There's been a lot of attention given to this year's election! I wrote up a summary of the remaining Board candidates and why I liked them on a Discord server, and was encouraged to repost it here so it could serve as a quick guide for other people. Hopefully it also makes the whole situation with the OTW feel less hopeless as well.

First of all, I'd like to note that while three board members stepping down means that the election is now technically uncontested (meaning all five candidates will end up on the Board), your vote still matters because it will determine who gets a full term and who serves a partial term (i.e. who you vote for determines how long they'll be on the Board). That said, I have a positive impression of all of these candidates and I'm actually quite pleased that all of them are going to be on the Board one way or another!

I'll start by sharing impressions of each candidate, then summarize some of the group's viewpoints at the bottom. Everyone seems to be more or less in agreement over all major issues facing the OTW, which is fantastic, and moreover they also seem to all like one another!


Zixin Z.

Zixin Z. works at a non-profit that provides education to migrant workers' children. She has tons of experience working with the OTW: she's worked as a Chinese-language tag wrangler, as part of PAC, and as an admin volunteer for Open Doors. There's been a lot of people talking about the org's treatment of the Weibo mods, but until recently it hasn't been widely shared that Zixin Z. is actually one of those same Weibo mods who chose to run for the Board in response to how they were treated. During the recent public chats, someone who was likely a Chair submitted questions that seemed like targeted pushback against her, which she responded to with aplomb. Other than that important context, her answers in her Q&As have been kind, thorough and earnest. She unsurprisingly stresses the importance of standing up for minority volunteers as well.


Anh P.

Anh P. has been talked up a lot and it seems deserved. A multilingual Vietnamese candidate whose love of Fanlore really seeps through in their answers, generally seems sensible and who reached out to other fan archives to see how easy it had been for them to adapt AO3's code. They seem to be interested in the code and programming side of things and really good at reaching out to people and networking between different communities and committees. Interestingly, they seem very big on the idea of finding ways to decentralize fandom so that there are multiple healthy fandom archives, not just Archive of Our Own. They've also said that they'd prioritize interface translation, which is my personal top priority. (Qiao C. and Zixin Z. also said this.)


Kathryn S.

Kathryn S. is a Fandom Old who works as a nonprofit admin. They have really clear, specific ideas for improving the Archive's structure, creating paid positions and improving internal communications. She generally gave really balanced, mature, thoughtful answers, and you can tell she's got a lot of experience with both nonprofit work and volunteering with the org in particular. I especially liked their response to a question on AO3's policy of maximum inclusivity of fanworks, which included talking about how people who are writing from a place of trauma or earnest discussion of something harmful are more likely to tag their work and they'd be the first ones likely to be hit by content moderation, and how all of this ties into queer issues.

Jennifer H.

Jennifer H., like Kathryn, has put forward a lot of clear and specific ideas for structural improvement, including improving internal documentation. In general they come across as blunt but passionate. She's one of the least experienced out of the volunteers, but really interested in ironing out the flaws within the OTW and determined to put the work in. (As one example of this, they've been very vocal about wanting Alex to resign and racism in the OTW in general, and they said they were horrified to learn the current Board puts in an average of an hour a week into Board ac.) She's also been very encouraging and supportive towards the EAL candidates.

Qiao C.
What about AI works?

Everyone except Kathryn was anti-machine learning but acknowledged there wasn't much they could do besides adding a non-fandom tag for AI-generated works and trying to prevent scraping. Kathryn says they're personally inclined to consider them fanworks, much as a curated playlist is a fanwork in spite of the fan not creating the music themselves, along with some other points (that AI fanworks are not currently common, that there's no monetary incentive to post them to the Archive, and other solid points. You can see her entire answer here.)

How about censorship?

How do they feel about #EndOTWRacism?


And that's a wrap! If you've been following the elections and have your own thoughts or additional information you want to highlight about the candidates, I encourage you to share that below.

Somehow, even though this winter's been full of warm days like this, today is the first one that really felt like spring. In spite of the snow still piled up a meter high in some places, and in spite of "warm" here meaning in the local sense of three degrees Celsius.

I was trying to figure out what indefinable quality had changed, something in the light or the air. I think it's the birdsong. Winters here are always muffled and silent. Today there are windchimes and the noise of living things all around.

I have found a layout I like! I have added dear friends! I am still so terribly confused!

EDIT: It reorders tags in chronological order! Oh, no.