtes to hang out in and get work done. It would also be a great way to let people mingle with other volunteers across committees and build more org-wide relationships.
I've also mentioned previously that I'd like to see us lower the gatekeeping in general to empower basically any volunteer who wants to get something done, and that I'd like us to expose our internal documentation so (among other good effects) prospective volunteers could see what they would be getting into even before they have shown up.
I’ve been hearing a lot of interesting ideas from the candidates, but at the same time, some of these ideas make me worry. For example, the suggestion to open up the wiki to the public: something like that is not at all simple and is absolutely extra work and a matter of extreme effort; it would require, as an absolutely key part of the whole proposal, volunteers across multiple committees to review the entire wiki. When I hear this and other suggestions tossed out right next to statements about volunteer sustainability and burnout, saying we don’t have enough people for various tasks, this is really troubling to me and I fear that a lot of these great ideas create more work that results in losing more people. As a candidate, how do you plan to balance these needs? I’m hearing a lot of ideas, but how do you plan to incorporate these into an approach that helps our sustainability?
I find it's generally more problematic and stressful (and less stable) to add things that require sustained long-term effort, even if relatively small, than things that need an initial burst of work but then are over. So for instance, if we're looking for a solution that increases transparency, I would lean towards spending the initial time and effort to open up the wiki as opposed to put an ongoing burden on committees to create an initially smaller but ongoing increase in their outward communication to achieve similar levels of transparency.
Of course, the answer for this or any such idea that when the Board sits down with it and looks in detail at what would be involved, you realize that it's either just not feasible, or not enough payoff for the work involved. Then you consider how possibly the idea might be scaled back or trialled in a less painful way. For instance, the opening of the wiki could be trialled by say opening up just the ADT section of the wiki (nearly all technical stuff, basically nothing confidential or needing review) and seeing how much it's used, what if any issues arise. If it really proves effective, then you could gradually move one after another committee in that direction.
(BTW, although I get you are using this just as an example, in this case, the internal wiki is already open to all our volunteers -- that's hundreds of people many of whom have just volunteered in passing. If there is anything in there that is actively confidential, it shouldn't be there anyway, and we can still keep the wiki non-googleable for the very real distinction between "readable by someone who comes and dives in actively" and "findable for typing your name in google".)
ETA: and
copracat has just told me that actually that's not the case anymore, on volunteers able to see the whole wiki, and there are different access levels set up, which I had remembered being something we wanted but didn't have. So I am all wrong on the absence of confidential information, but on the bright side it should be pretty easy to do the opening up by sections. :D
There's been some discussion since the first chat about the time commitment required for serving on the Board, and what that means for Board Members who also have other roles within the OTW. How will you balance your role as a Board Member and committee liaison with your other commitments within the organization?
The way I have from the beginning. :) I do have less free time than I did before baby, but I also wouldn't be chairing again and the full scope of the challenges code will finally be in after this year, so I think it will be manageable. (The first year when I was chairing both Board and ADT and having something like 2-4 weekly meetings was tough, I will say!)
The thing is, you need productive people on Board. Productive people are usually already doing stuff in their RL, and already doing stuff for the org. And often the work they're doing is work they enjoy. I love coding; if I wasn't doing it for the archive, I'd be doing it on something else. So for myself, I will still be coding if I'm on Board, I'll probably just focus more on smaller and more discrete chunks of code and more bugfixing instead of new features, which would also not be a bad thing for the project as a whole to have a senior coder on.
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