synonymous

As cited from comments on chestnut_pod's post:

ellen_fremedon

1.) The org at the time had an abundance of volunteers but needed money for startup costs, and we needed to encourage people to give it. This reason no longer applies; a sweat equity membership option would probably not meaningfully effect fundraising at this point.

2.) Because we needed money, we had to offer a money-based way of gaining membership--meaning that any hours-based membership would have been in addition to, not instead of, paid membership. This effectively sets a wage on volunteer work-- and a very low one, if we were to keep membership as low as possible. This is something which has a known depressing effect on volunteering--people are willing to do a lot more work for no pay than for a very small amount of pay. This reason still applies, but it's not a deal-breaker and there can be ways around it.

3.) Because the org was still brand new, we didn't have any good idea how much volunteer work there would be, in what areas, and how much a typical volunteer would end up doing. We didn't have the data we would have needed to set a reasonable threshold for a number of hours to confer membership.

4.) The membership rolls of a nonprofit organization aren't public information but they are discoverable. They can be subpoenaed and they can be hacked. And unlike volunteer rolls or donor rolls, they are supposed to be a record of people's legal identities.

We were absolutely opposed to collecting or keeping any records that would ever connect a person's wallet name, AO3 account name, or volunteer handle. We were committed to preserving user, member, and volunteer privacy as completely as possible, and we decided, in conjunction with other committees, that any membership option which allowed the AO3 to correlate any two of those was a non-starter. If the org doesn't collect that information, it can't reveal it. (The mechanism for verifying a volunteer's identity so they can run for the Board, if they've been volunteering under a pseud, goes through personal communications (or at least used to go through?) so that the only records in the org's own possession are that so-and-so vouched for so-and-so's eligibility.)

This reason is still fully in effect, and even in the absence of the others, it would have killed sweat equity. The only way to offer sweat equity membership without requiring the collection of data that the org was 100% committed to not collecting would have been to make it the only membership option (so, no way to pay for membership if you couldn't make your hours requirement or if there simply wasn't work for you to do), AND to require volunteers to use their legal names. We didn't want to do either of those; but any other option would have opened the org to connecting volunteer X to paid member Y somewhere in their records.

tl;dr, making membership paid-only wasn't a great option but it was the only one that didn't require a compromise on privacy considerations that the org was unwilling to compromise on as a matter of principle.

I am really disturbed that this apparently has trickled down into org culture as "tracking volunteer hours bad," instead of "tracking volunteer hours still won't open to the door to volunteer membership for unrelated privacy reasons."

xparrot

I was involved pretty high up in OTW for several years, almost 10 years ago now; I've barely participated since. So I don't know how much what I observed at the time still holds true now -- I would be really curious to compare to other volunteers' experience. However, I will say that from what things looked like then, I could've easily predicted all these current issues, so I have reason to believe the problems persisted.

Basically, I believe the primary reason most of the anti-racist measures promised three years ago haven't been implemented isn't due to racism, or a lack of dedication to anti-racism, but rather for the same reason that the OTW has failed to implement many, many other things it's promised over the years: because of institutional dysfunctionalism.

However, your diagnosis of the cause of that dysfunctionalism doesn't quite match with my own experience, and therefore I'm not convinced of the solution you present. But it could be just that I'm not following everything?

"However, horizontal leadership and direct democracy fail, and fail hard, when anything resembling size comes into play. It is, in fact, undemocratic not to have strong, clear, predictable structures for leadership, decision-making, and representation."

I may be misunderstanding, but the OTW has never been a horizontal direct democracy, or at least not since really early on. It's had a clear hierarchy from at least the time I signed on in 2009:

basic volunteers under
committee staff/supervisors under
committee leads/chairs under
Board

This terminology gets a little confusing because all of these people are volunteers, there's no paid workers; but this was the chain of command. And in my experience, the volunteers (at all levels) generally followed this structure. The staff made rules and guidelines that the volunteers followed; the chairs guided the staff and made the calls when there wasn't consensus, and passed the decisions that went beyond the committee's purview onto Board. Basic volunteers of course could talk to staff and chairs and present their opinions (and still can; volunteers are talking to Board right now in the internal OTW channels about these anti-racism efforts), but it wasn't rule by consensus but rather by specific, designated decision-makers. At least, that was how it worked on my committee and the ones I interacted with.

It's true that staff and chairs were not elected positions. But -- again, this was only my personal experience in one committee, and from what I saw in the other committees I interacted with -- this wasn't because a few people were monopolizing the power; it was because there were few people who wanted the jobs. There weren't volunteers who wanted to be staff, or wanted to be chairs, but were barred access; the greater problem was finding anyone who was willing to be chairs, because these were difficult, thankless admin jobs that required more commitment than the couple hours a week that most volunteers were providing. People who wanted to and had the availability to be in more influential positions could "rise in the ranks" quickly, from basic volunteer to chair in a couple of years, because there were power vacuums. But most volunteers didn't want to.

I think this was, in part, because the volunteer jobs and the management jobs are quite different, and wanting to do one does not predicate wanting to do the other. E.g. the job of wrangling tags is quite fun for a lot of people, while the job of wrangling the wranglers is less fun (i>especially for the type of geeky rule-focused person who is likely to enjoy tag wrangling.)

I suspect this issue is worse for the OTW overall than for a labor union: in a union, people are fighting for their livelihood and their families; they come ready to put in the hard work. While the OTW is a fan organization; people come for community, and fandom -- and fandom is what we do for fun. Most people volunteering for the OTW are dedicated and want to serve their fellow fans, but they are also expecting/wanting to enjoy the experience, in a way they maybe wouldn't be in a union? And if they don't enjoy it, or if their life outside changes such that volunteering becomes more difficult, they're more likely to just leave, as the work they're doing isn't anything they actually need.

And as the OTW gets larger and more out of control, the leadership positions become that much more onerous and unwanted. And as you say they're calcifying, but it tends not to be because of "charismatic/forceful/bad faith" people clinging to power, but because the people stuck in those positions don't have time to train a successor, or document the vital procedures they do, because they're too busy just trying to get those procedures done. And they may be burned out and not in touch and would love to be replaced, but don't know how to get out of it without leaving many people in the lurch (...I may be projecting a lot. But that was my personal experience, and I don't think I was completely unique.)

Which is all to say, I think you could arrange democratically elected committee chairs pretty easily within the existing structure of the OTW (some committees, like Wrangling, already have committee-wide voting procedures in place for deciding on guidelines that could also be used for voting on chairs, and those arrangements could be applied to other committees) and I think it would be a good idea overall for all the reasons you give about the value of democracy -- but I'm not convinced it would change much about the OTW's present state, if no one was running for the positions anyway.

I think the greater problem that needs to be solved for, across the OTW, is that the decision-making and the administration jobs are completely combined, and often interfere with each other.

Nowhere is this clearer than with Board. A lot of the worst dysfunctionality of the OTW is Board. The individual committees do their jobs pretty well, carrying out the basic ongoing functions of the OTW. But when it comes to doing something new, or setting the course of the OTW overall, that's Board's job.

As you pointed out, a major problem with the OTW is that there isn't a single decision-maker. Except by the structure of the OTW, there should be; that's what Board is. The buck should stop there. Board has the final authority to make decisions (and in my experience the chairs and committees will agree to them)...and it does make them. Eventually. Sometimes. Frustratingly slowly and often without communicating sufficiently with the committees with the actual knowledge, so Board will make promises that can't be easily followed up. Or internally they won't make a decision at all and a committee chair is left holding the bag without the authority to enact policy one way or another.

As far as I can tell -- and this is where I am going out on a limb, because I was never involved with Board directly and only can go on what I observed from within -- the reason Board is so slow and confused to act is because it has way, way too much to do. Half a dozen people overseeing 20-odd committees with 900 volunteers is pretty untenable without a lot of administrative support.

At least when I was active in the OTW, all my communications with Board were directly to the Board member assigned to my committee. Which was barely functional then -- my emails got delayed responses, if they got replies at all -- and I have no idea how it can possibly work now, when the OTW is about 4 times the size.

It's my semi-informed opinion that if Board had a full-time executive assistant to handle communications and scheduling, and Board's members could actually focus on the work of making decisions and carrying out policy, that would clear up some of the worst dysfunction of the OTW almost immediately.

Likewise, if there was more administrative support throughout the OTW, it would clear the way for more active participation of all volunteers in decision-making. And if the roles of committee chair offered some authority without also requiring a crushing amount of administrative labor, there would be more eagerness and ability for volunteers to take them on.

The problem is that I'm really not sure how many paid positions the OTW's budget allows for? I don't have sufficient information here. While I think it's easy to assume the OTW has plenty of money due to the size of its donation drives -- according to most tech people I've talked to, AO3 runs on a shoestring budget so small for the size of the site that it's either a miracle or witchcraft that it stays online at all. So hiring any full-time employees, as opposed to single-time consultants, might not be feasible? But I don't know.

Likewise, budget affects the number of volunteers. The OTW would do much better to have many more volunteers -- some of the problems re: not having sufficient people willing and able to take leadership positions could be solved just by having a much large volunteer pool to pull from. There are a lot of activated and engaged people now who would probably be willing, if they could just easily sign up. Except volunteers aren't free labor, even if they're giving their labor for free. Putting aside the time needed to onboard volunteers, as an online organization, the OTW has to provide tools to its volunteers for access (e.g. dedicated email accounts), and those tools cost money. Doubling the number of volunteers doubles (or at least increases) the budget, and again, I'm not sure if the OTW can afford it.

--whew, anyway. That's my 2 cents (or $6 and change). I wish I had clearer solutions. But I am really encouraged that you've started such an active conversation on this! Not least of which because some of the people suffering the most under the OTW's dysfunctional structure are the volunteers in it, and they deserve better. And if the OTW functioned better, then it could actually possibly carry out some of the many promises it's made (a few, at least. I think the other thing Board desperately needs is to learn how to say "no" or at least "not right now" -- after administration, lack of prioritization is the other biggest problem the OTW has.)

As cited from FFA:

Support cannot hide works (reversible) but they can delete them (not reversible).

I feel like I'm just telling ghost stories at this point, but I shoild mention that it used to be worse. We didn't get admin roles until 2018-ish? Before that, if you had an admin account, you had access to ALL of admin, not just what you conceivably needed to do your job. Now it's divided into roles, with each committee only getting whatever roles they need, not blanket access.

That "don't talk to the volunteer, talk to their supervisor thing" is still around, btw. Talking about a project to someone outside your committee could get interpreted as you trying to assign work to them or otherwise step on another committee's turf.

Chatting about non-org stuff in the personal channels was fine. Popping into another committee's channel and asking "do you guys have a procedure for this?" or "is X something you have the ability to do?" was asking for trouble, unless it was cleared by chairs ahead of time.

Tbf I don't know if EVERY committee worked that way, but I did see several that was both siloed and very protective of their silo.

...

Here's an example I ran into:

PAC was talking about one of the spam-prevention mechanisms on AO3. I don't remember which one, exactly, but it was a rate-limiter. The site let you do something X times in a minute, and we were still getting spammed so we wondered if it could be turned down to Y times in a minute. But we didn't know if that was possible, or if it would be a bit pain in the ass to change. If it was a lot of trouble to change, we would try to come up with a different way to handle it instead of increasing ADT's workload.

I hopped over to the ADT handle and asked something along they lines of, "Hey, is [Setting] hardcoded or otherwise a big deal to change? Or is it just a switch you can flip? If PAC asked to change it from X to Y, would that be a lot of effort or really quick? We're trying to find out if that's a realistic solution to a problem we're having."

And for some reason known only to himself and god, one of the ADT people decided to answer my question by going and changing it to the example of Y that I used in my question. So I guess it was a really easy change! But we hadn't even settled on the value of Y we wanted, and there was no reasonable way to interpret my question as an official request from PAC to ADT to alter the site. In plain English, which is the first language of both myself and that ADT volunteer, I was asking for information, not action.

It turned out turning the setting to Y did help PAC! But the ADT chairs yelled at my PAC chairs for me speaking out of turn and telling his committee what to do, and my chairs didn't get on my case, but did reiterate to PAC that all requests for other committees should be made through PAC chairs who would talk to the other chairs. I can't blame them for not wanting to get yelled at by other chairs, but what a stupid situation to begin with.

azarias

There was someone a few years ago who kept getting into arguments with others all over our channels, work and social both, and snapping at people to "kill yourself," "go jump off a bridge" and whatnot, as if that's a remotely acceptable comeback. Not only did nothing happen despite various complaints, but she just became Support chair a few months ago.

'walk into traffic' was also on their repertoire, wasn't it. A peach of a person.

When the hell was [Paula 1 2] telling people to off themselves? She is definitely thoughtlessly rude (I remember her getting slapped down for refusing to let go of that stupid ~boobs joke despite multiple people complaining directly to her to stop) but I am in a bunch of active social channels and don't think I've ever seen her say anything like "kill yourself".

That happened in support channel. Directly to the face of the chairs :)

Let me get this straight. Chairs of different committees were having a work meeting online. One Chair told other Chairs to kill themselves - directly, verbatim. There were no consequences, no pushback, no apologies. This behaviour is endemic, systemic, and continuous.

Nah, in the face of their own chairs, who did fuck all about it as far as i could tell at the time.

Did they face any consequences for this? Can't believe that this was allowed in official channels. Is there some kind of code of conduct preventing this?

It's definitely against the Code of Conduct. The issue is, who applies the CoC? People's own chairs.
So if the chairs don't take nasty behavior seriously, nothing happens.

Same chairs who apparently chose to make Paula chair now.