#organization of transformative works
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what's been happening at the otw?
so it seems that on twitter and possibly tumblr, people have been hearing things about the otw board/election stuff without really knowing what's going on. a lot of the different issues get conflated and confused with each other, and things that aren't related get connected while things that are related don't. i'm making this post to make things clear, since i've been following some of it (primarily the otw board stuff) from the outside so that people know exactly what is going on, and to reduce the spread of misinformation.
a lot of this information comes from this dreamwidth journal, which has been documenting many testimonies and receipts, for full context.
an earlier timeline of the csem and insensitive treatment of policy and abuse committee volunteers is documented at @221loislane, on this post.
the election season
every year — for anyone out of touch with how the organization of transformative works (otw) politics go, yes this occurs every year as seats can be held for 3 years maximum but resignations happen, leading to staggering — the org has an election season for the main board of directors. they oversee all of the otw's fan projects, including ao3 and fanlore. there are 7 seats, one of whom is the president (kari dayton).
if a chair resigns, then their seat may remain empty to the end of the term or to the next election season, depending on when they resign. if they resign early, a runner-up from the previous election may take their seat.
elections generally take place every summer, but the actual changing of hands occurs in in the fall. board directors are known by their real life name; this has always been the policy. prior to this year, when candidacies were announced, it was with their full name. however, due to the csem attack emails that were targeting volunteers last may, it seems that they added a layer of protection for the candidates this year, and initially announced them with their first name and last initial.
this election season, there were originally 4 chairs that were going to be vacant and needed to be filled. there were also originally 7 candidates, some of whom applied for candidacy last minute. one of the candidates withdrew early (mid june), so this came down to 6.
in order to vote in an election, you must donate a minimum $10usd prior to a certain date in june (this year being june 30) and tick the box that says you want to become a member.
the republican candidate
on july 24, people started spreading the fact that one of the otw board candidates, audrey richards, is a republican. this is true: she ran for a republican seat for the us house of reps in 2022 (and prior to that, as an independent in 2020.) this can be seen on her ballotpedia. we know that she is the same audrey richards, because her ballotpedia page also connects her with the otw.
let me be clear: this is still in line with org policy, in terms of her real name getting released. their full names were going to be released to the public at some point, and as far as i know the org did not state that they would hide their full names until after the election.
many people, especially americans on the ao3 (full disclosure: i am one of the americans on ao3) were very wary about this, because the republican party has been endorsing increasingly dangerous laws and policies along the lines of fascism and transphobia. audrey running as a republican does not necessarily mean that she agrees with these values; however, because she, as a white woman, felt comfortable enough to align herself with a party that does, many lgbt people and people of color had every right to have reservations about her. her statements about ukraine (disagreeing with biden sending arms) and her involvement with "children and screens" was also brought under scrutiny: see this post by discluded. (i am not endorsing discluded's post; it simply cites some concerns with audrey)
due to claims of harassment (i am also not saying whether or not they occurred), she resigned from candidacy and from the org as a whole on july 25, declaring "congrats on the witch hunt." (x)
the otw then released a statement dissuading people from harassing board candidates. this was not taken well, as they were completely silent last year regarding unsubstantiated rumors about tiffany g, a previous election candidate who's chinese, with views that many were not comfortable with, to the point of saying that she might be a spy for the chinese government. this was spread by chinese- and english-speaking users alike. the otw was silent about this. however, this year, many volunteers internally have said that the otw's silence towards harassment is damning, and in any case, even in audrey's, they should speak up against it, resulting in their public statement.
reprimanding a volunteer of color
also on july 24, coincidentally enough, a volunteer of color made a post about receiving a letter about constructive corrective action procedure (ccap) from the tag wrangling team, due to making volunteers uncomfortable by speaking up about racism in the org.
the tl;dr of why they received the letter boiled down to:
talking about the org's racism in a ~certain way~ in public channels where volunteers could not leave made some vols uncomfortable
sharing internal chatlogs and correspondences to the public. EXCEPT THE THINGS SHE SHARED WERE HER OWN MESSAGES. and before july 25, the only OTHER thing she had shared to the public was the otw's direction on how volunteers should approach getting csem, from the spam attack last year, on a comment in a news post - which is an email that ALL VOLUNTEERS GOT. because none of that was public! no one knew what the org's approach to the spam attack in order to protect the volunteers was! she disclosed it so randoms who are not volunteers would know!
"outing" a volunteer, except she DIDN'T, because the volunteer had outed THEMSELVES in the chat program previously and repeatedly, then changed their icon at some point to indicate they didn't want to link the identities anymore. but there had never been a formal announcement or request not to link the identities, and who was supposed to take an icon change as an indicator of that, so IN THE CHAT PROGRAM (not in public!) kutti made a reference to something that person (under their real name) said in public (under their fannish handle/icon) and got reprimanded for it
emyn a has since made a post about how kutti's general behavior in the chat has made him uncomfortable and was one of the reasons why he withdrew his candidacy, and that he supported the fact that she received the ccap. he stated that alex tischer's abrasiveness (see below) was probably because of where alex is from, in europe. he also said that kutti outed a withdrawn candidate (probably audrey) in the chat program, which was not public information prior to his post. the rest of his claims are presently not substantiated, and most of what i have read about his accusations boil down to tone policing.
EDIT: kutti clarified that emyn got her mixed up with another volunteer of color in one of these claims. she says that she has never talked about audrey either internally nor externally, and does not know what other handles she would link audrey to. she also specified that emyn's accusation of her using "provocative descriptors, such as 'disgusting'" was in context of her criticizing the org's handling of azarias — a volunteer who handled many csem tickets last year, then got their account suspended without warning, and then got implicated for distribution in an org-wide letter, which, yeah, is pretty fucking disgusting!
the alex problem
i mentioned the ccap above because kutti references it in her post about alex tischer here, and when i linked to it on twitter people were confused as to what ccap meant and why it was significant. and i don't think kutti's treatment should go ignored either, because i think it signifies a larger problem that the org has.
and one of these very glaring problems is alex tischer. alex tischer was on the board this year, being their last year of their current term. they were on the board previously too, from 2015-2018. tischer has been called a "missing stair" by multiple volunteers, and a huge problem in the org's function.
more specifically, and as confirmed by a former volunteer i talked to on an ao3 post (wherein they corrected me for conflating two incidents), some incidents that occurred with tischer were:
in 2020, when mainland chinese vols were encouraged to do more recruitment for volunteers on weibo (a mainland china site), the otw had added two new language tags on ao3: tai-gi (taiwanese) and cantonese. the vols were also encouraged to endorse this — not specifically by alex — on weibo. china and taiwan have VERY high geopolitical tensions, and the vols endorsing the addition of the taiwanese language on a mainland chinese site could potentially put them in danger. when they expressed this, alex had told them to "not appease a shitty government," or something along those lines — indicating alex did not care for their safety in a heavily censored country, over sticking it to the man or whatever. (alex is white/german and lives in the uk.)
in 2023, separate from this issue, the otw had decided to shut down the transformative works weibo page without consulting the chinese volunteers. the chinese vols were very pissed and protested, first in english. and then, when their concerns weren't being heard, they started in protesting in chinese. this prompted alex to reply to them, in german, "We can throw all sorts of things at each other, but if we don't agree on a lingua franca, we won't achieve much" (Wir können uns gegenseitig alle möglichen Dinge an den Kopf werfen aber wenn wir uns nicht auf eine Lingua Franca einigen erreichen wir nicht viel.) which, in my opinion, is pretty fucking irrelevant to chinese volunteers not getting their voices heard for something that they had every right to get their voice heard on, and basically told them to "speak english" when they had been speaking english previously and getting ignored!!!
a discussion from the otw slack in 2020 was leaked, wherein a black volunteer asked a question and expressed interest in knowing the diversity of the board of directors. not the diversity of all volunteers. they immediately got dogpiled on by multiple volunteers, alex included, saying that asking for such a thing could endanger the safety of volunteers (which is pretty fucking ironic considering alex's treatment of the chinese vols), the black volunteer should've backread a day's worth of chatlogs, saying that asking about diversity was chilling, etc. i cannot summarize in full how furious this chatlog makes me, so if you are capable i do recommend you to read it to see how utterly defensive everyone got at a simple question about diversity.
these things are relevant because on july 25, kutti made a post about alex — because other volunteers had been asking in the otw slack about kutti's situation, and a volunteer compared how kutti was treated, for speaking up about racism, to how alex was treated, who was consistently xenophobic and as far as anyone knew, did not receive a reprimand for it. alex then doubled down on their previous comments.
this prompted kutti's post, both to publicize this incident and to call for alex's immediate suspension.
board directors resign
there were, at the time, five chairs on board, due to the fact that two had resigned previously (heather in may 2023, jess in nov 2022; neither were replaced). after this incident, volunteers were furious and backed kutti up and also called for alex to resign, or for the other chairs to kick alex out.
two chairs in particular, antonius and natalia, were already on hiatus. they were also pressured to kick alex out, due to the fact that they were only standing chairs, not active, so volunteers wanted them to either come off hiatus and start the process to get alex out, or if they could not do their chair duties, resign. i believe the board needs a 2/3rds vote to kick someone off as a chair, which is why they were brought into the conversation — 2/5 chairs would not be enough.
on july 26, natalia did reprimand alex's behavior in the chat according to some sources. an anonymous source said that both natalia and antonius had started their resignation process prior to the alex-kutti incident; they made this public and official after/during this conversation.
on july 27, alex also said that they had resigned "yesterday." it is unclear if they only resigned from the board, or the org as a whole, considering they were still the webs chair, a tag wrangler, and on the translation and support committees.
all three board resignations were made public in an official announcement on july 27; natalia and antonius's were made first, with alex's as an add-on shortly afterward. however, as alex and antonius's spots were already outgoing, this has only opened up ONE slot for the election: a fifth one. and there are five candidates.
what happens next?
with five vacant seats and five candidates, this means that the election is uncontested. however, two of the five candidates will serve partial terms (the ones who get less votes; 2 years each), while three of the five candidates will serve full terms (3 years each.) if you've donated at least $10 to the otw in the past year, you're eligible to vote. a comprehensive schedule can be found here.
all candidate platforms/q&as can be found here in individual posts, and here as a spreadsheet.
by the way, this is not the first time most of, if not a full board has resigned almost all at once. this occurred previously in 2015, due to some of the following incidents (these may not be all of the reasons for the mass resignation, but definitely for many of them):
insanely incompetent financial handling wherein they had donations up to six figures held in paypal accounts
the removal of sanders, a candidate during that election season, because she had resigned from her role as treasurer recently, thus supposedly making her ineligible to run (candidates must have served as a volunteer in any position for 2 years), even though she was still on the dev committee. she did not resign from the candidacy herself. the election committee had objected to this but was overridden by the board. sanders is black.
a board chair had gone under a sockpuppet account during multiple candidate chats asking questions "as a concerned member," even though she was board chair, indicating a conflict of interest.
during the open board meeting in november (after the election), without warning the board decided to appoint andrea, the candidate who got the least number of votes that election year, to a spot that was vacated a whole year before. it was hard for me to find context around this situation but from what i've gathered, andrea was already friends with the present board and the newly appointed board had not yet settled in. when this was met with appropriate backlash and accusations of power grabbing, this is when the entire board at the time — minus the new elects — resigned.
i bring this up to show that the otw has never been a perfect organization — rather, it has always had its problems. i did not pay much attention to these incidents previously, but considering how the current election season has become more and more prominent on my social media, i feel that it's important for me to be in the know now, and to spread this information to others.
i am not a volunteer (although i used to be a tag wrangler for a brief time.) i am not speaking on behalf of anyone mentioned or linked in this post except for myself. i strongly believe in making an organization's policies public and for as much information to be accessible as possible, for a site that i'm an active member on and love to use. i believe in ensuring the safety, comfort, and consideration of volunteers of color. i am making this post because i believe the otw deserves to be transparent like any other organization. please feel free to share and discuss as you see fit; and if any of this information is incorrect, please let me know asap!
edit: follow-up incidents
this post by @fandomantiracism writes a detailed timeline of the mishandling of chinese volunteers (including the below incidents), and explains exactly why the environment in which otw volunteers in china must be handled with a modicum of more care than they do currently. please read it to fully understand the cvols' situation! (disclaimer: i am not affiliated with this blog.)
during the candidate chats, a chinese candidate got an extremely inappropriate question from a present chair/former or present board member, breaching on org privacy (even though kutti got a ccap for less), a clear attempt to attack the candidate by making them appear unsafe and immature, and with a lie that put their ACTUAL SAFETY at risk. see this post, and this thread on twitter
an aforementioned former volunteer detailed another incident where the treatment of chinese volunteers was severely mishandled; see here
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"the site is full of disgusting smuts"
#fandom#fanfiction#ao3#ddos attack#archive of our own#give them hell otw!#organization of transformative works#ao3 ddos
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Whose car do I need to wash in order to get a “sort by commenter” feature on AO3?
I have such a backlog of comments (sorry!!!) and even if I didn’t, I’d love to see who the repeat-commenters are, so I can be extra chatty and grateful to them.
Is there an AO3 feature request system or?
#AO3#fanfic#archive of our own#fan fiction#fan fic#otw#otw board#organization of transformative works
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hey ao3 people, I know y'all care about freedom of speech and gay content, that's why you called a board member electee a 'ccp spy sent to destroy ao3 in the west' cause she was Chinese American an mentioned that ao3 had a cp problem, or how you assumed anonymous Sudan was run by gay hating Muslims the moment you saw Arabic, so I think it is important that you know that one the board member candidate, Audrey Richards, is a registered republican politician. Maybe speak up about that, get a little angry.
Or do you just reserve that anger for non-white people?
#ao3#archive of our own#otw#otw board#otw elections#organization of transformative works#racism#Audrey r
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Yo peeps,
I don't really ever make posts myself but I haven't heard anyone on my dash talking about this yet so I figure i might as well.
Organization of Transformative Works (the people behind AO3) is celebrating its 16th anniversary!!!!! As part of this they are conducting a survey. It's really quick and asks no identify information. It's mostly trying to find out where fans congregate/hang out nowadays and how much fans know about about OTW's work. So take 2mins out of your day and fill out the survey!
05.09.2023-21.09.2023
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So, Anonymous Sudan, the group of probably Russian hackers whose intended goal is division in the West, is the group attacking Ao3 at the moment. They’ve issued a $30,000 dollar ransom demand, which is stupid because 1) the OTW isn’t gonna pay that, and 2) the OTW can’t pay that.
Ao3 and the OTW are run by donations. They don’t have the money to pay this even if they wanted to, and all indications are they’re not inclined to give money to Anonymous Sudan that they’ll just use to buy more additions to their botnets and bring down more websites
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idc who’s behind the DDoS attack i just need ao3 BACK i am TIRED and i want to read some nice stories and i want to escape reality
special place in hell for whoever disrupted ao3 etc etc
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youtube
No makeup or filters lol just a call to action!
#endotwracism
#ao3#end otw racism#organization of transformative works#fandomshatepeopleofcolor#fansofcolor#Youtube
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So, I keep seeing people talking about wanting to bulk update their fic settings to be viewable for registered users only. This feature actually can be found in your AO3 settings and while this might not be a very glamourous infographic, it is fairly easy to do.
#ao3 author#ao3#otw#how to ao3#bulk update fics#fanfiction#archive of our own#organization of transformative works#ao3 functions
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For Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, the OTW’s Legal Chair, Betsy Rosenblatt, was interviewed about AI legal issues. Betsy pointed out that having AIs learn from works such as fanfiction meant that they weren’t only using old works from the public domain to learn about the world. “That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.” What’s more…
I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….
Will fans take up this challenge?
(source)
OTW, WHAT THE HECK???
WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS???
WHAT FAIR USE BULLSHIT??? I DID NOT CONSENT TO AI SCRAPING MY FANFICS
Who the heck is this Betsy Rosenblatt??? They’re so out of touch with their user base. Did they really think fanfic writers would be happy hearing about this? Hah, I guess this is why they only said this after asking for donations...
I just can’t believe this is coming from the Organization of Transformative Works. I trusted AO3 to not be pro-AI, and yet here we are.
Time to remove my fanfics from that platform.
#ai#archiveofourown#organization of transformative works#fanfiction#fanfic#ai stories#chatgpt#writeblr#writers on tumblr#writing#ao3#otw#dall e ai#writers#miyamiwu.src
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Next chapter of Master of My Fate is up!
In which Yavanna wonders about the nature of her soul bond...
#fanfiction#ifd2024#archive of our own#fanlore#organization of transformative works#owd#ao3#lord of the rings#lotr#i am aragornosexual#aragorn#lord of the rings fanfiction
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Just a PSA and that it’s the last day for the current OTW fundraising drive! I just donated, so now I’m officially a OTW member, and can vote in next years board of directors election! It feels good to know I have a say in the future of AO3, our safe haven! Please donate if you can!
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smallish update
I locked my fic on ao3. I didn't want to. I know ao3 said they're trying to prevent fic from being scraped, but it is.
I also don't think AI generated fic should be considered fanwork. Computers cannot be fans. They cannot be as interesting and innovative as fans have the capability to be. If you feed all the star wars scripts into an AI generator and tell it to write an original story, it's going to look like an even worse star wars fic.
Anyway. I hope locking it will at least help protecting it. Unless the AI can also make a ao3 login, which I don't know shit, it probably can. @annakie, do you know?
I really, really hate that it's locked.
#myfic#sorry everyone#i get so many anon kudos and even some comments#it's not fair to those readers#archive of our own#organization of transformative works
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just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack
people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too
suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there
EDIT: Please see my pinned post for additional screenshots. There are a lot. Thank you.
(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)
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AO3 Celebrates 12 Million Posted Fanworks
The Archive of Our Own has reached the milestone of 12 million published fanworks! Read more about how the archive works (and doesn't) when it comes to algorithms, tags and bookmarks! https://otw.news/02c68e
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on ao3's current fundraiser
apparently it’s time for ao3’s biannual donation drive, which means it’s time for me to remind you all, that regardless of how much you love ao3, you shouldn’t donate to them because they HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY AND NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH IT.
we’ve known for years that ao3 – or, more specifically, the organization for transformative works (@transformativeworks on tumblr), or otw, who runs ao3 and other fandom projects – has a lot of money in their “reserves” that they had no plans for. but in 2023, @manogirl and i did some research on this, and now, after looking at their more recent financial statements, i’ve determined that at the beginning of 2024, they had almost $2.8 MILLION US DOLLARS IN SURPLUS.
our full post last year goes over the principles of how we determined this, even though the numbers are for 2023, but the key points still stand (with the updated numbers):
when we say “surplus”, we are not including money that they estimate they need to spend in 2024 for their regular expenses. just the extra that they have no plan for
yes, nonprofits do need to keep some money in reserves for emergencies; typically, nonprofits registered in the u.s. tend to keep enough to cover between six months and two years of their regular operating expenses (meaning, the rough amount they need each month to keep their services going). $2.8 million USD is enough to keep otw running for almost FIVE YEARS WITHOUT NEW DONATIONS
they always overshoot their fundraisers: as i’m posting this, they’ve already raised $104,751.62 USD from their current donation drive, which is over double what they’ve asked for! on day two of the fundraiser!!
no, we are not trying to claim they are embezzling this money or that it is a scam. we believe they are just super incompetent with their money. case in point: that surplus that they have? only earned them $146 USD in interest in 2022, because only about $10,000 USD of their money invested in an interest-bearing account. that’s the interest they earn off of MILLIONS. at the very least they should be using this extra money to generate new revenue – which would also help with their long-term financial security – but they can’t even do that
no, they do not need this money to use if they are sued. you can read more about this in the full post, but essentially, they get most of their legal services donated, and they have not, themselves, said this money is for that purpose
i'm not going to go through my process for determining the updated 2024 numbers because i want to get this post out quickly, and otw actually had not updated the sources i needed to get these numbers until the last couple days (seriously, i've been checking), but you can easily recreate the process that @manogirl and i outlined last year with these documents:
otw’s 2022 audited financial statement, to determine how much money they had at the end of 2022
otw’s 2024 budget spreadsheet, to determine their net income in 2023 and how much they transferred to and from reserves at the beginning of 2024
otw’s 2022 form 990 (also available on propublica), which is a tax document, and shows how much interest they earned in 2022 (search “interest” and you’ll find it in several places)
also, otw has not been accountable to answering questions about their surplus. typically, they hold a public meeting with their finance committee every year in september or october so people can ask questions directly to their treasurer and other committee members; as you can imagine, after doing this deep dive last summer, i was looking forward to getting some answers at that meeting!
but they cancelled that meeting in 2023, and instead asked people to write to the finance committee through their contact us form online. fun fact: i wrote a one-line message to the finance committee on may 11, 2023 through that form, when @manogirl and i were doing this research, asking them for clarification on how much they have in their reserves. i have still not received a response.
so yeah. please spend your money on people who actually need it, like on mutual aid requests! anyone who wants to share their mutual aid requests, please do so in the replies and i’ll share them out – i didn’t want to link directly to individual requests without permission in case this leads to anyone getting harassed, but i would love to share your requests. to start with, here's operation olive branch and their ongoing spreadsheet sharing palestinian folks who need money to escape genocide.
oh, and if you want to write to otw and tell them why you are not donating, i'm not sure it’ll get any results, but it can’t hurt lol. here's their contact us form – just don’t expect a response! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
#ao3#otw#archive of our own#organization for transformative works#ao3 is not your savior#and they don't need your money#otw finances
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