Agenda
- Decisions made since the last public meeting
- Updates to the Board Year Roadmap
- Strategic Planning One Year Implementation Report
- OTW Culture 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
- Erica Frank
- Kathryn Soderholm
- Qiao Chu
- Rachel Linton
Guests
- _cinderella_ish
- (The Violet) Howler
- a.
- abstractdionysus
- aeremaee
- ailinen
- AllTheAllSpark
- ani.skywalker
- Anne-Li
- ArcadianMaggie
- arty
- Ash is in writing mode
- biblically accurate lotusboob
- Bilka
- bookbee
- Brian
- C. Ryan Smith
- caco
- calamario
- Caprice
- ceara_einin
- Cesy
- connect_the_stars
- corr
- daisy
- Dan-i
- e.
- EchoEkhi
- Egg
- Faeryn
- Gamebird
- Gammarad
- Glimmer
- Helena
- Ink
- itsmeimhere
- james_
- Jane
- Janine (naarna)
- Juhos
- Kathryn S
- keladry
- Keltena
- knifebird
- Kylara
- ladydragona
- Ladylark
- Lielac
- logicgunn
- Lydia
- Marion McG
- melo
- MT
- okforthey
- Phlebas
- pitytheviolins
- runawaymarbles
- runt
- Sanity
- sarcasticallyinclined
- Shantismurf
- ShirouHokuto
- SoftBoyDepot
- soundofsnow
- Starcasting
- SunriseMagpie
- tehfanglyfish
- therealmorticia
- vinnawis
- Whatsit
- wireliarire
- z
- ZG
- zozo1237
Open Session
Decisions made since the last public meeting
- Approved minutes of previous public Board meeting.
- Approved Finance requests.
- Approved the Board Member Agreement & Engagement Policy which outlines the duties, responsibilities, and minimum engagement threshold for OTW Board members.
- Approved new Open Doors’ Fandom Estate Planning Project which will allow archive owners to coordinate importing their archives to AO3 after their passing.
- Approved new policy outlining the rules and expectations for volunteers using our chat tool.
- Wrote and approved Board Letter to be included in the 2024 Annual Report.
- Approved new OTW Recruitment Strategy policy.
- Approved signing on to a letter opposing mandatory online ID checks.
- Approved new chairs for the Accessibility, Design, & Technology as well as Communications committees.
- Approved the retirement of the Multi-Communication Discussion Policy and Survey Policy (Both were out of date and no longer reflective of OTW tools and processes).
- Approved decommission of the Webs committee.
- Approved new Lead for the Accessibility, Design, & Technology: Quality Assurance and Testing subcommittee.
- Approved changes to Board email workflow to improve response times.
Updates to the Board Year Roadmap
We first shared the Board Year Roadmap in our first quarter of 2025 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 by sharing regular updates and improving the Board response time to communication (Carried over from 2024). – ONGOING
- Make efficiency improvements to how Board members agree to the Board Confidentiality and Conflict of Interest Policies. – STARTED
- Review and revamp the OTW Conflict of Interest Policy. – STARTED
Board transparency improvement goals are always ongoing, and specific documentation reviews for this year are underway.
- Soliciting Expertise
- Finalize OTW Procurement Policy and related documentation (Continued from 2024) – ONGOING
- Following Existing Plans
- Collaborate with OTW Roadmap Team and work on Organizational goals (Continued from 2024) – ONGOING
- Support implementation of the Strategic Plan by completing our own goals and supporting other committees (Continued from 2024) – ONGOING
Work to move forward on Strategic Roadmap is ongoing, with significant progress on Crisis Procedures, the Culture Roadmap, and Cybersecurity assessments so far this year. We will discuss our report on Strategic Roadmap progress for year one in our next agenda item.
- Board Assistants Team (BAT) Committee
- Work with BATs to create systems to better manage Board tasks (Continued from 2024). – ONGOING
- Increase active BAT membership by 20% – STARTED
- Create and improve documentation around regular BAT and Board tasks – ONGOING
BAT continues to be instrumental in facilitating progress on Board initiatives and improving transparency and efficiency. Thank you BAT! Documentation creation and improvement around both regular tasks (including email, Annual Reports, and internal updates among other processes) and recruitment are underway.
Strategic Planning One Year Implementation Report
Our Strategic Planning Team has completed their public report on progress towards implementation of goals in the first year of our 2023-2026 Strategic Roadmap (updates as of July 31, 2024).
For our Diversifying Spaces goals, our Diversity Consultant Research Officer recommended hiring an external firm to conduct a cultural audit. 265 volunteers at all levels of the organization were surveyed, and the consultant made a number of recommendations. Those recommendations were developed into the OTW Cultural Change Roadmap. Strategic Planning and Volunteer Committees also developed and distributed guidelines for inclusive recruiting practices.
For our Internal Sustainability goal, succession planning and documentation efforts are ongoing and have made significant progress, although have run slightly behind schedule.
For our Paid Staff goals, work is underway to conduct a needs assessment and assess feasibility.
For our Cybersecurity goals, an initial review has been completed and a draft report of recommendations has been submitted to the Board.
For our AO3 Development goals, the ongoing maintenance of AO3 continues (yay!) and work to internationalize our interface is underway.
The full report is available here.
OTW Culture Roadmap Update
Since the last meeting, the project to update and create policies for behavioral standards for use of our internal chat tool has been completed. The policy underwent review by all OTW volunteers and following two weeks of feedback and revisions, was sent to Board for approval. We approved it and our Volunteers & Recruiting committee has worked hard to finish up its implementation.
Our Cybersecurity Delegate completed their review and finalized the report about their audit of OTW tools and processes. It completed review by stakeholder groups and has been shared with Board for review. We are reviewing it now and then will be working with them to plan next steps.
OTW Emergency Procedures are fully underway now and are in the process of being drafted. Discussions are underway and related documents are being worked on. Once a full draft has been completed, it will be shared with all OTW volunteers for review before being sent to the Board for approval and implementation.
The Roadmapping team has also been working on some structure formalization and admin work to make sure these goals are sustainable for the long term. They’re also discussing the next goals to target for work!
AOB
No items
Open Question time
11 questions in total were answered during the meeting.
Q1: What legislation which the legal team is watching at the moment which could impact the OTW, both in the USA and elsewhere?
A: If you have questions about laws and bills that could affect us, we strongly recommend that you contact Legal directly as they are the best person to answer you. You can reach them via their contact form: https://www.transformativeworks.org/contact_us/?who=Legal%20Advocacy For today, we’ve reached out to Legal to get some input. They indicated that there’s a lot and the list is ever changing. We are focused primarily on changes to US legislation as we are based in the US. They are closely watching attempts to impose age verification, which means privacy exposure, on websites, as well as various other proposals, most of which are unlikely to be enacted. Many proposals target commercial sites, which we aren’t, but could still be bad for fans and freedom generally. As the list is constantly in flux as legislation is changed and new laws are proposed, they don’t have a concrete list to offer you. If you have concerns about a specific law, we recommend you reach out to them directly.
Q2: What is the status of the new servers that were last mentioned to be arriving in April and once they’re installed, will Ao3 relax it’s bot protections that are preventing FanFicFare (a fanfic downloading/archiving plugin for Calibre) from being able to correctly scrape the archive?
A: The new servers were delayed by install issues at the data center. The servers have arrived but are not ready for installation because we need more power to run the new servers. We expect to be able to install the new servers in June. To keep service fast for users that are browsing manually, we’ve chosen to prioritize user traffic over other traffic and implemented a tiered service system that prioritizes user browsing and moves requests by bots (including FanFicFare) to a lower priority. Unfortunately, with our current capacity, we’re unable to keep up with the bot traffic. We hope people downloading with FanFicFare will have fewer issues when the new servers expand our capacity to serve all uses. However, bot traffic will always be lower priority than user traffic and we do not plan to change this.
Q3: Will there be a public Finance meeting this year? There hasn’t been one in two years.
A: We reached out to Finance to confirm an answer for this. They indicated that it’s going to depend on committee availability and workload. They currently expect to be unable to have have one this year and are instead expecting it to be next April.
Q4: What measures are OTW taking to protect fanworks from AI scrapping? Can the OTW please issue an update on what steps have been taken to address the situation with nyuuzyou scraping AO3 and uploading it to huggingface
A: We have added a CloudFlare tool to prevent AI scraping and other bots. This helps a lot but is not perfect. However, more robust solutions would have a significant negative impact on some of our users, especially those using older devices.
The OTW is aware of the recent scraping incident and is actively responding. Our Legal committee is currently in discussions with the site owner. For that reason, we can’t comment further publicly at this time.
Q5: Are there currently plans or projects to create an investment portfolio to provide a more reliable source of income for the OTW?
A: Yes! Creating an investment plan has been a goal and priority of the Finance committee for several years. They’ve been working to recruit volunteers with expertise in the area and hope to recruit a few additional volunteers this year for the project. Once they have the volunteers at hand, they will work on establishing the investment portfolio for the OTW’s money.
Q6: Board and Legal have previously highlighted that AO3 only hosts avatars, not embedded images. However, those are included in some export formats. Have the potential legal challenges of this type of hosting and whether AO3 is doing what it needs to when there are legal violations (e.g. CSAM/CSEM) been investigated?
A: Yes; Board, Legal, and our relevant committees are all aware of the legal requirements involved in such a situation, and will follow those requirements if such a violation should occur.
Q7: Are there any plans for dealing with the influx of AO3 accounts that exist solely to post spam comments soliciting ‘art commissions’ etc.?
A: We are aware that this is an issue, and the Policy & Abuse, Systems, and AD&T Committees are working hard to address it. The situation is evolving quickly, so we can’t speak to individual actions, but we are actively working on it. These spam accounts are violating our Terms of Service.
Q8: Does the OTW claim to be the authorized agent for works posted for the purposes of DMCA?
A: No, per our Terms of Service, the OTW does not claim to be the authorized agent for your individual works. You remain the sole copyright owner of any work you post to AO3. Please direct legal questions to [email protected].
Q9: What are the board doing about the issues with racism raised over the past few years that have still not been addressed?
A: Since 2020, we’ve given several updates on our work in this area. We recommend that you refer to past meeting minutes to find them: https://www.transformativeworks.org/board_minutes/ Our most recent update summarizing this work as a whole was at the September 2024 Board meeting; you can read it on the OTW website: https://www.transformativeworks.org/board_minutes/board-meeting-minutes-30-september-2024#Q2
Since that update, our work on the OTW Culture Roadmap has continued and we have made further progress on the goals outlined by the Culture Audit we underwent last year. The Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Subcommittee (ICCR) is in operation, providing independent oversight of disciplinary decisions and a channel for volunteers to raise complaints and concerns outside their committees for investigation and action. The OTW has also developed and reviewed, and Board has approved, a new policy outlining behavioral standards and expectations for our internal chat tool. A full review and revision of the Code of Conduct is additionally on the roadmap for this year.
For our users, we completed our Terms of Service (TOS) review last year. You can read more about those updates in the minutes from our January 2025 meeting here https://www.transformativeworks.org/board_minutes/board-meeting-minutes-26-january-2025/. Among those updates, the Abuse Policy for addressing violations was generalized to continue to protect fanworks in accordance with our mission, while also giving the Policy & Abuse team greater flexibility and therefore increased capacity to address novel forms of harassment. Antiracist work isn’t something that is ever going to be complete; instead, it requires active, ongoing work at all times. The OTW will continue to move forward on our Culture Roadmap and periodically reevaluate appropriate steps and changes to best protect both our volunteers and users.
Q10: What kind of actions/decisions are being taken in regards to the rate-limit implemented to balance filtering of spam comments with allowing maximum user-engagement between creators and commenters? (Specifically regarding how creators can be ratelimited while replying to their comments on their own works)
A: As discussed in our answer to the second question, we actively prioritize manual users over bot traffic. Rate limits are set by AD&T in response to specific events and are designed to be as targeted as possible.
Q11: If the decision is made to limit bot scraping of AO3 to prevent AI usage, is the OTW committed to finding ways for non-exploitative traffic, such as the Internet Archive or fan-run projects that need to scrape to work, to continue to function?
A: We need to discuss this internally before we can give a full formal response. We will include it with our post-meeting question responses in two weeks. (This response does not count towards our 10-question response minimum.)
Asynchronous Questions
7 questions in total were answered after the meeting.
Q1: Are you planning on reviewing the Board’s stance on IA usage for fanfiction in AO3? Thank you!
A: For the purpose of answering your question, we are assuming that you are talking about AI. If we’re wrong, we apologize and ask that you contact us using our contact form https://www.transformativeworks.org/contact_us/?who=OTW%20Board%20of%20Directors
There are no plans to change AO3’s rules on using AI to create works. As the Policy & Abuse committee shared in the TOS Update Guide that accompanied AO3’s recent TOS changes (https://archiveofourown.org/works/58283857#aiworks), there are many arguments for and against allowing AI-generated content; however, a ban against AI works is not enforceable.
AI usage cannot be reliably detected and existing “AI Detector” tools typically provide many false positives, which disproportionately target works that are written by authors who speak English as a second language, are less experienced, or are not neurotypical.
Until such time as there is a reliable way to detect AI usage, it is not possible to enforce a ban against AI. Given the state of the technology, we do not expect this to become possible in the near future without a revolutionary leap forward in detection technology equivalent to the emergence of generative AI itself. If a tool did become available, we could discuss our policy at that time; however, we do not believe this is likely to occur and AO3 will not consider any policy that cannot be reasonably and fairly implemented.
Q2: What is the plan to help protect A03 from ddos attacks?
A: We use CloudFlare to prevent DDoS attacks on OTW sites. We supplement it with caching, rate-limiting and custom challenge/blocking rules to target specific traffic as necessary.
If and when a DDoS attack happens, the caching and rate limiting rules help us in the short-term until the Cloudflare automatic DDoS protection recognizes something is happening. It’s quite fast at doing so, but that little bit in the beginning makes the difference in preventing almost any slowdowns at all from happening.
Q3: Does the OTW have a position on the UK Online Safety Bill/is Legal working on that?
A: The OTW is aware of the UK Online Safety Bill, and our Legal committee is monitoring the situation closely. You are welcome to reach out to them directly if you have questions or concerns: https://www.transformativeworks.org/contact_us/?who=Legal%20Advocacy
Q4: Can you provide additional detail on the board member engagement and volunteer chat policies?
A： The Board Members Agreement and Engagement policy is a policy outlining the minimal activity requirements for each individual Board member. There are many different facets and activities involved in Board’s work, and this policy provides direction for all Board members about where and how they can contribute. In the event they can’t meet the minimum activity requirements for Board work, it may be necessary for them to take a formal break, a hiatus, or step down from the position. An example requirement is that Board members are required to attend at least two public meetings per Board year and contribute to at least one Board-BAT project per quarter (three months).
For the volunteer chat policy, it sets the foundation to make our internal chat tool a safer and more welcoming work space — part of our OTW Culture Roadmap goals. As this policy is internal to our volunteers and workspace, we have no additional details to share.
Q5: Does it make a difference for scraping between locked and not-locked fics?
A: Most scrapers are not logged in and therefore cannot view locked works. Locking your works significantly reduces but does not entirely prevent the possibility that they will be scraped.
Q6: Does AO3 still hire independent contractors for development work? If so, is there a non-Jira publicly accessible prioritized list of projects reserved for independent contractors that can be browsed?
A: The OTW and AO3 hire contractors on an as-needed basis and at present we are not recruiting for or hiring independent contractors for development work.
Q7: If the decision is made to limit bot scraping of AO3 to prevent AI usage, is the OTW committed to finding ways for non-exploitative traffic, such as the Internet Archive or fan-run projects that need to scrape to work, to continue to function?
A: We are always balancing the accessibility of the AO3 against safety and security. Our first priority is, and will remain, human traffic to the site. Efforts to curb the influx of disruptive and malicious bot usage are ongoing and we’re unable to say at this time how this will continue to affect non-disruptive non-human traffic, including automated archiving services, but we are monitoring the situation, and will be trying our best to find a workable compromise.
The meeting was adjourned at 16:05 26 April 2025 UTC.
Minutes approved by the Board on 25 May 2025.