OTW Election: Getting in under the wire

I've been thinking about this at several points over the course of the ongoing OTW Board Election discussion, so here it is: the Organization for Transformative Works is unquestionably by the fans, for the fans, and of the fans, but as a non-profit organization incorporated in the state of Delaware and granted federal IRS 501(c)3 status, it is not the same as any other mass fan project, and unfortunately, it cannot be run like any other mass fan project. It just can't.

I say this in particular with regard to two things, the first being the recent discussion over volunteer membership, which on some level I couldn't quite understand why people kept bringing it up. After reading ellen_fremedon's post OTW Elections: Signal Boost, Endorsements, and the Volunteer Membership Issue, which discusses the now-disbanded Election Committee's rationale for rejecting the concept of volunteer membership back when it was reviewing and creating membership structures as part of its work (ellen_fremedon is a former Chair of the Elections Committee), I finally understand my own lack of comprehension. Volunteer membership is very much a fannish, cashless economy, sweat-equity model: you have a stake in the thing you have worked on because you have worked on it, and in principle there should be no barrier to you having "ownership" of that stake.

What it comes down to, from my perspective, is that the OTW is not a fannish entity; it is a non-profit entity, and as such, not all of its work can be accomplished within the rubrics of fan culture, which at its best strives to be inclusive of everyone. In a perfect world, every volunteer who's put in the work but can't afford the $10 USD membership donation or who doesn't have the requisite personal financial methods to make it would receive membership in the OTW anyway. But the world of U.S. non-profit law and IRS regulations is anything but perfect, and it's most certainly not fully accessible to everyone regardless of income or geographic location. The OTW operates in that world by its very nature, and at the end of that day to function there the Org has to play by its rules to some extent. We can't do all the things, and we can't have all the members. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't and we can't.

This doesn't mean, of course, that membership--even on the current paid model--can't be made more accessible, and I am absolutely in favor of the 2012 Board exploring alternate payment methods or letting people make cumulative donations towards membership or whatever. I am even in favor of revisiting the volunteer-membership model, provided that people do it with the clear acknowledgment that the OTW is not a fannish entity, but rather a non-profit organization that needs to be managed according to sustainable principles, rather than jury-rigged ad hoc, or even acceptable fannish, methods.

I've long felt, and have written in my forthcoming TWC article, co-written with Alex Leavitt, that the "amateur/professional" or "fan/industry" binary is no longer adequate to describe the complexity of the interplay between fandom and non-fandom, or of the people and structures that straddle the grey zone between them. The case of someone like lim, who put in 14-hour days for months on end to code the latest AO3 deploy, is particularly telling in that regard: that's not an amateur or no-profit level of work and commitment, and even though lim herself needed to work alone so that she could contribute to the project, her coding should have been managed so that the end results met the minimum standards for accessibility in website design, and she should have been managed so that she knew that she had other options and the support she needed to not resign in the face of personal criticism that was not justified, if she so desired. That's not what happened, unfortunately, and as a variety of posts written over the past day or so have illustrated, the OTW's management, and in particular the management of the AO3 project, is shockingly deficient. skud, a professional software developer herself, has analyzed the AO3's code commit history in Github, transparency, and the OTW Archive project:

This does not seem, to me, to be a well managed project. This is a project where the project lead is acting as a gatekeeper, commiting huge swathes of code (sometimes on behalf of third parties) with inadequate documentation, and allowing extremely poor branch hygiene (skins project mixed up with other changes, for example) to infect the main branch, leading to a buggy release. This should not have happened, and, I suspect, would not have happened if the OTW’s technical leaders had had, or had sought the advice of people who had, experience with distributed open source software development projects and the tools they typically use.

In short, the OTW isn't able to avoid the pitfalls of increasing professionalization and complexification, and I believe that we need to develop structures that will maximize the advantages of that fact, by supporting the people we have who are already putting in a professional level of effort. In light of Lucy Pearson's withdrawal of her candidacy for the Board, I'm endorsing Betsy Rosenblatt along with Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders and Jenny Scott-Thompson. All of them have given me more than sufficient reason to believe that they have the passion and the needed grasp on the OTW's problems to make significant inroads towards solving them.

To quote ellen_fremedon again:

This is both a vote for these four candidates, and-- inevitably, given the seat-to-candidate ratio-- a vote against Naomi Novik. My reasons for both of these choices, for wanting to see Julia, Jenny, Sanders, and Betsy on the board and for believing that it's time for Naomi to step down, boil down to one thing: Naomi's plans and priorities for the next term, as she has described them, all focus on completing existing projects-- that is, on the AO3. And that's something she can work on, quite possibly better, as a staffer and volunteer coder. Every other candidate has a vision for larger-scale change and outreach which will require the board's authority to see it through.

I have immense respect for what Naomi has done in getting this organization off the ground. Under other circumstances, I would be happy to vote for her to continue as a board member. But the OTW's current circumstances, of massive volunteer and staff burnout and a desperate need for international and pan-fandom outreach, call for immediate and thorough change in the organization's internal and external communications and its volunteer policies, and making those changes is not Naomi's priority.

I might add that there's no a priori reason that Novik should make these issues her priority; it's clear, especially from her latest post about the election, that she values the AO3 above all else. This is a legitimate position, if one that I cannot endorse either personally or in terms of the good of the OTW as a whole. But the AO3 isn't going away no matter who gets elected to the Board, and we need to elect people to the Board who recognize that the way the OTW operates needs to change.

Voting begins 16 November 2011. Thank you, for reading, and for participating in the election.