Cognitive Resonance

It's the OTW's biannual membership drive again this week, and we're fundraising to continue to do our work in support of our mission and our projects! 

The theme of this drive is tropes, and I wrote a post about the alternate universe in which the OTW never existed: it's a pretty dark timeline. With your support, we can prevent it from ever coming true and continue to bring you great projects like Fanlore, Open Doors, the AO3, and many more.

Along with the other members of the OTW's Board of Directors and representatives from several other committees, I spent the first weekend of October in Maryland for the 2014 Board retreat. All in all, we had a really good, productive, and encouraging time. Everyone who attended left convinced that the changes we discussed will make the OTW a stronger and much more functional organization, while at the same time extending our capacities both internally and externally. I think in three years we're going to be in a very different, and much better, position.

I'm aware that there are a lot of conspiracy theories going around about the meeting; obviously, given my position, I don't think they're particularly well-founded, but I can certainly understand how people would be worried. Nor do I really expect that anyone with these worries will be particularly inclined to take my word for it on any of these matters. But I did want to register that in my view what the OTW has accomplished this far is even more remarkable in light of all the problems it has had, and that the credit for that entirely goes to the people who've been involved with it. Hats off to all of us, and to all of you.

On another note, I'm thrilled that the Archive of Our Own has hit one million works as of early this morning, Pacific time. The AO3 is quite an achievement, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it, as a user and as a staff member of the OTW, but this couldn't have happened without all of my fellow archive users. So, here's to us, and here's to the next million fanworks on the Archive!

As of the last deploy a few days ago, the Archive of Our Own Diversity Statement is now live on the Archive of Our Own.

I drafted the text of the blog post, which puts things much more eloquently than I can at the moment, but here in my own space I can admit to taking a large amount of personal satisfaction in this. I was a founding staffer of the Internationalization & Outreach committee (then International Outreach) when it was created under Julia Beck in 2010, and this was one of our earliest projects. Complications arose, ensued, were overcome, and along the way I became the last of the original I&O staffers on the committee, but we didn't restart work on the getting the Statement live on the Archive until the middle of last year. Now that it is part of Archive policy, I feel like I can retire as Chair with my head held high.