Agenda
- Decisions made since the last public board meeting
- Updates to Board roadmap
- Updates to Organizational Culture Roadmap
- Updates regarding internal complaint and conflict systems
- 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
- Qiao Chu
- Rachel Linton
Guests
- a.
- Æther
- AiedailEclipsed
- alogical
- Arya
- bak.bop
- Beatrice_Otter
- Berix
- Blue
- briar
- Cat
- chanvrerie
- CMDonovann
- cutesy
- daisy
- DawnWinters
- EchoEkhi
- ethanbrecke
- evilanifa
- Ghysals
- Grumpycat
- itsmeimhere
- jess
- keladry
- Keltena
- ladydragona
- LtMel
- Lydia
- missizzy
- Moonbob
- most resilient ugly squid
- muffinman29
- MustardPot
- nova
- Nova Rivera
- pitytheviolins
- sarcasticallyinclined
- Shade
- ShirouHokuto
- Sobriquett
- soundofsnow
- Sparrow
- Sullie Tosho
- Talmoon
- therealmorticia
- Ultraviolet_Ink
- Water_eddown
- Wist
- WonderfulWorld
- XxDarkness
- ZG
Open Session
Decisions made since the last public board meeting
- Approved January Board public meeting minutes.
- Approved interpretation of Article V, clause 16 of the Bylaws to include communication by means of transcription devices for the hearing impaired or similar technology, provided such means permit a contemporaneous transcription. This interpretation will comply with corporate law while accommodating deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals.
- Approved two Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Heads.
- Approved two Fanlore co-chairs.
- Approved two Legal co-chairs.
- Approved one Translation co-chair.
- Approved Crisis Management Documentation.
- Approved sign-on to amicus brief supporting the “server test” for online copyright liability.
- Approved three finance requests.
- AO3 exited beta.
Updates to Board roadmap
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 – In Progress
Work has continued on OTW discipline policies, including on procedures for emergency suspensions. Board continues to provide internal bi-weekly updates on Board and BAT projects. We’ll go into further detail about additional revisions to our internal complaint procedures later in our agenda.
Soliciting Expertise
- Finalize procurement-related documentation (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
- Engage short-term contractors and subject matter experts to support progress of committee-specific projects (Ongoing, carried over from 2025)
We are pleased to have our new Procurement Policy operational! We have also engaged both a consultant and a contractor to contribute to AD&T projects.
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).
We have carried out our “Still Willing to Board” survey for 2026 and are pleased to announce that all Board members are remaining in their positions and have documented the related administrative tasks. We continue to look for ways to improve our processes.
Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup
- Work with OCR to address Culture Roadmap goals – IN PROGRESS
- Support OCR external recruitment – COMPLETE
- Develop further OCR independence from Board and BAT – COMPLETE
We’re pleased to have completed the Board-OCR separation and will be moving our remaining goal, “Work with OCR to address Culture Roadmap goals”, to the “Following Existing Plans” category and removing the Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup section from our roadmap going forward. A final, full update on OCR will follow.
Updates to Organizational Culture Roadmap
The Organizational Culture Roadmap (OCR) workgroup has successfully completed external recruitment, and is currently working on revising the OTW’s Code of Conduct with an external HR firm – the completed draft of which is currently being reviewed by stakeholders. As mentioned in the January public Board meeting, the OCR workgroup now officially operates and is led independently from the Board. As such, this will be their last update in this forum; any and all future updates on OCR work will be communicated in the monthly OTW newsletter, where OCR has been regularly giving updates since last year.
Updates regarding internal complaint and conflict systems
In our January public board meeting, we answered questions about the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution (ICCR) committee and other reporting procedures. We’d like to provide further updates on both ICCR and other complaint procedures, as well as to correct information provided in our previous question response about existing and alternative complaint procedures.
Since January, ICCR has been actively investigating cases and has continued to work on its existing procedures around communication with complainants. At the same time, Board, ICCR, and VolCom have been re-evaluating backup complaint and escalation procedures. Unlike previously stated, while ICCR was working to become operational, volunteers also experienced failures in existing and alternative complaint procedures for certain types of complaints where established backup resolution pathways did not exist. Even now with an active ICCR, having effective alternative reporting channels and clear escalation procedures remains important to ensure volunteers have their concerns addressed in a timely manner.
To address these issues, Board and VolCom have updated the Volunteer Handbook to adjust complaint procedures to clearly identify the available escalation pathways in a variety of situations and outline expected communication. In addition, Board, VolCom, and ICCR have refined procedures internally to better track complaints and ensure they are assigned appropriately for investigation, including by, going forward, providing information on complaint ownership to complainants who report through multiple channels or to multiple parties. We hope that these changes will ensure that all complaints move forward in a timely manner.
We will continue to monitor complaint processes and make further adjustments in response to issues as we move forward. Our goal is to improve both ease of reporting and speed of response, and we thank both the volunteers who have reported issues and ICCR and VolCom for their ongoing work in implementing improvements.
AOB
No items
Open Question time
Q1: In case of people not affiliated with the OTW pretending publicly that they are/insinuating that they are, are there any measures in place to address these situations, especially when such individuals are behaving in a way that due to the misrepresentation reflects badly on the OTW?
A: All OTW volunteers agree to a Code of Conduct, which includes a public communications policy. No volunteer will ever contact you on behalf of the OTW through unofficial channels such as by commenting on your work. Any communication from the OTW, such as from the Policy & Abuse committee regarding your account, will come to your registered email from an official email address. The OTW’s response would depend on the situation, as we have limited control over individuals unaffiliated with the OTW and their behavior on non-OTW-run platforms. However, we do encourage you to contact us if you have questions or concerns about an individual misrepresenting their affiliation with the OTW or questions about whether a communication is official.
Q2: What is the OTW’s stance about online age verification?
A: Currently, there are no laws that require online age verification on Archive of Our Own or any OTW projects. We have no plans to implement any kind of age verification, although we continue to monitor the situation closely. As a policy matter, the OTW is against online age verification and similar regulations that damage personal privacy and access to a free and fair internet.
Q3: Seeing as AO3 has been stably running for many years now, I’d be interested in hearing about the reasons that led to the decision to exit beta status at this point in time rather than years prior, considering it’s described as a mostly cosmetic change and that many of the goals laid out in the roadmaps have not yet been reached. Thank you!
A: AO3 hasn’t met the definition of beta software for several years now, and with over 10 million active users, exiting open beta has been overdue. The timing was chosen because it worked for the groups involved in making and announcing the change, especially our developers and communications team. Graduating from open beta does not necessarily mean AO3 is “complete” — there will definitely be new features to write and bugs to squash. But it’s time to recognize that the software is, and has been for a while, working at massive scale and will continue to do so. While our AD&T team still plans to implement some items from the 2013 roadmap, that plan was written over a decade ago, and some of the listed features do not make sense anymore in today’s internet landscape or with AO3’s current size and scale. Our AD&T team will provide an update in the Roadmap via newspost in the future.
Q4: hi! how’s the ao3 translation to different languages going? is the volunteer recruitement open again? it says on the website that it’s gonna be open in april
A: Our internationalization team is working hard to enable translation across AO3! They finished making AO3 emails translatable late last year and are continuing to work on making the interface translatable. As for volunteer recruitment, our Legal and Policy & Abuse committees are currently recruiting. You can see information about all our open positions here: https://www.transformativeworks.org/volunteer/ In general, we recruit approximately monthly for a variety of positions, so you can check back at that page for future openings. We also announce volunteer recruitment on the AO3 homepage.
Q5: When was the decision made for Ao3 to exit open beta?
A: On April 2nd, we announced AO3 was exiting open beta https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34626. AO3 hasn’t met the definition of beta software for several years now and the idea of exiting open beta had been bouncing around for a while, but because this was largely a cosmetic change, it also wasn’t an urgent priority. The timing was chosen because it worked for the groups involved in making and announcing the change, especially our developers and communications team.
Q6: When AO3 goes down for scheduled maintenance, can the community find out what AO3 is down for? Where can that information be found?
A: We have a status page at https://www.otwstatus.org/ where you can check for server status of all OTW projects, including but not limited to AO3 and Fanlore. That page will sometimes offer details about expected downtime and reasons for maintenance. You can additionally subscribe to the RSS feed of the above-mentioned status page for incident reports. For announcements and news regarding scheduled maintenance, AO3 typically publish advanced notices via site-wide banner and social media posts at the AO3 Status accounts on bsky, X, and Tumblr (@status.archiveofourown.org, https://x.com/AO3_Status, and https://ao3org.tumblr.com/).
Q7: Will there be any graphic design or SWE / web development volunteer positions available this summer?
A: For ease of answering, we’ll assume you mean the period of May to August this year. OTW recruits for multiple positions throughout the year, and amongst them several committees may decide to recruit for graphic design volunteers, or other positions that you may find interesting. For example, Fanlore, Development & Membership, and Communications are the committees that most frequently recruit for graphic designer volunteers. You can subscribe to the OTW newsletter and receive OTW news – including recruitment/call for volunteers related news – via email. For software engineering, we’d recommend you to start by contributing code to the otwarchive on Github: https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive – this is a great way to get to know our code base, and experience as a contributor is a requirement to become a developer on the AD&T committee.
Q8: How can I join the PAC (Police & Abuse committee)? I am very much interested in contributing more to the ao3 community.
A: Good news! Our Policy & Abuse committee is currently recruiting. You can read more about the position requirements and apply here: https://www.transformativeworks.org/volunteer/application-policy-abuse-volunteer/
Q9: What do you want volunteers to do?
A: Currently, the Organization for Transformative Works is entirely operated by volunteers, including our Board. As a result, we have volunteers who carry out a wide variety of tasks ranging from wrangling tags on AO3, developing code for AO3, editing our peer-reviewed academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and doing administration, onboarding, and tool management for all our volunteers. You can read more about all our committees to get a sense of the wide range of roles at our website here: https://www.transformativeworks.org/committees/ We recruit regularly for a variety of roles, so please keep an eye on our volunteer listings here if you are interested in volunteering with us: https://www.transformativeworks.org/volunteer/
Q10: Would the Board be willing to consider making some decision- or goal-making meetings open to members or the public? For the purpose of attendees being able to oversee the processes and dynamics of the Board
A: With the exception of these meetings, the Board works largely asynchronously; while we have a weekly work session, discussions are asynch in our internal messaging tool, and votes are recorded in the ticketing system. A large part of this is simply that the Board is distributed all over the world — we span a fourteen hour timezone difference! A lot of the work the Board does is also coordination between different committees, which adds another layer of conversational back-and-forth. If there’s a particular thing that you’d be interested in understanding how the Board does, though, please let us know (on the internal messaging tool for volunteers, or [email protected] for the public). If there’s widespread interest, we may also be able to hold a synchronous meeting, though this would require a lot of resource investment to coordinate and it’s likely not all of our members will be able to attend.
Q11: now that AO3 is outside the beta, how close are you to V1.0?
A: Our team plans to start releasing under 1.0 now that AO3 is out of beta! The actual timing will depend on when it’s practical to make that change.
Q12: which committee is your favorite child and why is it wrangling?
A: We love you all equally. But one of them is the most special. They know which one.
Q13: If you had to pick, would you rather talk to animals or read minds?
A: Anh: I love Cherik dearly and I adore Charles Xavier so definitely talk to animals! I want to know whether my cat is plotting murder or not!
Qiao: Talk to animals! Don’t want to accidentally read mind of my friends who ship opponent ships from me >.>
Liz: Animals – I want my cat to be able to understand my love for her and why we can’t go outside for a walk when it’s raining
Rachel: Talk to animals. I would love to be able to explain to my cat the concept of “sleeping in”.
Harlan: Definitely talk to animals. It would be so noisy though….
Asynchronous Questions
All questions asked were answered live, so there are no asynchronous question responses.
The meeting was adjourned at 01:54 18 April 2026 UTC.
Minutes approved by the Board on 26 April 2026.