Agenda
- Decisions made since last public meeting
- 2026 OTW Board Election update
- Board Roadmap update
- Any other business (Questions & Answers)
Transcript
The meeting can be read in full on the official OTW Board Discord server. In order to access it, you’ll need to join our Discord server.
Present
- Anh Pham
- Elizabeth Wiltshire
- Harlan Lieberman-Berg
- Rachel Linton
Guests
- a.
- ArchivistDana
- Berix
- biblically accurate lotusboob
- Blue
- BluJay
- briar
- caco
- chanvrerie
- coddly cod
- DawnWinters
- Eiko
- erindizmo
- havesomewords
- itssmeimhere
- Jane
- Jen
- jess
- k5josh
- Kitsune_Scribe
- Leonal
- LtMel
- Mikah
- MustardPot
- nickels
- nova
- onnanokodaisuki
- Penneth
- pitytheviolins
- randompassingninja
- Shade
- ShirouHokuto
- spaceoddish
- Talmoon
- Tar-Roccorendil
- therealmorticia
- Trixx
- Ultraviolet_Ink
- Water_eddown
- Whatsit
- WonderfulWorld
- XxDarkness
Open Session
Decisions taken since the last meeting
- Approved April Board public meeting minutes.
- Approved 2 Finance payment requests.
- Approved sign-on to letter opposing the overbroad NO FAKES Act, which could negatively impact fan art and artists.
- Approved two new Legal volunteers.
- Approved updated Code of Conduct.
- Approved one new AO3 Documentation committee co-chair.
- Approved updates to our What We Believe statement.
2026 OTW Board Election
This year, the OTW Board has four vacancies, three for full, three-year terms and one for a partial, one-year term. Three candidates have declared their candidacy (announcement here). As we have four seats to be filled but only three candidates, the 2026 election will be uncontested – that is, the members of the OTW will not vote on which candidates fill the seats. All three candidates will take full, three-year term seats. You can still learn more about the three candidates on the Elections website, where they will be answering member-submitted questions in a series of Q&A posts. We look forward to welcoming them as colleagues later this year.
Board Roadmap update
Trust, Safety, and Accountability
- Review and revise OTW policies for volunteer discipline (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Continue our commitment to Board transparency by sharing regular updates and improving the Board response time to communication (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Review and revamp the OTW Conflict of Interest Policy (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Assist the development and expansion of the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution (ICCR) subcommittee to provide improved avenues of support for volunteers (new)
The Board continues to work with the Organizational Culture Roadmap workgroup, ICCR, VolCom, and BAT to revise volunteer disciplinary policies, including emergency suspension procedures.
Soliciting Expertise
- Finalized procurement-related documentation (now concluded)
- Engage short-term contractors and subject matter experts to support progress of committee-specific projects (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
Board has continued to communicate with committees on contractor needs, including approving additional hours for AD&T’s current contractor. We have also finalized the last of our procurement-related documentation – templates to support competitive procurement activity.
Following Existing Plans
- Combine Paid Staff Transition project with joint Board-OCR workgroup to continue work on transitioning to hybrid volunteer-paid staff model (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Support implementation of the Strategic Plan by completing our own goals and supporting other committees (Carried over from 2025)
- Work with BATs to create systems to better manage Board tasks (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Create and improve documentation around regular BAT and Board tasks (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Work with OCR to address Culture Roadmap goals (Ongoing, moved from former Organizational Culture Roadmap category)
Board continues to work on ongoing projects with other committees, including the updated OTW Code of Conduct, which Board was excited to approve this quarter. Our Volunteers & Recruiting committee is now working on the organization-wide rollout of the new Code of Conduct, which will be complete in October.
OTW Sustainability & Proposals to the Board
- Optimize and document the procedures for the annual turnover of Board members post-election (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Optimize and document the procedures for the annual “Still Willing to Board” survey, as well as personnel admin tasks resulting from this (In-Progress)
- Address and resolve proposals carried over from 2025 (Ongoing)
- Provide retention and recruitment support to committees requesting assistance (New).
With Election season underway, Board has begun reviewing training documentation and preparing to welcome our new Board members in the next few months.
AOB
No items
Open Question time
Q1: Being a volunteer org increases burn-out risk, and the paid staff project doesn’t seem to have much (evident) progress in some time. What concrete steps is the organization taking to ensure volunteers don’t burn out, especially in roles like committee chairs that demand a lot of volunteers?
A: Burn-out is a risk in any organization, especially in an all-volunteer organization like the OTW. This is especially a risk with chair positions, which often require a substantial amount of time and energy. In the past year, the OTW Board reached out to all committees that had solo chairs to discuss sustainability and succession planning. We plan to continue to work with committees to move to a co-chair model to ensure that individual chairs are able to take breaks and share the workload. The Board also encourages chairs to create Chair Assistant and Chair-Track Volunteer positions to help with sustainability, and to recruit specifically for these positions both internally and externally when needed. As an organization, we plan to continue to build out recruitment and training processes and build broader leadership teams that can share the load.
On an individual committee level, the Board checks in regularly with committee leadership to see how they’re doing and how the Board can support them. While individual committee needs vary, some measures can include loaning Board Assistant Team (BAT) volunteers to committee leadership to assist with projects, utilizing contractors to fill specific needs, or providing assistance with recruitment processes. We encourage committee leadership to reach out to the Board when they’re facing these challenges so we can help find solutions or provide support.
Q2: What’s the plan in case changes to US law make some of what’s currently on AO3 illegal or in some other way conflicts with AO3’s values?
A: The OTW has discussed moving previously and are keeping a very close eye on developments in the US and elsewhere to determine what best protects us. For now, we have determined that even with all that is going on, the US is still a very speech- and fair use-protective country when compared to other options and there is currently no better place for us than in the US.
On the technical side, AO3 does follow industry best practices, such as having multiple online and offline backups and servers on multiple continents.
Q3: In a contested election, Board candidates can be vetted and possibly rejected by voters. Is there a way for voters to address any serious concerns that may come up during candidate chats or Q&A’s now that this election is uncontested and every candidate will get in automatically?
A: As you note, even in an uncontested election, the Elections committee still organises Q&A and chats for candidates, so that OTW members can learn more about the candidates. The first batch of Q&A was published last week and can be read on the Election website. Additionally, we also emailed all our eligible voting members relevant information about this year’s candidates, with the time and place to participate in a live candidate chat.
In an uncontested election, while voters cannot directly reject candidates via the voting process, they can still raise concerns that arise from candidate chats and Q&A’s, either to the current Board directly through our contact form, or to the Elections committee contact form.
Q4: The OTW Board election this year is uncontested. What will the OTW do to make sure future elections for the Board of Directors are contested?
A: In an ideal world, OTW elections would have many candidates and would be contested every year. We understand the desire of OTW members and volunteers to have a broad slate of potential candidates to vote for, and we would also like to have all Board seats filled via contested election.
Unfortunately, there are many reasons why volunteers may be unable or unwilling to serve on the Board of Directors. Unlike most positions in the OTW, Board members must serve under their legal names. Running for the Board, and being on the Board, can expose candidates and Board members to harassment and threats. In addition, being a member of the Board is often a three-year commitment to a position that requires a significant amount of time over and above their other OTW volunteer time commitments, which increases the risk of burnout. We continue to make changes to try and improve both the safety and sustainability of serving as a member of the Board: implementation of new Board member safety tools (where we coordinate with Elections to better support and protect candidates and elected Board members); mandatory breaks away from Board work; and annual check-ins regarding work performance, to assess whether taking a hiatus or stepping down from the Board is recommended and/or necessary.
The creation of the Board Assistants Team (BAT) has also improved the Board experience by removing some of the workload burden, particularly around administrative tasks.
Ultimately, even as we continue to look for ways to improve the experience of serving on Board, we understand that it’s a significant commitment in terms of work and time, and we want to ensure that all candidates are prepared. Therefore, although we will continue to encourage volunteers to stand for Board election, we can never guarantee that future elections will be contested.
Q5: Are you interested in making an art-sharing like DeviantART and Pixiv as part of your OTW initiatives?
A: The kinds of image hosting that would support art-sharing in this manner has been considered by the OTW in the past as part of AO3, but it is not something we currently wish to pursue. There are a number of reasons for that.
First, image hosting is significantly more expensive than text hosting and would increase server costs by several orders of magnitude. The scale of that expense is not something that our current servers, or even several times our current servers, would be able to handle. The cost alone makes this project highly infeasible for the organization.
Second, the OTW’s volunteer technical teams are small, and the work they already do to keep OTW projects running keeps them extremely busy. The amount of technical work involved in building an image platform–let alone keeping it running–would be substantially greater than our volunteer teams have the capacity for, and we have a number of other higher-priority goals for our existing projects that we would work on if we had increased technical work capacity. Supporting the continuous growth of AO3 is a more-than full time job.
Third, image hosting raises a number of issues that don’t exist with text hosting from a legal basis. Because AO3 hosts an extremely limited amount of image content, we are somewhat insulated from the very real risk of users uploading illegal image content. The kind of infrastructure we would need both as a technical matter and as a safety matter for any individual responsible for that kind of content review would be entirely new to the OTW, and very expensive.
There are a number of other reasons why image content hosting, as part of AO3 and especially as a different initiative, is not a good use of the OTW’s limited money and volunteer time. But we hope that this gives you an overview of the various factors that we’ve considered in deciding not to pursue this in the past.
Q6: How can we request a feature to be added to the roadmap?
A: All feature requests should be submitted via our Support form, which you can access on any page on AO3 by clicking “Technical Support & Feedback” in the footer. Please do not submit feature requests to the OTW Board.
Q7: Is there a particular reason there has not been a public finance meeting since 2022?
A: Running public meetings takes considerable time and personnel to organise. As a result, volunteer time is currently being prioritised on internal activities, but if there is considerable public interest then we can look into how we can help to facilitate this with the Finance team.
Q8: Is there a plan to re-evaluate OTWs position on using LLM-based tools like Claude? Specifically within AO3?
A: For those who don’t know, our Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) team has a policy forbidding the use of LLM-generated code in the AO3 codebase (https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/wiki/Commit-policy#scary-legal-stuff), though this rule applies to all of our repositories. The Board does not develop policies for specific committees, and code contributors with questions about this policy should direct them to AD&T.
Q9: What was changed in the volunteer code of conduct and why were those changes made? Do they offer more protections for volunteers?
A: Since the Code of Conduct was written more than 14 years ago, the OTW has grown and changed, not only in the scale of our organization and personnel numbers but also in volunteer demographics, and there have also been updates in what is considered best practice for human resource management in nonprofit organisations. Updating the Code of Conduct has been one of our highest priority goals in our Organizational Culture Roadmap. The project has been a collaborative effort between multiple committees and workgroups, involving multiple stakeholder reviews, volunteer surveys, and review by an external specialist HR consultant.
We are confident that the updated Code of Conduct now aligns with industry best practice, sets a professional standard for the Organisation, and is a stronger tool to protect our volunteers.
You can read the entirety of our new Code of Conduct on the OTW website here: https://www.transformativeworks.org/code-conduct/
Asynchronous Questions
All questions asked were answered live, so there are no asynchronous question responses.
The meeting was adjourned at 2:59 01 August 2026 UTC
Minutes approved by the Board on 16 August 2026.