Bio

Qiao C (she/her) discovered fandom back in her elementary school days, almost 20 years ago. She stumbled upon a Cardcaptor Sakura fandom forum, and has been reading fanfics ever since. She was motivated by her love for fandom to learn English: she simply couldn’t wait for the translator to update her favorite X-Men fanfic, and decided to read the original text. This is how she discovered AO3, seven years ago.

She joined OTW as a tag wrangler in 2019. She is happy to see that she can make use of her lore knowledge and language abilities in her daily wrangling duties as well as to help users improve their filtering and reading experiences.

She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. degree in materials engineering in Japan, and hopefully will get her doctorate degree next year. She loves to spend her time outside the lab reading manga, playing video games and participating in fandoms: she sometimes writes, translates, edits, and always, always reads.



1. Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?



My first motivation was to support the diversity of fanworks that OTW aims to protect. Being a trilingualist, I am fortunate enough to be able to enjoy amazing fanworks created by people from different cultures. However, during my multi-cultural fandom adventures across the past decade, I have witnessed different platforms, regardless of their language or cultural background, censor and exploit fanworks or sometimes, expel fanwork creators. This consolidates my belief in the maximum inclusivity of fanworks that OTW holds up to. However, I particularly recognize that there is still a long journey ahead for us to be inclusive to fanworks of all cultures, and therefore, I believe that with my cultural background, I can contribute to the diversity of our volunteers and users by offering help to those who aren’t native English speakers during their accustomation to the community.

While I was preparing this platform, protests broke out both inside and outside the organization. The protests were brought by concerns about both recent technology development and the structural issue within the OTW, particularly regarding lack of communication. It is blatantly clear that diversity would not blossom in soil where issues as fundamental as communication were not solved, which further strengthened my determination to protect and promote diversity within the organization, particularly through facilitating conversation and communications.

I made friends and expanded my understanding of fandom during the previous four years as a volunteer. I had never expected to learn and grow this much. By running for the Board, I would like to open up communication: between OTW and its users and members, between Board and volunteers, and between committees and committees, providing a continuous environment for diversity to grow in.

2. What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?

As mentioned above, protests broke out recently within the organization, due to long-time lack of communication in many aspects. This is a consequence of not only vertical structural failure in the organization but also vacancy of diverse volunteers in decisive roles. Taking my first language as example: Mandarin Chinese is the second most used language on the Archive and Chinese-speaking volunteers make up 8% of all OTW volunteers, yet at the moment we still don’t have any Chinese-speaking volunteers in the position of committee chairs or Board members.

As a trilingualist who also speaks Mandarin and Japanese, I am more than willing to help the Board communicate with our volunteers of a variety of cultural backgrounds. As a tag wrangler who has translated and wrangled tags for hundreds of fandoms, I am familiar with doing background research, listening and responding to users’ feedback, and communicating with colleagues from different committees. I believe that with my skill in communication and determination to change, the organization could better embrace the diversity it has promised in its roadmap.

3. Choose one or two goals for the OTW that are important to you and that you would be interested in working on during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?

As of now, the most urgent issue is to enhance communication – it’s not only between OTW and users, but also between Board and volunteers, and inter-committee. As representatives for the organization, the Board is responsible for reporting on the progress of projects to our users; as members of the Board, we should listen to feedback from volunteers for they are under the direct influence for the decisions the Board makes. I would like to focus on helping each committee in task assignment and collaboration. Specifically, to help mitigate burnout from too many tasks for our volunteers, and to allocate tasks more reasonably as well as seeing progress make more consistently, I would like to push for the employment of an HR professional. Trust and collaboration are based on transparency, and understanding only grows when words are heard.I would promote Board transparency, create and implement more accessible feedback routes and work with relevant committees in finding suitable professionals to promote communication and trust between the board and OTW users, members, and volunteers.

On the foundation of enhanced communication, I would also like to help facilitate the language diversity of our projects. AO3 has experienced a boom in non-English works in the past ten years, with the ratio in total non-English work count surging up from 3.6% to 11.0%. I hope to contribute to making the AO3 experience more friendly and welcoming for our international users. Specifically, I would like to help facilitate the establishment of the multilingual interface listed in our roadmap. Not only can the Archive better serve its purpose of preserving works written in different languages, but users will be much more willing to participate when they are in a language environment they are comfortable with.

4. What is your experience with the OTW’s projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.

I am most familiar with AO3 amongst all OTW’s projects through being a daily user and wrangler. My experiences with other committees, e.g., Support and Policy & Abuse, also come from my tag wrangling work as we communicate to respond to users’ feedback. I read Fanlore periodically to research and familiarize myself with the history of fandoms that I know little about (although Fanlore is recorded in English, editors from different languages are more than welcomed – please check Fanlore April news for details). Living in an era where technologies evolve faster than the law, I also would like to work with our Legal committee to better support their work and up our terms of service to date. I look forward to hearing from each of our projects and committees: I will focus on not only listening to their feedback, but also facilitating communication between each committee, and providing suggestions on reasonable task assignment and member management.

In particular, I plan to collaborate with our Election committee to call for the candidacy of individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds, in order to draw attention from potential candidates that could introduce more diversity into the Board.

5. How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

In fact, I have reduced the amount of fandoms I wrangled in the past year to make sure that I can finish my wrangling duties in two nights every week. I plan on focusing on my Board work over the weekdays, and extend to the weekend if needed to.

Board Work I

What committees have you worked with, and for how long? What have you especially enjoyed about them?



I have been working with the Tag Wrangling committee since I joined the OTW in 2019! No matter what other committees I join in the future, I would not leave tag wrangling. As a wrangler, I can embrace fannish energy directly everyday and wrangle tags that can be immediately helpful to users. This work reminds me of why I volunteer – because I love fandom culture and want to offer my help. In addition, the Tag Wrangling committee also has a most understanding and diverse atmosphere within the organization – considering it being the largest committee and taking up to half of all volunteers, that is really very impressive. My experiences with other committees, e.g., Support and Policy & Abuse, also come from my tag wrangling work as we communicate to respond to users’ feedback. I have learned a lot from other tag wranglers and I believe that my experience as a wrangler can help me approach the entire organization.

Where did you get most of the knowledge and preparation in order to know running for board is a good fit for you? Did you feel prepared enough by Board/elections? Do you personally believe that people with no concrete professional experience (such as college students) are apt to serve on the Board of Directors of a US non-profit?

We have internal documents that explain what the board’s work would be like, and there is also an open house organized by the Election committee months ahead of the election season to explain the election process and expectations for candidates. I decided to declare candidacy after I confirmed that my work would not conflict with election or board work. I also don’t consider being a Ph.D. candidate a disadvantage for me in the election. On one hand, I am experienced in giving guidance and facilitating communication from years of laboratory experiences and collaborating with fellow researchers and sponsor companies. My work as an engineer requires me to always look for new alternatives to solve problems; on the other hand, I have less inertia and professional biases which people who work for a long time in a one position tend to acquire. Since I find the most urgent organizational issues are structural ones, I believe that fresh eyes and energy are important to the organization.

What techniques do you use to manage pressure on yourself? How would you handle stepping up into a more visible and personally accountable position? Tell me about a time you had to manage a particularly heavy workload. How did you handle it?

2) Stepping up into a visible-to-Internet position is indeed a very fresh experience for me, and hopefully in a good way. I was warned about possible pressure from being talked about or being yelled at, which concerned me for a while until I concluded that, due to my personality, I am unlikely to be negatively affected by criticism. That doesn’t mean I would simply ignore those, but I tend to think more about the constructive part in negative comments and consider if it can help me to both enhance my capabilities and improve my self image.

Through my laboratory years, I have learned that I thrive in collaborative environments where I am being held accountable for the larger part of the work. I have delivered better and more efficient results when I am heading a team than when I am on my own or in a minor role.

1) I am also a person who would not feel anxiety from workload by nature. In fact I work more efficiently when very busy. This is partly because I thrive under pressure hence my working pace would not be negatively affected, and also because those piecemeal hours that I usually wasted doing nothing can now be put into actual work.

3) As a doctoral candidate, the busiest days come to me periodically before each academic conference. During such time I conclude possible mechanisms for the observed phenomenon and suggest potential improvement from engineering aspects. Meanwhile I discuss with collaborating companies and adjust my conference presentation according to feedback, as well as provide suggestions to junior students who are relatively new in attending conferences. Usually it lasts for a week, during which I would pause in dealing with non-urgent OTW tasks.

The Board is the nominal head of the OTW, which means that there is no Chair or other supervisor telling you what work to take on or what your priorities should be. Explain your comfort level with that kind of work and how you think you would handle that scenario. As a board member, how would you handle situations where you encounter an unfamiliar area, such as legal issues?

The Tag Wrangling committee I belong to has been very successful in establishing a sustainable relationship between chairs, supervisors and volunteers. I have been paying attention to how our chairs communicate with volunteers and announce decisions, and consider them a good example to learn from. For instance, volunteers can directly check the progress of tag wrangling tasks in discussions; this degree of transparency is very important to volunteers, especially when the discussion may last for a relatively long period.

I am prepared to step into a leadership role to allocate tasks and decide task priorities. I am also glad to meet qualified candidates who are familiar with many concerning aspects. We would have a good talk to get to know each other and find a way to support each other in board work. When encountering unfamiliar areas, I would not hesitate to discuss the issue with the subject experts we have in the organization. I trust our volunteers’ expertise and abilities wholeheartedly. Due to the organization’s rapid growth, I want to further support our volunteers by facilitating frequent recruitment for all committees.

Explain in your own words what “fiduciary duty” means for a US non-profit. Are you comfortable with that level of legal commitment? Does being on the Board of Directors of a US nonprofit pose any risk to you or your family in your country? Have you discussed this risk with your loved ones?

1) The financial duty a person is supposed to take when establishing a legal or moral relationship with another person or party.

2) Yes, I am aware of this level of legal commitment.

3) Personally I don’t feel at risk of being on the Board of directors of OTW.

4) Yes, I had such a talk.

How might the OTW better support fanworks and fan culture which is hosted in places other than AO3? Do you believe the organization has a responsibility to do so?

1) The Archive always supports external work imports – you can do so by “Post” – “Import Work”. Open Doors is also a great project to help preserve works that were originally posted in other archives than AO3. As much as OTW respects the diversity in fandom cultures and supports the right of fans to express themselves, it does not have authority over the entire Internet and cannot do anything to things not happening on its own platform.

2) I do believe that the organization has the responsibility to help preserve fanworks and support fan culture. Meanwhile the organization also needs the permission from fanwork creators and owners of other platforms to do so, which is what Open Doors pays particular attention to when helping importing archives.

Many of you mentioned large, exciting projects such as paid HR, DEI consultants, and new mandatory tags. If you encountered roadblocks for these plans, how would you ensure that you can still fill your campaign promises, and how would those new strategies be communicated to OTW members?

In my platform, I proposed a push for employment of an HR professional, to help mitigate burnout from our volunteers, and to allocate tasks more reasonably. Hiring an HR professional is a must-do for an organization in a size that we are currently in; my promise is to prioritize it as it has become urgent for the organization now. If I encounter roadblocks, such as opposition from chairs or inertia within the organization, I would listen to which particular part of the plan people are worried about and consider alternatives. I believe that new strategies and routes will be reported in future public board meetings before they are issued.

What are your thoughts on PAC and how to improve things there in response to the current controversy?

1) Overworking and understaffing. Whenever I hear from my colleagues in PAC, their workloads always sound to be overwhelming. Many of them feel defeated, if not burning out, given the workload. This leads to extremely low retention, then a vicious circle where the rest of PAC volunteers have to deal with more work on average. I believe it is crucially important for PAC to recruit and expand in order to improve this situation.

2) Not sufficiently supported by the Board and other committees. Starting from 2021 the Support committee has taken on some PAC tasks, and I believe this is only the first step to help our PAC volunteers. I will try to reduce the burden generated from future plans for PAC.

3) Lack of protection. Some other controversies that PAC is facing are results of controversies surrounding our TOS. I deeply believe in the organization’s mission of maximum inclusivity, a rule that PAC upholds when dealing with reports of potentially violating content. However, this makes PAC vulnerable in the face of potential attacks, and as we have seen in the past, CSAM and CSEM attacks. It is important to implement new tools to shield them from potential attacks.

What further steps would you do to foster a welcoming and safe environment for users and fans? Many people find the current process for volunteering with the OTW to be unclear or difficult; how would you like to change the current recruitment process to bring in more – and more diverse – volunteers? What would you propose the Archive to do to protect/support volunteers?

1) Recent events led to the consideration that harassment would appear in every corner of the internet wherever there is a space designed for communication, like the comment section in bookmark can also be used to harass fanfic writers and cannot be moderated by fanfic writers themselves. While the organization may notice similar phenomenon later than users do, if receiving a support ticket with suggestions of improvements, we will surely be happy to discuss the accessibility with PAC and AD&T, like turning blocked/muted users’ bookmarks into private bookmarks.

2) Organization wide, the diversity in volunteers is very high; committee wide, sometimes no. In fact, for public recruitment, when the chair of the committee decides it’s necessary, diversity would be added into requirements; also we have internal recruitment across the organization. So if a certain committee lacks diverse volunteers, I assume that compared to requesting change in the current recruitment process, it might be more helpful to suggest the chairs to require diversity in internal or external recruitment.

3) The Archive is only a project which aims at preserving fanworks, like a library preserves books. It is the organization (OTW) behind it who takes charge of everything, including running a foundation, maintaining the library and managing librarians. Ahead of the protection or support that volunteers deserve, our board, as representative of the organization, should show its respect to our volunteers in the first place. The board is supposed to listen to volunteers’ suggestions, analyzing which could be useful, instead of suspecting their attempts. Then we can move on to talk about what could be done to protect or to support volunteers.

Features & Content Policy

Would you be in favor to expand further features of the Archive to improve user experience? If so, what features do you think Ao3 needs to add or improve? What AO3 features would you prioritize to help people avoid what they don’t want to see?



1) The first project that I would like to focus on is the multilingual interface project listed on the org’s roadmap. I believe this is an important step to improve language diversity. Not only can the Archive better serve its purpose of preserving works written in different languages, but users will be much more willing to participate in OTW projects when they are in a language environment they are comfortable with. This project may take considerable time to be completed and I will keep an eye on it as long as I volunteer for OTW.

2) As a decade-long AO3 user and tag wrangler, I have noticed that our search function for some languages does not work very well. In general, for a language without spaces in the sentence, the search function regards each character (e.g., Hanzi, Kana, and Hangul) as a separate keyword, making it less functional than it should be. I hope this can be fixed in the foreseeable future.

3) We have a very expansive tag system to help people filter out fandoms, characters, relationships, or tropes they don’t want to see in a fanwork. We also recently enabled block and mute functions to make it easier to avoid specific users (which was very useful for me! Thanks to the AD & T committee). I am very interested in adding persistent tag filters into the Archive, which has proved to be very useful in my fandom experiences.

Do you support adding additional mandatory archive warnings (for example, warnings for incest and slavery), and do you think this is feasible?

1) I don’t have any strong opinions on adding major archive warnings. Our considerations on whether a warning can become a mandatory one often are first, how practical it is to enforce and second, whether it aligns with the AO3’s general policy to encourage people to label their works however they want. There might also be legal concerns about whether reading fanworks containing certain content is illegal in certain countries. Those discussions together would mean that it would take a very long time to actually make a new mandatory warning come true.

2) As a tag wrangler, though, I would like our users to be aware that Incest and Slavery have always been common tags and can be used to filter out works. It’s a much more convenient path, during the long-term discussions of adding major archive warnings.

What is your stance on AI scraping/learning from the Archive and AI produced works on OTW platforms?

Personally, I wouldn’t read fanfic or kudo fanart generated by AI technology. When it comes to OTW, however, things are much more complicated than my own preference.

1) On one hand, I am in strong agreement with our attitude against AI scraping because it is done without users’ permission; however, it’s well-known that there are several existing AI writing bots that have already included the Archive in their training databases regardless of our protest.

2) On the other hand, if OTW disallows AI works, it would be hard to actually execute such a ban, because we are not equipped with technology to precisely distinguish human writing from AI writing. Recent news even reports that most technologies that claim to “detect AI works” typically label English works written by non-native English speakers as AI generated text.

A temporary solution at this moment, in my opinion, is to ask the Tag Wrangling committee to canonize a common freeform tag like “AI-generated Fanwork” for people to filter out. I suggest a freeform tag instead of a major archive warning here because the latter takes a very long time to realize, and will pose challenges for PAC to enforce.

In your opinion, what would a sensible policy regarding ai-generated content on AO3 look like? How would you enforce this policy such that NO human fic writers are harmed in overzealous attempts to reign in ai-generated content, as seen on art platforms which attempted an ai ban? Do you think AI is something that PAC can accurately detect and regulate/restrict?

1) A sensible, or implementable temporary policy given our current capacity is to build a common No Fandom freeform tag (instead of a major Archive warning tag because the latter takes a long time to realize) like “AI-generated work” for people to filter out such content. When we have this done, we should promote it to encourage usage of the tag.

2 & 3) Given the rapidly developing technology, I think “banning” AI works is virtually impossible for a fiction platform to execute. Technology giants are now spending billions of dollars to study how to make AI think and write like humans (though this is not a very accurate or thorough description of what they are actually doing). The rapidly evolving AI technology will only make detecting and identifying harder for the Policy and Abuse Committee (PAC), as time goes by. It is impossible to train humans to identify AI works with a read-through, and tech that claims to “detect AI works” is also not reliable. Such attempts to regulate AI works would only be in vain.

How do you feel about AO3’s principle of maximum inclusivity of fanworks? Are you willing to uphold AO3’s commitment to protecting content that many consider controversial or problematic? Where do you personally think the line should be drawn with respect to AI, racism, etc? What are the candidates thoughts on content currently being hosted on the site, including the Archive level Minor warning, and how it relates to the sites availability in various countries?

1) I completely support the maximum inclusivity of fanworks.

2) Yes, as long as they are legal under US law.

3-a) Personally I don’t read any AI-generated works, but when it comes to the Archive, as it is impossible to precisely distinguish AI-generated from human-written, we can only accept their existence. A temporary solution at this moment is to make a “AI-generated Fanwork” common tag to help people filter them out.

3-b) We don’t pre-screen any content, including for racism and other controversial topics; we can’t censor the author’s writing intention either, whether such intention (clearly stated or not) is posted in the Archive or elsewhere. We will take action towards those who are openly hostile towards other people or groups of people. I think we could have a more flexible approach in identifying harassment (as in Content and Abuse Policy) to make the environment safer for all groups of users of the Archive.

4) I can’t speak for users from another country which recently banned AO3, but in the country I am more familiar with – the ban is not related to contents hosted on AO3. It’s not a result of a specific work, or a fandom, or a major or minor warning (I assume this refers to common freeform tag) in the Archive, but due to domestic considerations.

What measures will you take to better protect creators from harassment on Ao3? Would you implement methods to protect creators from harassment in Bookmarks? Eg. Creators can set “disallow/hide comments or tags on public bookmarks or when a user changes their private bookmarks with notes to public”. Or options to delete or respond to bookmarks?

I don’t think we would ever allow users to delete other users’ bookmarks. Allowing authors to respond to bookmarks sounds like a misuse of the bookmark function. I assume such proposals are motivated by unfriendly, if not harassing, comments or tags on bookmarks. In light of reducing harassment rather than suppressing reader to reader communication, it makes more sense if, once a user is blocked or muted by another user, all their bookmarks for the works posted by the user who blocked them will be set automatically to private for everyone. I think this would be an improvement on the block and mute functions that we already have, while not harming the intended functions of bookmarkers.

Preserving fan culture is a OTW mission, but when preserving & recording history, how do you think say Fanlore can acknowledge, warn or prevent replicating of harassment & hate speech? In your volunteer experience, what resources are available for volunteers & users on what to do when encountering such cases?

From my experience in reading and editing Wikipedia, as well as our Fanlore volunteers’ explanations:

1) Anyone with an account can write, edit, correct errors or add additional perspectives on Fanlore. I have witnessed editing wars very often on Wikipedia which is kind of inevitable due to its nature. In contrast to Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View policy, though, Fanlore has the Plural Point of View (PPoV) policy which states that personal experiences and interpretations are of interest and should be recorded. So criticisms towards certain fanworks or individual persons might be allowed according to the PPoV policy.

When encountering negative criticism, one of the solutions would be to make it possible for editors to add more warning labels to the page; they should also discuss in Talk pages which warnings would be useful. Fanlore staff tends to flag content problems instead of “fixing” them when they are personally unfamiliar with the topic of the content. Fanlore is a collaborative project and would work better when more editors join.

2) I rarely encounter such cases as a tag wrangler. However, I am aware that the resources should be a necessity for our volunteers and are currently insufficient. I would discuss with our experts and look for proper resources to better support our community.

How important do you think it is to focus on making sure the AO3 software continues to be developed and improved so other people can set up their own archives with their own content and conduct policies?

The OTW-Archive software is open source code, so we are glad to see it help more people in setting up their own archives. We are in support of fanworks preservation no matter which platform it happens on. However, the priority for our AD&T and Systems committees is always the Archive and other OTW projects, since this is what our members donate for and what we promise to them. In the future, when we have the structure and functions of the Archive optimized, have the defense against cyber attack enhanced, and our coders are eventually free from their mountain-high pile of tasks, we would be willing to provide more help to people in adapting our code, to make it easier to install it to a self-hosted archive.

Comment bots at AO3 are a growing problem. While some of the fixes for that are “better spamblockers,” would you be willing to promote something like OpenID to allow comments from people without AO3 accounts?

Comment spam has always been a concern on AO3 and previously, OpenID was indeed an available option to help users comment without logging in to their AO3 account. We removed this option some while ago, mostly because compared to the coding work we need to put in to maintain OpenID running, the actual users of this option are few. Such a function also was not reducing spam efficiently. While there is no perfect solution to the comment spam so far, I would always keep an eye on it and actively discuss with the AD & T committee on this issue.

Fandom cultures can vary significantly. How would you best reflect the specific fandom’s expectations in tag canonization and synning? May I please know if you support speeding up the conversion of large and small non-canonical tags into Canonical ones? Canonical tags make it easier to include or exclude works from search.

1) In most cases, active fandoms are wrangled by wranglers who are familiar with the canon and fanon. However, fannish is different among fans speaking different languages. For example in JoJo fandom, there is a very popular Chinese fanon as “Villain House” (Araki Sou, originated from Japanese fanon) which is relatively unfamiliar to English fans. Usually (and ideally), a wrangling team consists of wranglers who speak the languages that are frequently used in that specific fandom, so tags could be wrangled accurately and in time. A wrangling team could recruit internally for specific language speaking wranglers for help at any time.

2) I do support speeding up wrangling speed whenever it is possible. However, this is not decided by the chairs of the Tag Wrangling committee or by the Board of directors, but by the wrangling team of a certain fandom. If a fandom is slow on wrangling tags, it’s mostly because either the fandom is very small and currently not noticed by and assigned to any wranglers, or the fandom is large and so active that the wrangling team is struggling to keep up with tag generation speed.

Currently our expectation for assigned fandoms is that new tags should be wrangled within a month. Freeforms within a fandom, however, need to meet Rule of 3 (used by 3 different users) to be canonized, and will probably take longer to be noticed by wranglers after they reach RO3. If users think their fandom is slow on wrangling tags, they can submit a support ticket to request their tags to be wrangled. For unassigned fandoms, we have projects aimed at wrangling per users’ requests. For assigned and active fandoms, if the wrangling team asks for additional help in the workspace, there are always wranglers willing to offer help.

Recent Discussions

What’s the biggest problem currently facing the OTW? What is the priority for the Archive to do in general, and how would you see this happening?



1) Low trust among committees, including the Board. I believe that the Board’s policies should have priority over committee chairs because the Board is elected to reflect our members’ expectations. However, there should be an established system to hold disagreements or protests. As the system is now lacking, this leads to conflict that reduces trust and lowers the efficiency for necessary changes.

I would like to see a future Board of directors formed by seven (or more) volunteers from at least seven different committees; in that way one of them could always serve as a liaison with a certain committee’s work flow and help the Board negotiate with the committee chair. Rebuilding internal communication is the foundation of facilitating external transparency and earning trust back from our user base.

2) Unlike some of our other projects (Open Doors, Fanlore and TWC), the Archive itself is supported by multiple committees, hence the policies for this specific project can be directly decided by the Board.

In my opinion, the priority at the moment should be updating our Terms of Service as well as providing support to all committees to address the low trust issues. Every recent controversy regarding the OTW indicates some necessary modification to the ToS.

I would support our PAC committee in recruitment and task assignment, as well as seeking out tools that can better help their work. I will also discuss with fellow Board members, chairs of related committees and experts, in order to revise our ToS as soon as possible.

Would you be in favor of creating a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee? Why or why not?

To my knowledge, there was a similar attempt. The Internationalization & Outreach committee was established in 2010 and disbanded in around 2016, following the reform of the Board during the 2015 election. I am, in fact, not in favor of the creation of a DEI committee. This would not work unless the majority of this committee consists of international or minority volunteers. On the other hand, compared to a new committee that does not have more power than the Board does, I am more convinced by a Board with minority members occupying the majority. I believe this is only the first step we should take on the organization level to address diversity issues.

The cost of becoming a member/voting in elections is prohibitive for many users, particularly disabled, international and POC ones. Do you have any ideas about how this could be improved to make the otw more inclusive and less privileged?

Answering from a Mainland Chinese user’ POV: for most of us, it is the limited choices of payment methods that makes it particularly challenging for us to donate and become a member. Credit cards and debit cards issued by Chinese banks are not allowed to top-up Paypal in dollars, as a result of China’s foreign currency exchange control. Also, very few of our users from mainland China own a Mastercard or VISA card as banks have strict conditions upon issuing international credit cards. I have limited experience in finance, so I would like to talk with relevant committees to explore the possibility of adding different payment methods, such as UnionPay or Alipay, for donation purposes.

Our projects should be made more accessible to more users, which should take the donation and voting process into consideration (e.g., CAPTCHA audio). In the future, we may also talk about lowering the requirement of a 10 dollar donation.

Upon receiving donations of disabled, international and minority members, I hope the organization could actually put the money towards resolving problems for them, e.g., establish a more accessible interface. I am also looking forward to seeing future candidates who come up with related concerns be more likely to be elected, and push the Board to improve the environment within the organization.

What challenges do you see presented to the OTW by its growing international userbase and volunteer pool, and how do you plan to address them? English dominance within OTW has been a longstanding topic of discussion. What actions have you taken, or do you plan to take in the future, to make OTW a more welcoming and accessible space for volunteers and users who do not speak English as their primary language?

1) Regional accessibility has become an unignorable issue in recent years. Users from the two countries who banned the Archive have together contributed 7.7% of total works we host. Although the organization cannot recover the accessibility, I do think we can at least make the Archive more welcoming to international users, by facilitating the multilingual interface. We should also keep recruiting international volunteers to ensure every user’s requests are handled properly. When recruiting, we should pay particular attention to confirm that volunteers wouldn’t have safety concerns when accessing our projects.

2-a) I have talked about it in my platform and last Q&A set before, and will keep talking about it as long as I volunteer here until it eventually comes true – that the multilingual interface is necessary for our projects. Knowing that it might take a great amount of time and resources with collaboration between committees to achieve this goal, I would provide what I can do to support them, pushing for changes and continuing to offer help to all our users until the goal comes true.

2-b) In the Tag Wrangling committee, when recruiting for speakers for a specific language, we always have mentors who speak that language so they can help the new wranglers to get familiar with their training quickly. I think this mentor system will be also helpful for most of the other committees in welcoming EFL volunteers.

Recently, we’ve seen disagreements about how the Legal team handled various problems. How will you clarify to everyone what Legal’s role is, and make sure their actions are within that scope and are documented so their decisions can be reviewed?

Our Legal team has always been very important for the entire OTW. As the very first committee established within OTW, they have provided indispensable support to the organization as well as to fandoms, especially in intellectual property right protection and non-profit organization running. However, I do think our Legal team should have a periodic internal assessment to consider recruiting more members. New members with expertise in various areas would bring in more comprehensive views in aspects with the rapid growth, like user base, cyber attack and technology innovation. As much as I believe that Legal’s decisions are well documented internally, I also want to request more communication from them with our users, through chats, open Q & A sessions or other approaches.

Do you believe there should be any restrictions on people with a history of harassment running for Board? Do you believe there should be any restrictions on people with a history of harassment becoming committee chairs?

I don’t have a strong opinion on such restrictions, considering the difficulty of tracing one’s previous behavior in fandom. I think compared to a Board candidate’s history of harassment, it is the misconduct that happened during one’s term as Board member or committee chair that should be paid particular attention to. If we decide to apply such restrictions in the future, I think it would be more about prevention of misconduct.

1) Changes in candidate eligibility requirements are decided by Legal, Election and a couple of other committee chairs; it also needs a vote from the Board to take effect. However, once elected, a Board member cannot be impeached through violating Code of Conduct. If a certain Board member misbehaves, there is nothing others can do but wait for that Board member’s term to end. I would like to discuss with our Legal and related committees about the possibility of establishing an impeachment mechanism that could be launched by our voting members.

2) The committee chairs are appointed within their committee; the qualifications for a chair are also committee-dependent. Per current policies, if a chair violates Code of Conduct, (e.g., violence, harassment and discrimination), volunteers may complain. Processing would be applied regarding how a chair misbehaved.

A long-standing issue in the OTW is that chairs often prefer to avoid conflict and never discipline their volunteers. Do you have any ideas for how to solve this issue?

The biggest issue I see on some of our chairs is excusing themselves from responsibility. Some chairs act so because they are genuinely clueless about their position; some others are very aware that they are overstepping to another committee, but still take the liberty and disappear from workspace when being called out to take responsibility.

New chairs are appointed by current chairs of the committee – I think this appointment process should remain as it is. In addition, we also started to actively recruit chair track volunteers who are willing to take the responsibility in the future as the chair of a committee. However, there should be mechanisms that could help correct their behavior when they make mistakes outside or inside their committee. If we have the Board consist of volunteers from as many committees as possible, then we could always have a Board member as liaison to a certain committee, and discuss how to repair the damage caused by chairs.

What specific actions would you have the Board take to 1) fulfill its commitments made in 2020 to reduce racism on AO3 and across the OTW and 2) continue to expand anti-racist efforts in the OTW? How will you support Black fans, Indigenous fans, and fans of color in feeling welcome on the Archive of Our Own and in avoiding harassment? How do you feel about #EndRacismInTheOTW?

4) I really appreciate the protest methods chosen by this movement: those showed a clear attitude towards OTW decision makers while not burdening common volunteers. For example, they chose to add the slogan into work titles and summaries instead of tags, which both makes it searchable by using the slogan and also does not increase work amount for tag wranglers. In the future, if the treatment towards us volunteers and users with different cultural backgrounds has not improved, these approaches would be very useful precedents.

2 & 3) Due to the nature of AO3 as a fiction platform, the racial harassment towards other users is not only based on races but also based on languages. I am going to request a more flexible definition of harassment in our Term of Service, depending on racial terms not only in American English but also in other commonly and uncommonly used languages. I will also ensure the diversity and volunteers volume in our PAC committee to have each report resolved properly and in time. In addition, I want to publicize the comment moderation functions we currently have.

1) The Board mainly promised three things in 2020: one of them, to give users more control over their own works’ comment section and block/mute to other users, has come true but surely could be optimized in the future. The other two goals, reviewing warnings and ToS, and supporting our PAC committee, are either paused or failed hard. First of all, we need someone who works for or is very familiar with PAC to be on the Board, to help the PAC out of their current vicious circle between too many tasks and too few volunteers. With our PAC running efficiently, we will continue to review our Term of Service and then execute our up-to-date ToS to reduce racial harassment.

In my experience, problems in institutions can often be traced back to pockets of stagnation, where people who are uninterested in general change have become calcified in a given organization. How would you approach trying to address that kind of organizational stagnation?

Inertia and stagnation have always been a problem for the organization. I believe a structural change is necessary to combat such stagnation in the long-term. I propose setting up more specific roles within the organization: not only do we need chairs and chair track volunteers, but we should also set up roles on the more administrative side to make sure interested individuals who have the time and energy can tackle tasks that are necessary but exhausting.

Board Work II

What’s the main type of Board work you want to do, concretely?



I am most interested in coordinating goals with committees and workgroups, for I believe that I could and should help in facilitating effective internal communication as soon as possible. I would be willing to reach out to committees and ask for their input or opinions on things. I believe by doing so, it would encourage the committees to do likewise. I would also like to make more use of asynchronous chat instead of live chats because timezone is difficult to manage and according to my experience as tag wrangler in a big team, asynchronous chat is not less efficient in organizing discussion.

Is the current Board’s collective capacity sufficient? Their multi-year delay to update on a priority issue indicates otherwise. Would you support adding seats or administrative staff to the board? What would allow individual directors contribute more (and more effectively) to the organization?

Previously, we had nine members on the Board. I think the number was lowered because it seemed difficult to get enough candidates each year. In the ideal case, more seats on the Board should improve diversity and function and I absolutely support it.

However, we are still facing challenges in getting enough candidates each year. Despite their wish to help the organization to change, volunteers are hesitant to run for the Board because the working environment for a Board member is unsustainable. The low efficiency in communication between the Board and committees and individual volunteers also leads to low trust internally.

We need to solve the trust issue about the Board and make a healthier environment before next election season to expect more participation from our volunteers. Hopefully within two or three years we could collect enough candidates to consider enlarging the Board’s volume again.

The OTW has a history of distrusting its Board of Directors (most notably demonstrated in the 2015 elections). What steps do you think the Board could take to regain trust, not just with internal volunteers, but also with the broader community of fandom?

The lack of trust is a result of lacking transparency, a serious and long-standing issue within the organization. The lack of communication from the Board with the volunteers and with the user base has deepened this situation, for instance, late replies (or no reply at all) to emails from users to the Board.

As representatives of the organization, the Board is responsible for reporting on the progress of projects to our users, therefore the public meeting should be promoted more. I also suggest that we separate Q&A sessions from public meetings and hold the Q&A sessions more frequently. As members of the Board, we should listen to feedback from volunteers for they are directly influenced by the decisions the Board makes. I propose that for each question received, the Board will provide a general timeline as to when an answer will be given.

As a Board member, would you support contracting external subject matter experts to perform an institutional audit, including potentially developing a revamped org chart, with the goal of strengthening internal efficiency and organizational resilience? If not, how would you pursue those goals?

In my opinion, we are now in desperate need of help from contracted experts. The organization’s volume and complexity are far beyond its self-adaptation capability. For diversity issues, we are actively researching for a DEI consultant with help from an internal DCRO. For burn-out issues, we are also in the process of researching HR professionals. I expect the HR expert to help overburdened committees in task allocation. These examples are what we are currently working on, but I would support reaching out to other types of experts as well. During my Board term I hope to reach out to committees to see what other experts could aid them or the wider organization in our work.

Serving on the Board of Directors means you will have to work with all committee chairs. How do you plan to handle situations where your priorities do not align with the priorities of committee chairs?

When the priorities of the Board conflict with that of the chairs, with respect to each other’s work, we should sit down for a discussion. I would listen to the chairs’ concern and carefully specify the points in a task that induce conflict. When we have a Board member who works for that committee, I would suggest that member to be liaison between the Board and the committee so both chairs and the Board could better understand each other’s situation.

How would you handle conflict – with volunteers, users, other board members, the OTW’s aims? Are you good at conflict resolution? Especially understanding people’s viewpoints in a text discussion, and explaining and standing up for your own without making stuff blow up. What strategies do you use in those situations?

When handling a conflict, if there is a point in someone else’s view that I am not certain about, I would carefully ask them to make it clear so that I don’t mistake their meaning or motivation. When stating my own opinion, I usually number them so we could easily narrow the discussion on more specific topics if disagreement happens. This helps me a lot in negotiation. I believe that with time serving in the Board I would become more experienced in conflict resolution, yet at the moment, it is one of many things I would like to learn from my colleagues who are better at it.

Considering the evidence that has been brought to light of past board misconduct, if elected, what would you do to make sure such egregious misuse of power cannot be repeated?

As I have discussed in my last Q&A set: as long as the US laws about non-profit organization allow for it, we should really establish an impeachment mechanism that could be launched by our common volunteers. Right now, a Board member cannot be impeached by volunteers even if they violate the Code of Conduct .If a certain Board member misbehaves, there is little that other volunteers can do to seek recourse but wait for that Board member’s term to end. I would like to discuss with our Legal and related committees about the possibility of establishing such an impeachment mechanism as soon as possible.

What would you do to improve transparency of the Board’s actions and processes so that fans outside the org know what the OTW is doing? Board meetings are an hour long, held just four times a year, and frequently end without sufficient time to answer questions. Would you be in favor of holding meetings more frequently, making them longer, or holding special Town Hall type sessions where the focus is on answering questions?

I think we should separate the Q&A session from the public Board meeting. A Board meeting requires attendance of all or most Board members because some processes need a vote, e.g., approval of an annual plan from the Strategic Planning committee. Because Board members are located all over the world, arranging these full-roster Board meetings is challenging due to the various timezones and holding them more frequently is likely to make that harder, especially if the number of Board members is increased. However, I do think we could arrange regular Q&A sessions with only two or three Board members. By doing so, questions could be answered more often and in time. Board could also give regular reports on project progress such as in the monthly newsletter or in the Q&A sessions. Since some popular social platforms are falling apart recently (and likely will not be miraculously saved), I also think we should promote a different method of publicly collecting users’ feedback and sharing updates to our user base.

How to you plan to improve internal org communications so that every volunteer has a chance to be heard, rather than just the loudest voices? For example, do you have plans to do surveys or focus groups of among volunteers?

At the moment I don’t think volunteers’ “chance to be heard” by decision makers is a communication issue anymore; a serious problem we are facing is that decision makers pretend they don’t hear anything, selectively respond to things they do want to hear, or retaliate against those who say things they don’t want to hear. Therefore I propose that for each and every feedback we receive, the Board will provide a general timeline as to how soon a response will be given. This is a different problem from mere issues with communication.

Survey is indeed a good approach, in a normal situation. When a project might involve volunteers from multiple committees or volunteers with specific skill sets, e.g., speakers of a certain language, it is a very considerate step we should definitely take.

Name another candidate you are looking forward to working with and describe how you believe your skills or experiences will complement each other.

I do want to say how excited I am to work with all the wonderful candidates this year, but if I have to name one, Anh! I didn’t know her until the election season began, and I regretted that we didn’t meet earlier. We need her opinions on AI works because she is an artist and she is one of those who is heavily affected by AI technologies, therefore she should have deeper consideration on this topic than many of us. She speaks multiple languages and has shown her understanding of diversity, and I believe her ideas and cultural background will bring a new and much needed perspective on diversity. I’m also glad that she is from a different committee from me, because together we could bring views from different aspects to the Board and provide better communication with different committees.

Candidate Q&A Chat

Here's our first question of the chat: It's become apparent that there are missing checks and balances within the OTW to hold those in leadership positions accountable for misconduct. Should you be elected, what first steps would you take to cover these gaps?

Qiao: I think for the first step, we should talk to stakeholders and assess the situation. With realization of the missing stairs, we will work with the VolCom Committee, Legal Committee and related committees and experts to decide on the priority for each task.
Before starting to work on them, we should also provide a timeline for each investigation in order to track the tasks.

Thank you all!
This question is for Jennifer and Qiao, as Zixin already answered this question in Chat 1: There is a perennial problem with volunteer burnout, retention, and recruitment across many committees of the OTW. What steps, if any, do you think board can take to aid committees with ensuring that volunteers are supported appropriately?

Qiao: In addition to the feedback venues that we already have in the org, I think the Board should actively reach out to committees and volunteers and ask for their input and opinions. By doing so, I believe taking the initiative to reach out will in turn encourage the committees to do the same.
We are also in the process of researching HR professionals. I expect the HR expert to help mitigate burnout from too many tasks for our volunteers, and to allocate tasks more reasonably as well as seeing progress make more consistently.

Thank you! Our next question is for all candidates. One of the issues that the OTW has historically faced is a lack of people willing to step into leadership roles such as Chairs and Board. Do you have any thoughts about how to either encourage more people to take on those roles or make those roles less scary to volunteer for?

Qiao: Same as other volunteers, the chairs are also facing burnout issues. For common volunteers, chairs and the Board should provide support for them to in task allocation; for chairs, the Board should also consider how to lifting burden for them. We could achieve so by creating more leadership roles, and delegating admin tasks to a group of people rather than letting only one or two people be solely responsible for them. We are also working on recruiting specific chair tracking volunteers.
For the Board, I think the biggest challenge in recruiting people in this position is the low trust between the Board and volunteers and user base. The lack of trust is a result of lacking transparency, a serious and long-standing issue within the organization. I have discussed about how to deal with such issue in my Q&A 4 (https://elections.transformativeworks.org/qiao-cs-2023-qa-board-work-ii/).

Thank you for all of your answers! Our next question is about siloing.
OTW volunteers often point to "silo'ing" (aka a relative isolation between one another) of the org's committees as a pervasive issue. What do you think could be done to counteract this, improve communication and relations between parts of the OTW, or the general knowledge of how the various committees and projects work?

Qiao: In our current work flow, I have to admit that for certain committees, volunteers have little opportunity to work or collaborate with other committees. In our workspace there are many channels loosely related to org work or not at all, where we could have discussions or casual talk with other volunteers without interrupting org work. Our internal documentation also allows volunteers to learn about other committee's organization and work flow. I think it's important that we encourage people to ask questions about other committees when they are curious about (It's also a good way for attracting attention in internal recruitment!)

Thank you for your answers! Our next question related to Board Director hiatuses. How would you (all) come up with a hiatus procedure for board members that balances their personal needs with their responsibilities to voters?

Qiao: I think we should include the following requirements in a hiatus procedure:
1. Retain a minimum members (like 5 out of 7 members, or 7 out of 9)
2. Return for crucial votes
3. Provide estimation of hiatus duration
If an active member's request of hiatus will cause deficiency of (1), they should discuss with members who are already in hiatus that if they can both change the hiatus duration at some degree to help retain the minimum in active members.

Thanks you all! That was a tough question. On a lighter note, for our final question in this chat, a member of the audience channel would like to know, what's the most interesting or surprising thing you have learned about the org during this election campaign?

Qiao: English writing skills in formal document 🙏 which is indeed something I rarely touched in my daily life, since in engineering the graphs (with simple and proper captions) are more universal than textual description. During the election season, however, the importance of lingua franca was clearly pointed out, which had me realize that in this international organization and our multilingual projects, it's the importance of communication not only in languages but also in mutual respect that should be paid attention to. I appreciate everyone who has offered help in improving my English, and I would like to give back by facilitating the communication we all deserve.

Let's get started with our first question(s) - one for each candidate:

For Qiao, (if it's allowed to ask this so both can have questions), I borrowed from a question in chat 1 that Kathryn S has already answered: How would you improve disciplinary practices to ensure they are working to prevent discrimination not reinforce it?

Qiao: I think we should have a neutral group of people dedicated to investigation of discrimination in the org. We should have a timeline of periodic investigation and make sure that investigation reports are well documented and feedbacked to the Board on time. We also expect our DEI consultant to provide professional opinions and firm help on the above tasks.

There have recently been some concerns raised about certain committees having more control/influence than others, especially in regards to Legal and PAC, & whether this is appropriate. What do you make of these criticisms, & what solutions do you see to these tensions between different parts of the org?

Qiao: I think it's kind of inevitable that certain committees would be more influential than others in the org, due to the duty of committees. In addition to that, I have also worried about influence from the Board members' belonging committees on decision making, especially when this year seems to be the very first time that we have multiple candidates and Board members from the Tag Wrangling committee, which is also my committee and the largest committee in the org.

I would like to enhance communications between committees and the Board to ensure that voices from all aspects could be heard and opinions could be well considered.

Thank you both for the thoughtful answers.

Here's one for each of you:

For Qiao: In your Q&As, you've mentioned that in "the Tag Wrangling committee, when recruiting for speakers for a specific language, we always have mentors who speak that language..." Does Tag Wrangling have training documents translated to other languages? What are your thoughts for how OTW can better support EAL volunteers with regards to training?

Qiao: At the moment, we don't have training documents translated into other languages. Previously, I have heard from our EFL new wranglers that they found the training docs to be too long to memorize necessary points. While I think our training docs are well written and very careful in giving trainees guide, I do believe that having docs translated in trainees' first language would be helpful when they just started the training process. We could do so by having a group of translators dedicated to translate internal documents.
The Tag Wrangling committee possesses most members in the org now, taking up half of the population and are very abundant in different language speakers. Therefore we established mentor system in other languages the earliest in the org. Yet I think with translators' help, other committees could also provide more supports towards new EFL volunteers by the mentor system or translated traning docs.

Thank you both!

Here's the next question, for both of you: What ideas do you have on better promoting collaboration across committees in a systemic, robust way that do not solely rely on interpersonal friendships among volunteers, especially for committees that are not typically active on social tools, like Legal?

Qiao: Some of our committees that don't frequently appear in workspace could always be contacted with emails. Yet, I also found that may not be the most effective way for our volunteers to communicate with them, especially when there is a tensive concern regarding certain topic going around internally.
I would like to suggest every of our committes to have a public channel in the workspace. If a committee is usually off from social tools, then they should schedule periodic Town Hall type Q&A session in their public channel.

For the next question: Are there any ideas that other candidates have proposed, or issues that they have raised during the elections cycle that you are particularly interested in? Or, what have you found most interesting while talking with other candidates during the elections cycle?

Qiao: I did notice that the other two EFL candidates have both come with concerns regarding making our projects more accessible to EFL users as I have. The other two candidates (that I didn't know before the election) also discussed about enhancing communication with user base. I am really impressed that all of the candidates pay attention to the communication issues and come up consideration on how to improve it. I believe that with such united determination, the severe communication issue we are now facing to could be solved in near future.

Our next (and possibly final? We're running close to time) question is: What would you consider to be a successful first year as Board member? I.e. at the end of the year, how would the OTW have changed in ways you considered to be positive?

Qiao: In the very first month on Board, I think we would be getting familiar with all committees. During the process we will work out a plan for stable and effective communication with the committees.
Upon our annual strategic plan, we should be getting in touch with our potential EDI consultant and HR professional within next months. They would help in solving the diversity and discrimination issues as well as burn-out issues.
We will report the progress of ongoing tasks periodically in Q&A sessions to public. By the end of first year, I expect improved internal and public communications, respect between committees and between volunteers and higher retention rate.