Some thoughts on OTW

[elz]

I volunteered with OTW as a coder at the beginning of 2008, and since then I've become a senior coder on the archive project, a member of the AD&T committee, and now the AD&T co-chair. (AD&T = Accessibility, Design and Technology, the committee responsible for archive design and development.) I've put an enormous amount of time and energy into my work, and I spend a lot of time hanging out in the OTW chatrooms. I've been lucky enough to meet some of my OTW cohorts offline as well!

Ira, one of our board members, has a post up about The OTW Server Poll and Fannish Diversity, and I just wanted to post some of my thoughts on the OTW and this particular issue, from an equally personal and unofficial perspective. Also check out Helka Lantto's post from the POV of someone involved in our International Outreach work.



OTW is really just a group of fans, or more properly, a group of smaller groups of fans, who volunteer a good percentage of their spare time to make and do things that are useful for other fans. Now, things that are useful for other fans are often useful for yourself as well, so it's not a totally unselfish undertaking, but at heart, I see good people doing good work, and not for ego-driven reasons or to reshape fandom in their own images. I don't hear rhetoric internally about how we represent or speak for all of fandom; what I hear people talking about internally is what we can do to make our projects better, more usable, more accessible and more inclusive. What problems are people in different parts of fandom having that we might be able to help with? What sort of feedback are we hearing about our current tools? And so forth.

OTW is also made up of an incredibly diverse group of fans, from a wealth of different cultural and fannish backgrounds. AD&T has members from Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Romania, Germany, the UK, the US and Canada, and we're just one relatively small committee. Scheduling meetings is challenging. :) We have multiple board members and committee chairs from anime, manga and gaming fandoms, and an International Outreach committee dedicated to advocating for and reaching out to fans around the world. All of these people are OTW as much as anybody else is.

If you added up all the people volunteering for OTW in some capacity, you'd have a pretty big number. However, that doesn't mean that there are a lot of people working on any individual OTW project or committee at any given time. For example, AD&T and the coding team are not very big at all (probably an average of about 8 people active at any point during the year, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, not all of whom are coders), and nearly all of us have had a rough or eventful couple of years in our personal lives as well. When we don't get things done on the schedule that we're striving for, when we don't put out as many public posts as we'd like, it's overwhelmingly because we've run out of time in our days, rather than because we don't care.

There are a very great number of things we could do better as an organization, and a ton of ways that AO3 could be improved. An awful lot of those things are the way they are because of resource constraints, plain and simple. For instance, making the archive available in a variety of languages has been on our to-do list since day 1, but it's a big undertaking that requires an experienced coder to dedicate a lot of time to building the functionality and interface that the translators are looking for. We’ve actually put a lot of work into it in the past, and I did a lot of that myself, but the Ruby on Rails framework that we use only began to add support for internationalization a few months before our open beta started, and once that hit, I never had the time to dig in to the issues we needed to fix to make the feature operational. Not because I didn’t care, but because we just didn’t have that many coders, and I was off working on the invitations system and the tag wrangling system and posting bugs and performance problems. So long story short, translations are under active development, and we are making a lot of progress on it this year, but what's made that possible is just the fact that we've gotten a couple more coding volunteers, and we have an awesome coder who's been able to make that her primary focus all year. OTW is absolutely an organization where one motivated person can make a huge difference, and that's true in every area!

One thing I try to be sensitive to is the fact that while we welcome and encourage participation in the organization by all interested fans and strive to be as inclusive and accessible as we can be, OTW is not the Borg. My personal opinion and the opinion I've seen around AD&T is that we know we can't be all things to all people, we know that not everyone will ever be on board with OTW or AO3 and that's okay. I would even say it's a good thing, because the existence of multiple fannish sites and perspectives is healthy and protects us all from being vulnerable to a single point of failure, no matter how well-intentioned that one point may be. And I do think that while we want to be welcoming and diverse, we also need to be respectful of other people's desires NOT to participate and to be able to do their own thing in peace. I'd be interested in hearing more suggestions from other people about how we can do more outreach to other groups without intruding on other people's spaces in ways that would be unwelcome - I suspect that's a pretty tricky balance to find.

In regard to the OTW server naming contest, there were two months of emails, discussions, meetings, subcommittees and spreadsheets prior to the voting, and I chimed in a few times, but I am guilty of not having given the project my full attention, since I was mostly focusing on my regular work at the time. From January to March, we had a change in committee chairs and subcommittee leaders, new staffers and volunteers, new servers, a new version control system, a new deploy process, four code releases, and a host of new projects, features and bugfixes. I felt like the contest was in good hands, especially since a number of staffers from anime and gaming fandoms and from International Outreach took an active role in the planning and discussion. There was a diverse group of people involved in the process, and no one's intent was malicious; it was a busy period of time for everyone, however, and it became evident after the fact that wires got crossed along the way in various respects.

I help to run online voting contests at work periodically, so I do take somewhat seriously the idea that it's bad form to encourage people to vote on something and then change the rules on them after the fact, even when you agree behind the scenes that you should have done things differently from the start. What I felt even more strongly about was that lying to our users about what the results had been would have set a terrible precedent in ways that would extend far beyond this particular poll.

Certainly, one of the primary things I take away from this is the importance of making sure everyone is on the same page and that we've thought about what our goals are at the outset of any project or promotion. OTW does a lot of different things over the course of a year, so an opportunity to do better is always just around the next corner. Before we even held the voting for this contest, we were working on our April Showers promotion for AO3 and Fanlore, where we highlighted older and underrepresented fandoms each day on Twitter and posted roundups to AO3 and the Fanlore community, with an emphasis on diversity across and within media categories. I will get fanart hosting out this term, or I will die trying. (...outcome still uncertain there, but I try to be optimistic!) And we welcome volunteers, feedback, new voices and new ideas! I want to do my best this year to help move the AO3 forward, and to help move it forward for everyone, and I know a lot of other people at OTW who feel the same way. We’re not perfect, but we do care; we'll keep striving to do better, and I'm glad to see other people's suggestions regarding ways that we can do that.



Plug: we're always eager to get new volunteers to help with almost anything, but our AO3 support and testing teams are particularly short-staffed right now. No technical expertise required! Contact our Volunteers Committee if you're interested.

Comments

[celli]

I am crossing my fingers SOHARD that the new language thing can work! If anyone can do it, I know you guys can.

(also, please don't be ded of fanart!)

[elz]

Rebecca, who is working on translations, is awesome, and she's a non-native English speaker, so I think she brings a great perspective to the project. She's gotten a lot done already, and she's doing a fantastic job of working with the other committees, and I am just generally kermit-flaily happy to have her on board!

[enigel]

Couldn't have said it better, especially as one of those who still muck about at middle level. *hugs and cheerleads*

[elz]

I don't say this enough, but seriously, OTW is lucky to have you, and your contributions are incredibly valuable. You've done so much work coding, and participating in AD&T, and issue-wrangling - some of that may feel like small stuff to you, but it really adds up, and *I* know that there's a ton of stuff that wouldn't have gotten done if you hadn't done it. <3

[enigel]

<3 You do say it, and like Maia says, I feel the love! :) I wasn't fishing for reassurance (though I won't deny that it helps *g*). I was in a self-assessment phase and coming up short against my own expectations (and, well, against those of prospective employers *sigh* because I'm such a broken record these days).

And sometimes the unending list of bugs and issues feels overwhelming. I wish I knew how to contaminate other people with the same kind of drive that made me say "hey, there's a broken image there, I think I know how to fix it"...

So, you know, if anyone is reading: yes, you there, if you see something broken and think you know how to fix it, don't be shy! You're not going to be expected to fix more than what you set out to fix, but you might discover you enjoy doing it and stick around. :D

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[(Anonymous)]

int test(const char *str1, const char *str2){ printf( test for [%s] and [%s] , str1, str2); if(str1 == 0 || str2 == 0) { reutrn 0; } int nBase[26] = {0}; while(*str1 != 0) { int nIndex = (*str1 A' > 25) ? (*str1 a') : (*str1 A'); nBase[nIndex] = 1; str1++; } while(*str2 != 0) { int nIndex = (*str2 A' > 25) ? (*str2 a') : (*str2 A'); if(nBase[nIndex] == 0) { reutrn 0; } str2++; } reutrn 1;}int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]){ printf( result is %d\n , test( ABCDEFGHLMNOPQRS , DCGSRQPOM )); printf( result is %d\n , test( ABCDEFGHLMNOPQRS , DCGSRQPOZ )); printf( result is %d\n , test( abcdefghlmnopqrs , DCGSRQPOM )); printf( result is %d\n , test( ABCDEFGHLMNOPQRS , dcgsrqpoz )); reutrn 0;}

[cesy]

Middle level love! \o/ *hugs*

[zooey_glass]

<3

[lim]

Awesome post.

[lian]

One thing I try to be sensitive to is the fact that while we welcome and encourage participation in the organization by all interested fans and strive to be as inclusive and accessible as we can be, OTW is not the Borg. My personal opinion and the opinion I've seen around AD&T is that we know we can't be all things to all people, we know that not everyone will ever be on board with OTW or AO3 and that's okay.

Yeah. I want to cut out this statement and pin it to my fridge door XD

There are pretty much only two things that bug me in OTW discussions: if people assert that we're a bunch of elitist BNFs (still waiting for that BNF badge to arrive in the mail, and it's been three years!) and that OTW wants to convert all fans to their One True Way.

Speaking of AO3, the whole "centralized archive" idea is weirdly un-postmodern and may well be outdated. I absolutely get that many prefer the media miner model. But as long as enough people are invested in the "centralized archive" idea to build & maintain it, what's the harm? Just one more piece of useful infrastructure that you're free to use or not. (the rub is that we're striving to be 'useful' to a rather wide range of fans, and people seem to confuse that with "expect every fan to exclusively gather under the OTW umbrella". >_>; idek.)

But the question on what "fandom" is and who we want to serve, and where to draw the line -- I feel that more internal discussion about it would probably do us some good. (Like, I took up editing at Fanlore again, so I run into that practical question all the time -- "does this still fall under the 'transformative fandom' definition? Kinda? Maybe? Idk? Let's just write it up anyway~~" But then I'm not sure how to promote it to even more 'liminal' fans [in that case, farther removed from mediafannish tradition] if I'm only guessing, myself.)

[kass]

I don't hear rhetoric internally about how we represent or speak for all of fandom; what I hear people talking about internally is what we can do to make our projects better, more usable, more accessible and more inclusive. What problems are people in different parts of fandom having that we might be able to help with? What sort of feedback are we hearing about our current tools? And so forth.

::nod:: This has been my experience as an OTW volunteer, too.

Thank you for this post!

[jumpuphigh]

I don't know if you are the right person to ask but I will anyway. :D If I've volunteered and haven't heard back in months, should I just assume that I'm not currently needed and will hear back when I am?

[elf]

I suggest volunteering again; things slip through the cracks. (Watchya volunteering for?)

[jumpuphigh]

I did volunteer again after not hearing anything for months and didn't hear back regarding that at all. The prior time, I did actually get something to do.

Testing-ebooks.

[elz]

Eep! We definitely do need volunteers! Did you ever hear back at all, or did you get some setup info and then just not hear anything after that?

[jumpuphigh]

I volunteered last year, got set up, did a few things, and then never heard anything again. So, I revolunteered a few months ago and never heard anything.

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[(Anonymous)]

Tsoyzei to gegonos kurie Kapsi oti ayto egine ston ANT1 kai oxi sto MEGA? Kai eseis peorthxs ton eixate kalesmeno ton Kasidiari kai dystyxws gia sas, mono sas ebrise... Mallon zileuete tin "epityxia" ayti tou ANT1!

[cesy]

If you volunteered for testing or coding or tag wrangling, you should be hearing stuff regularly, so if you're not, something's slipped through the cracks, and please let someone know. If you volunteered for something else, it can sometimes take longer, for the committees who only take people at specific times of year.

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[(Anonymous)]

public static booalen contains(String left, String right) {int magicLeft = toMagicInt(left);int magicRight = toMagicInt(right);return (magicLeft & magicRight) == magicRight;}public static int toMagicInt(String text) {int result = 0;int index = 0;for (char c : text.toLowerCase().toCharArray()) {index = c a';result |= 2 << index;}return result;}

gaYlBOwQaK

[(Anonymous)]

This is what I do: This piece is a couple of years old now, but was rectnely 'added to the internet', so it was handy.Carved and dyed vegetable tanned leather (this pattern, however, is not mine).I am excited to see all the cool new things that will spring out of this new feature!Dave

[lobelia321]

I love this post! Thank you for posting it. I have learned a lot about how OTW and A03 work that I didn't know before. You are all awesome!

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[(Anonymous)]

Heck yeah bay-bee keep them ciomng!