Hello from Strategic Planning! Just a short update from us this month…
We are almost finished with the first draft of our Tag Wrangling report, and we’re very excited to share it internally and receive feedback. As we mentioned in our last update, first the report will be shared with Tag Wrangling committee staff, then with the Board, then with Tag Wrangling volunteers; then it will be published publicly. Each of these groups will have the opportunity to correct factual errors in review, but not to remove or edit the summary of what was revealed by the information gathering process.
We are specifically interested right now in hearing more about tag wrangling issues concerning fandoms that are underrepresented on the Archive Of Our Own, particularly anime/manga and other non-Western fandoms. If you are a current or retired tag wrangler for these fandoms and have thoughts to share, we would like to hear from you, particularly if you did not have a chance to fill out our survey. You can get in touch with us through our direct contact form
We are also beginning to conduct follow-up interviews with people who indicated on their survey responses that they’d like to talk to us further about a particular issue or experience. We really appreciate how many respondents were willing to take even more time out of their busy lives to share their thoughts with us, and we’re excited for the more in-depth information these interviews will yield!
The second team to work with us is Volunteers & Recruiting, and we have recently begun drafting our Volunteers & Recruiting report. We’ve also deployed a survey to retired Volunteers & Recruiting staffers and chairs.
One of the things we’ve found quite helpful is the “meta” question we include in our surveys:
Are there any questions we should have asked on this survey that we didn’t, or something else we should have done differently (e.g., a different approach, a different format, etc.)?
We’ve done our best to take those answers and use them to improve each new survey to make sure they are easy to take, easy to understand, and get us the most amount of data possible. It seems to be working! We feel extremely lucky and grateful that the OTW volunteers and staffers taking our surveys are so willing to give us immediate feedback on what we’re doing right and wrong — a big thank you to all of them!
Next up for us is the information gathering process for the Open Doors team: we’ve reviewed documentation, deployed a staff survey and started interviewing the chair. We are in the process of contacting the chairs of other committees to determine who we should look at next. We’ve also started talking to the Translation committee about actually getting our reports translated; at the very least, we’re hopeful we’ll be able to have our all-org and Board reports translated.
As always, people with questions and comments about the strategic planning process and/or who would like to get in touch with us about their OTW experiences are all welcome to contact us via our direct contact form. We look forward to hearing from you!