AO3 elections: I'm listening.

[icarus]

I let my AO3 membership lapse, so I don't have a vote. But I started following the election once it turned into a furor.

I mean, okay, I read astolat's detailed answers to questions a while back, and got the sense that apparently a rubber stamp election wasn't anymore.

I still haven't gone through Ainsley's giant compilation of election posts.

But here are the posts I've read so far (besides astolat's):

A shattered Lim's resignation.

Bookshop's position and analysis of the politics of the election revolt against AO3's status quo, or 'Listen to the rest of the community! There's more to AO3 than the archive.'

Board president on why she's resigning, or 'Listen to the exit interviews: When volunteer after volunteer quits for the same reason, you've got a problem.'

What I found most illuminating was skud's post on the technical aspect of AO3's project management and how it caused Lim's disaster, or 'You know, if you'd listen to the developers, you'd have a lot more help.'

You notice a pattern? Me, too.

Comments

[icarus]

I decided to go back and ask.

People are what make OTW work. Not just the leadership, but the volunteers. I don't like what I'm hearing about how volunteers feel ignored and pooh-poohed, and how there's a culture of silencing. I've worked in non-profits a loooong time, and while overwork is common enough to be cliche, the feeling of being ignored isn't.

My personal experience with AO3 backs up renay and general_jinjur 's posts. AO3 has been an impenetrable unresponsive monolith, very different from other large fandom organizations like Fiction Alley.

skud's hard data is revealing. There are more than just good ideas there.

The data shows how we have people at the top acting as one man bands.

One person is taking this, that, and the other change and throwing it in all at once, without marking what's in there. The ID on those changes is shalott, which I assume is astolat, or someone using her ID. Whoever this is, she may feel like she's doing all the work -- and no doubt she is -- but it demonstrates she's also not empowering the people below her, and creating a morass that only she will be able to disentangle.

Now that may be because the people below her aren't capable of running their own projects. But that strict hierarchy (bring in the newbie peons but don't let them touch anything) seems to have created an organization with the transparency and flexibility of a brick wall.

[rivkat]

I agree that there are definitely communication challenges. In my part of the organization, I feel like we've tried very hard to answer any questions. Sometimes we get dinged for not explaining ourselves when we did make a public announcement of a forthcoming change, but it's on the OTW blog (which we use because it's generally considered rude to come into another community's space and say "hey, let us talk about our thing instead"). It's totally reasonable not to follow the OTW blog! And I think there's more we can do to talk about our decisions.

But why that is, is another matter entirely. And I think people are conflating communication issues (which, in particular, not being on the Board or in a communications position, Naomi couldn't have done much about, at least not without even more accusations of wanting to control everything) with technical issues. There are very few volunteers with the technical skills we need; Naomi has helped train many of the ones we have; it's awesome that skud now says she'd like the easy ability to do a bug or two and I hope we build out that capacity so that she and anyone else can do so; and the person I have confidence in to lead the building of those tools is Naomi. (Two side notes: (1) If I haven't said it on this thread, it's notable that she was able to hand over Vividcon successfully when it was mature. (2) Essentially all open source has an 80-20 model, at best, where 20% of the people do 80% of the work, so expecting a "successful" open source project to have a flat contribution curve is planning for failure.) On the other hand, without her, we just have to hope that someone else will actually build those structures. elz has had some things to say recently on related topics. From where I sit, there's a lot of second-hand criticism, very little based on what Naomi is actually doing with the volunteers she herself works with.