Board Meeting Minutes: 14 July 2024

Agenda

  • Decisions made since the last public board meeting
  • Organizational Culture Roadmap
  • Board Year 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

  • Kathryn Soderholm
  • Michelle Schroeder
  • Qiao Chu
  • Zixin Zhang

Guests

  • baustin
  • Bilka
  • bluedreaming
  • C. Ryan Smith
  • calamario
  • Cesy
  • cirelle
  • CJ
  • CMDonovann
  • coaldustcanary
  • Gammarad
  • Helena
  • indes
  • InklingDancer
  • james_
  • kanadka
  • Lana
  • Lou
  • Mort
  • Palarista
  • soundofsnow
  • spacegandalf
  • Trillific

Open Session

Decisions made since last meeting

  • Approved minutes of last meeting
  • Approved Finance requests
  • Approved Legal’s request on Signing the Pending KOSA vote
  • Approved Legal request on joining a amicus brief
  • Approved a proposal for new OTW social media account
  • Approved new Chair for Policy & Abuse Committee
  • Approved new Chair for Strategic Planning Committee
  • Approved new Chair for Transformative Works & Cultures Committee
  • Approved Acting Chair for Webs Committee
  • Approved OTW Culture Change Roadmap project supervisors
  • Approved new Communication Escalation Policy for Board
  • Approved Break and Hiatus Policy for Board
  • Approved proposal for external review of AO3 Terms of Service
  • Retired the Diversity Consultant Research Officer

Organizational Culture Roadmap

As we mentioned in our second quarter of 2024 public meeting (meeting minutes available here, we have been working on the OTW Culture Roadmap to address the six themes for improvement in the Org. The Board of Directors also established a Roadmap team, with volunteers from various committees to assist with preliminary work regarding OTW Culture Roadmap.

In late April, the Roadmap for the OTW – which currently includes specific goals, next steps, and indicators of who’s responsible for each goal – was created and shared with all OTW volunteers. Additionally, the Roadmap team has been organizing various meetings and asynchronous discussions to discuss our next steps for overall project management and volunteer engagement. As these discussions and work are still ongoing internally, we are only sharing high-level updates during OTW Board public meetings

Board Year Roadmap Update

We first shared the Board Year Roadmap in our first quarter of 2024 meeting (meeting minutes available here). We’ve only included items here that have an update, so items that were completed before the last meeting or haven’t been worked on have been removed.

Trust, Safety, and Accountability:

  • Improve Board transparency – ONGOING.
  • OTW Whistleblower Protection Policy – ONGOING
  • Review and revise OTW policies for volunteer discipline – STARTED

Soliciting Expertise:

  • Procurement Policy – ONGOING The OTW Procurement Policy has been drafted and gone through OTW Committee Chairs review. The project lead for this policy is working on an accompanying OTW Request for Proposals Template.

Following Existing Plans:

  • Stay up to date with Board’s goals in the OTW Strategic Plan – ONGOING
  • Support Strategic Planning Committee through the implementation of the Strategic Plan – ONGOING
  • Lead the review, approval, and implementation of recommendations from organizational culture survey – IN PROGRESS

Board Sustainability:

  • Board Hiatus Policy – DONE
  • Board Annual Self-Assessment – STARTED
  • Board Still Willing to Serve survey – DONE

Board Assistants Team (BAT) Committee:

  • Work with BATs to create systems to better manage Board tasks – IN PROGRESS

We are pleased to share some additional details regarding updates and progress in our Roadmap with you as follows:

For the Improve Board transparency item, we started posting weekly Board/BAT updates internally for OTW volunteers. These updates outline all the work that has been done toward Board/BAT projects, and lists the committees that collaborated and communicated with Board/BAT during the week. The weekly update also includes hours tracking stats that help volunteers visualize the time spent on these projects and on Board/BAT work.

Additionally, the Board of Directors approved the Asynch Questions to Board project – led by a BAT Project Specialist volunteer – and we started a new method (using a Google Form) for the public to submit questions to the Board in advance of public Board meetings, instead of only asking questions during the live meeting period. As this meeting is the first trial for this method, we may adjust the rules and procedures for future meetings as we find what works or doesn’t work best for us.

Regarding the OTW Whistleblower Protection Policy, the policy draft has gone through various rounds of review and feedback. The policy was open for all OTW volunteers feedback in late June – early July, and we are looking forward to getting this policy finalized and completed by September 2024.

Concerning the Review and Revise OTW Policies for Volunteer Discipline item, the Board approved the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution (ICCR) subcommittee – an independent mechanism with the authority and responsibility to investigate and address complaints and conflicts between OTW volunteers. We have been consulting with the Legal committee about the purview, duty, and boundaries of ICCR and how that subcommittee affects our overall Board Year Roadmap goal toward Trust, Safety and Accountability. As these discussions and work are still ongoing internally, we are only sharing high-level updates during OTW Board public meetings.

In early May, we completed the first Still Willing to Serve survey for Board members. Moving forward, the Board will complete this survey each year in March. We also updated the Board training materials, and hope that we can develop better guardrails in place to ensure that Board members are sufficiently supported to help decrease the risk of burnout.

AOB

No items

Open Question time

7 questions in total were answered during the meeting.
Q1: Given the volatile political landscape of the United States and the increasing hostility towards queer communities (including fandom and fandom self expression) has there been any consideration of decentralisation of AO3 and other archival projects of the OTW?
Zixin Zhang: On the legal side of this, the Legal Committee, among others, pay close attention to threats to free expression and privacy. On the technical side, we follow industry best practices, such as having multiple online and offline backups and servers in multiple continents. The Board is prepared to use every tool at our disposal to protect the OTW’s projects.

Q2: What is your current position on generative AI? What action are you taking on them? Are you going to ban them on AO3? [This question has been combined with similar questions]
Qiao Chu: As we said in our update on AI and Data Scraping on the Archive (https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/25888), there is nothing in the AO3 Terms of Service that prohibits fanworks that are fully or partly generated with AI tools from being posted to the AO3, if they otherwise qualify as fanworks. AO3 is intentionally designed to promote and protect a policy of maximum inclusivity for all fanworks. This means not only the best fanworks, or the most popular fanworks, but all the fanworks that we can preserve. If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve.

We do encourage people to tag their works as AI-generated, so that people who are interested in AI-generated works can find them more easily and people who are not can filter them out. Tag Wranglers have recently canonized several freeform tags that users can optionally use to indicate that their work has been created using AI: Created Using Generative AI, AI-Generated Images, and AI-Generated Text.

Regarding works on the AO3 being used for AI training, the OTW is strongly opposed to such use. Our Terms of Service (TOS) do not allow users to choose whether they consent to have their works used in AI training. Therefore, every operation to crawl the Archive’s work for AI-training violates our TOS. The OTW has never authorized any platform or organization or company to use our projects as their training base. Common Crawl has been disabled on the AO3, but it is not the only technology used and not all crawlers respect such requests. The Archive’s development team is on the lookout for individual scrapers collecting AO3 data and takes action when they identify them. Unfortunately, the only way to prevent new works from being used in AI training is to lock them to be viewable by logged-in users only.

Q3: What’s the amicus brief that legal is writing/joining about?
Michelle Schroeder: The brief was regarding legal liability for posted images; currently, the liability rests with the host of the image and not any site on which it is embedded. The brief argues that this should continue to be the law.

Q4: A content farm on YouTube, after receiving takedown notices from AO3 authors they stole from, has leaked their emails, directed their subscribers to brigade them, and threatened to counter-notice and counter-sue the authors. What will the OTW do to defend authors from these threats?
Zixin Zhang: Affected authors can reach out to our Legal team for advice and assistance, but we also recommend reporting the copyright-infringing content and harassment to YouTube. Board will also reach out to the Legal committee and ask if there’s anything the OTW can do by contacting YouTube as well.

Q5: regarding AI fics: are there plans to make tagging of ai-created fics one of the mandatory ones? (I already appreciate current system)
Michelle Schroeder: Tagging of AI-created works is not currently planned to be one of the mandatory Archive Warnings. This is because the AO3 Terms of Service requires our Policy and Abuse team to make sure users’ works comply with the mandatory Archive Warning tags if works get reported to them. As our team is not able to determine if a work is generated by AI, they would not be able to enforce this mandatory warning.

Q6: has it been considered to make works visible only to archive users by default, to help protect creators from having their works used in generative AI training?
Qiao Chu: As far as we’re aware, this hasn’t been formally considered yet, but we’re happy to bring it up with the relevant committees. However, many people who use the AO3 do not have accounts for various reasons, and we don’t necessarily want to force people to create accounts. We can also consider highlighting the archive lock feature to current users.

Q7:Part of the work of preserving fanworks is archiving software. Are there any plans to eventually support systems in making otwarchive easier to install & maintain (i.e. less hard-coding)
Michelle Schroeder: We have always hoped for more archives to open and use our code; there are a few out there already! Unfortunately, as you’ve noted, this is not an easy task. We don’t have any updates ready for public consumption yet, but we are working on something related to this. Hopefully we’ll have more news by the next meeting! (And we do have multiple Board members who ran on the platform of supporting other archives, so this is something near and dear to our hearts.)

Asynchronous Questions

All questions asked were answered live, so there are no asynchronous question responses.

The meeting was adjourned at 14:02 UTC

Minutes approved by the Board on 2024 07 26

2024-07-26 Retired Personnel

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