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Some thoughts on OTW
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.
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.