Agenda

• Decisions made since the last public board meeting
• AO3 Terms of Service Update wrap up
• OTW Culture Roadmap update
• 2024 Board Roadmap wrap up and 2025 Board Roadmap
• 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

• a.
• AiedailEclipsed
• Allekha
• alogical
• Anxious_Mess19
• arty
• Auntaggie
• baustin
• betty1120
• Caira
• calamario
• carolina
• chanvrerie
• CMDonovann
• corr
• Echo C
• EchoEkhi
• Egg
• FBV
• GemAnthony
• glimmah
• Glimmer
• herothief
• highlander ii
• Imanga
• james_
• Jane
• kanadka
• keladry
• Keltena
• Kitsune_Scribe
• Kiyaar
• kyparissos
• ladydragona
• Ladylark
• Lydia
• Malissieangel
• Marionberry
• mini
• missizzy
• MJ
• mlraven (they/them)
• Morbane
• Moro
• MT
• okforthey
• Pika
• pitytheviolins
• Rae
• randompassingninja
• Roz
• runt
• samothy
• Sanity
• sarcasticallyinclined
• Seren
• Shark
• Sheer Cold
• ShirouHokuto
• slumber
• tachyon
• Teó
• The Girl Reading This
• therealmorticia
• Vresci
• Whatsit
• xeno
• yr favorite goose
• ZG

Open Session

Decisions made since last public board meeting

• Approved four Open Doors Memorandums of Understanding addressing fanzines to be imported via the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, an updated MOU for the Online Archive Rescue Project, an MOU template for memorial archives created to honor and house a deceased fan’s works, and an MOU template for legitimizing unauthorized imports begun or completed without Open Doors’ assistance.
• Approved the inclusion of our academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, in the US Library of Congress.
• Approved updates to the OTW 2023-26 Strategic Plan as part of the 1 Year in Review process.
• Approved partnership with a free US university program regarding negotiation & mediation.
• Approved new Chairs for the Fanlore, Strategic Planning, User Response Translation, and Volunteers & Recruiting committees.
• Approved two new members of the Board Assistants Team.
• Approved updates to the AO3 Terms of Service.
• Approved new Lead for the News Post Moderation subcommittee.
• Approved 2023 OTW Annual Report.
• Approved proposal to add Bluesky as an official social media presence.
• Approved signing on to a letter opposing the deregulation of the United States Federal Trade Commission’s powers over online speech.

AO3 Terms of Service Update wrap up

We’re very excited to say that following lots of hard work by our Legal and Policy & Abuse committees, the AO3 TOS updates have been completed!

Notably, while the Content Policy has been clarified, what works are or are not allowed has not been changed. If your fanwork was allowed on AO3 before, then it is still allowed.

In terms of other updates, the TOS was split into three pages (General Principles, Content Policy, and Privacy Policy) to make it easier to find what you’re looking for when you want to know about a specific part of the TOS and language has been simplified language throughout the TOS

The Abuse Policy has been generalized to provide the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee with greater flexibility to determine how to address TOS violations, while still providing protections for fanworks in accordance with AO3’s mission.

Finally, the “Underage” Archive Warning, which is used for works that depict or describe underage sex, is being renamed to “Underage Sex”. This does not change the meaning of this warning or how it is enforced but is intended to clarify its purpose for users who may have been confused by it.

You can read a full summary of the changes on the News Post announcement of the open feedback on the changes: here. We also highly encourage you to read the Terms of Service Update Guide authored by our Policy & Abuse volunteers: here.

This News Post was also emailed to all AO3 account holders and accompanied by a banner on the site for the full two week feedback period. If you have any questions about the TOS changes not answered by the news post or its links to the update guide and drafts, contact the Policy & Abuse committee as they are the experts on AO3’s TOS as well as the changes it recently underwent: here.

OTW Culture Roadmap update

Roadmap work has continued from our progress shared in the previous meetings (see minutes here). Since our last update, work has continued in earnest on several goals. As we said at the last meeting, the current goals in progress address the OTW cybersecurity, emergency procedures, and behavioral standards for use of our internal chat tool. Our Cybersecurity Delegate has created the first draft of a report on the audit of OTW tools and processes they undertook last year. It is being finalized and then will be shared for limited review with several stakeholder groups (including the chairs of several committees and Board). Following that work, we will begin to address the areas needing improvement laid out in the report.

Emergency procedures are under discussion but are still in the development phase. Research on best practices and industry standards as well as how those apply to the OTW has begun. Drafting these procedures will include input from multiple stakeholders and committees including the Board Cybersecurity Delegate.

Work on updating and creating policies for behavioral standards for use of our internal chat tool has continued and analysis of volunteer surveys as well as interviews has been completed. Reports analyzing those surveys and interviews have been drafted and undergone chair review. They will be shared with all volunteers later today. Additionally, a draft policy based on survey and interview results has been written and will be shared for review soon as well.

2024 Board Roadmap wrap up and 2025 Board Roadmap

We originally shared the 2024 Board roadmap in our January 2024 meeting, you can see the messages here.

It’s also recorded in our minutes here.

On this document you can see a list of all the goals from the January 2024 Roadmap as well as when they were completed.

As a note of correction, we realized during the compilation of this document that we had forgotten to report on one goal at the time it was completed in February 2024. We should have noted that a policy had been written and unanimously approved regarding the procedure and process for filing complaints about Board Directors. We apologize for this oversight. The policy was completed, underwent internal review, and was unanimously approved before the April 2024 meeting.

Moving forward into the 2025 year, all goals marked as deferred or ongoing will be carried forward into this year’s roadmap as they are items we have not yet completed.

The following is a list of tasks that the OTW Board hopes to accomplish by the end of the 2025 year. Completing this list is our goal, but it will depend on numerous factors outside of our control. We will continue to post updates on our progress on these and other tasks in the Newsletter and in Public Board Meetings like this one.

• Trust, Safety, and Accountability:
  • Review and revise OTW policies for volunteer discipline (Carried over from 2024).
  • Improve Board transparency by sharing regular updates and improving the Board response time to communication (Carried over from 2024).
  • Review Board Confidentiality Agreement (this policy is reviewed every two years).
  • Make efficiency improvements to how Board members agree to the Board Confidentiality and Conflict of Interest Policies.
  • Review and revamp the OTW Conflict of Interest Policy.

• Soliciting Expertise:
  • Finalize OTW Procurement Policy and related documentation (Continued from 2024).
  • Create Requests for Proposal (RFPs) for various consultants/contractors (Carried over from 2024).

• Following Existing Plans:
  • Collaborate with Paid Staff Transition Co-leads to work on transitioning the OTW to a hybrid volunteer-paid staff model.
  • Collaborate with OTW Roadmap Team and work on Organizational goals (Continued from 2024).
  • Support implementation of the Strategic Plan by completing our own goals and supporting other committees (Continued from 2024).

• Board Sustainability & Proposals to the Board:
  • Optimize and document the procedures for the annual turnover of Board members post-election.
  • Review and improve internal instructions on How to Make a Proposal to the Board.
  • Address and resolve proposals carried over from 2024.

• Board Assistants Team (BAT) Committee:
  • Work with BATs to create systems to better manage Board tasks (Continued from 2024).
  • Increase active BAT membership by 20%.
  • Create and improve documentation around regular BAT and Board tasks.

AOB

No items

Open Question time

13 questions in total were answered during the meeting.

Q1: All AO3 committees except AD&T and Systems had public recruitment posts in 2024. Systems last recruited in 2021, AD&T last recruited in 2016. Both committees seem to always have too much work. Why are these committees allowed to let years pass without publicly recruiting for volunteers?

Several other committees also did not have recruitment posts in 2024; it is not uncommon for some of our committees to not recruit in a given year. There is no level of required “minimum recruitment” that committees must uphold. When committees recruit is set within that committee by their own needs and availability.

Committees consider their own staffing needs and availability to take on and train new people, and from that determine when they should recruit in conjunction with our Volunteers & Recruiting committee.

Regarding these specific committees, AD&T does not require people to be volunteers to contribute to AO3. AD&T welcomes contributions to AO3’s codebase from anyone, refer to here to learn more. Systems meanwhile has privately recruited several individuals to cover specific areas of needs within their team which is part of what has prevented them from needing to recruit publicly. Public recruitment requires availability both to review and consider applicants as well as to oversee the training of any volunteer who joins the committee. As such, it is out of scope for Board to demand that a committee recruit at a particular time.

Q2: As a minority language user, I find it dispiriting to find AO3 small language tags often filled with purposefully mistagged works in larger languages. They are tedious to report, and IME reports are not handled recently (last year or so). Are there any plans to try to improve this? Thanks!

Due to the TOS update, the AO3 Support committee (who handles reports of incorrect languages) was able to recently make changes to their internal procedures for handling requests about incorrect languages on AO3 works to allow them to fix the work’s language immediately.

They expect these changes to help improve the situation greatly going forward but at this time, they have a large backlog of tickets and can’t guarantee a specific response time.

Q3: Will you truly halt/reverse the decision to remove “all media types” tags? Progress was halted a few months ago for some major fandoms, but recently some fandoms got their AMT tags removed.

As the Tag Wrangling committee mentioned in their previous statement in regards to this issue (viewable here), All Media Type (AMT) tag changes and the decisions related to them are on hold pending the completion of committee-wide guideline discussions. These discussions are not yet complete so changes are not being made to AMT structures beyond fixing redundancies and subtagging new or existing fandoms which should be subtagged to existing metatags/AMTs. The only fandoms that have been removed from AMTs have been instances where the fandom was subtagged to multiple metatags within the same tree unnecessarily and/or mistakenly. In those instances they were removed from one metatag within the tree and remain subtagged to another metatag within the tree. So, to be clear, these tags remain subtagged to the same primary AMT/metatag.

If you have further questions about AMTs or any Tag Wrangling decision, please contact AO3 Support who will pass on your request to our Wrangling committee. Board does not manage or handle these requests.

Q4: If the website is required to shut down by law, will there be any backup sites for the archives?

In the event that AO3 or the OTW was threatened, we would do all in our power to protect fan expression. We can’t say right now what those steps would be as it would depend greatly on the situation at that time.

The OTW and our Legal Committee remain on the watch for issues that would affect us or our projects. On the technical side, AO3 already follows industry best practices, such as having multiple online and offline backups and servers on multiple continents.

Q5: Will all of the subtags under Religion & Lore – Ambiguous Fandom be moved to Religion & Lore? Despite it being a year since the change was announced, this still hasn’t been done with some tags.

While our Tag Wrangling committee has made a number of changes in relation to Religion & Lore, they are scheduled to have a few internal discussions about formatting later this year before they move forward with additional changes.

Tag Wrangling is engaged in a number of ambitious projects to improve the experience of our users. However, Board doesn’t manage individual wrangling decisions like this. Please contact our Support team with any questions or requests you have about how tags are wrangled, and they will pass on your request to our Wrangling committee.

Q6: I frequently see discussions on social media regarding features readers would like to see on ao3 to help organize, track, and search for fic. What such features is the board aware of and/or intending to implement and on what timeline?

The Board of Directors is responsible for strategic oversight of the entire Organization for Transformative Works; however, we do not oversee all the day-to-day operations of our projects, including the AO3.

If you’d like to make a formal request for a feature to be added to AO3, please contact Support. They handle feature requests in addition to providing technical support to AO3’s users.

Otherwise, if you’d like to see what our volunteer coders are working on right now or have coding abilities to contribute yourself, it is publicly viewable on Jira.

Q7: With the UK’s Online Safety Act in the news recently, and it causing a lot of chilling effects for UK sites and other sites deciding to geoblock UK users in response, does OTW/AO3 have any position on it? (understand this is a tricky one!)

The OTW Legal Committee keeps track of changing laws and legal situations; they are aware of this and considering how it may affect the OTW’s projects. We do not currently know of any specific effects on AO3 at the moment, and we have no plans to geoblock UK users at this time. As much as legally possible, we will attempt to keep the user base informed of upcoming changes related to this.

Q8: What does this mean? Approved partnership with a free US university program regarding negotiation & mediation.

This is related to several Board Roadmap and Org Culture Roadmap Goals. We are soliciting their expertise primarily in mediation and conflict resolution to help create guidelines and procedures for the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution subcommittee, which was formed under the Volunteers & Recruiting Committee last year. This committee’s mandate is internal rather than public-facing.

Q9: Are there any plans on re-enabling embedded images in comments on AO3 stories for users who have had an account for a long time?

We consulted with the Policy & Abuse committee to get an answer to this question as they have the ultimate authority to make this decision. They indicated they are observing the situation and looking into potential solutions.

Q10: What are the areas of need we need to work on for 2025 to keep up going strong?

While we’re not sure quite what you’re asking here, we hope your question has been answered by our updates on the planned 2025 Board Roadmap that we covered during the Board meeting. If this didn’t answer your question, we apologize and ask that you contact us directly so we can answer you in more detail.

Q11: Can someone upload someone else’s fan fiction into AI and generate their own story, which could then be posted to AO3? Can this be prevented?

If you post something publicly on any site on the internet (AO3, Tumblr, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, etc) then other people can copy it. AO3 has put in place various methods to block bot scrapers, but no method is fool-proof. So yes, it is possible that someone could feed a specific work into an AI generator. AO3 cannot do anything more to prevent that than we already have.

It is not a violation of AO3’s Terms of Service to post a work generated by AI. In addition, AO3 does allow users to post transformative fanworks that are based on other fanworks. However, if what is generated is sufficiently similar to a specific, previously-created work, then that may be considered plagiarism, just as it would be if the new work was created without any technological assistance. In that case, the work would need to be reported to Policy & Abuse (PAC) for evaluation. Whenever reporting plagiarism or copyright infringement, remember to include links to both the infringing material and the original work so that PAC can evaluate the complaint.

If someone is taunting other users on AO3 by telling them they are feeding their work to AI against their wishes, that may be a violation of our harassment policy. Again, it would need to be reported to PAC. Ensure that you include all relevant links in your report.

You can file a report with PAC via the “Policy Questions & Abuse Reports” link that is available at the bottom of every page on AO3. Please remember that our wait-times may be lengthy.

As described in their confidentiality policy, PAC will not publicly comment on a specific case, or share information about a case with uninvolved parties.

Q12: When will ao3 recruit volunteers?

The Board does not set or oversee recruitment for any of our committees. Currently, recruitment is open for Communications Media Outreach Volunteers, Communications Posting Specialists, and Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteer. Roles open for recruitment will always be listed on our volunteering page. Please take a look at this page if you’re interested! We also recommend you refer to our Volunteering FAQ if you have questions!

The OTW aims to recruit at least once a month from January until October for committees that have identified needs for additional volunteers. It is also worth noting that the AO3 is only one of the OTW’s many projects and not all OTW committees may necessarily be involved in AO3, and we can’t speak for when specific committees plan to recruit.

If you’d like to contribute to the AO3’s code, you are able to do this through our GitHub without formally volunteering. Please see here for more details.

Otherwise, you might also be interested in Fanlore, the OTW’s fandom preservation wiki, and helping add information there. (A good place to start is the New User Portal)

If you want to make sure you hear about recruitment opportunities when they come up, sign up for our OTW News by Email service. This allows you to sign up to receive an email notification whenever we publish a News Post (which includes recruitment calls)!

If you have any other questions, please reach out to our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee.

Q13: How will the TikTok ban affect ao3?

The OTW Legal Committee keeps an eye on legislation that could impact us and other fans. The TikTok ban (if implemented or re-instated) will not affect AO3 in its current form.

Asynchronous Questions

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

The meeting was adjourned at 00:02 27 January 2025 UTC.
Minutes approved by the Board on 2025 01 31.