Organization name: Organization for Transformative Works

Committee/Workgroup/Volunteer Pool: Open Doors Committee

Reports to: Open Doors Team

Time Requirements: 3 – 6 hours/week

Term: 1+ years

Role overview: Open Doors volunteers work to preserve fanworks and fan materials, including assisting mods to import at-risk or offline archives to the Archive of Our Own and facilitating donations to the Fan Culture Preservation Project.

Date of position description review: Annually at the end of term

Key Responsibilities:

• Facilitate the import of at-risk and offline digital archives, as well as the import of print zine fanworks, to the Archive of Our Own
  • Communicate with archive moderators, zine publishers, and fanwork creators
  • Draft correspondences, announcement posts, and other written communications (internal and external to the OTW)
  • Maintain relevant content on Open Doors website and Fanlore
• Communicate with current and potential donors to the Fan Culture Preservation Project
• Facilitate the preservation of multimedia fanworks which cannot be imported to the Archive of Our Own
• Participate in discussions during committee meetings and in chat to further projects and activities of the committee
• Develop, document and/or maintain committee policies, procedures, and decisions
• Contribute to a cohesive spirit within the team
• Complete other committee tasks and responsibilities as assigned by the chairs and chair assistants

Experience:

• At least 18 years old and legally of age to open explicit fanworks in your local jurisdiction
• Able to reliably access AO3 with a computer or laptop
• Experience using the Archive of Our Own is required
• Experience using Google Drive and Google Documents is required
• Prior knowledge or experience with fannish archives, fanzines, or other fannish material welcomed but not required

Skills and attributes:

• Strong written communication skills in English are essential
• Strong project management skills
• Ability to meet deadlines, sometimes for unexpected and time-sensitive tasks
• Excellent attention to detail
• Commitment to team building and working effectively as part of a small team
• Ability to take initiative in carrying out the committee’s work
• Ability to adapt to new software and procedures quickly
• Nice to have, but not required: Fluency in languages other than English

Training requirements:

Administrative volunteer training is divided into two phases, one for “trainee administrative volunteers” (or “trainees”) and one for “junior administrative volunteers” (or “junior admins”).

During the trainee period, the volunteer will do some self-guided tutorials and then get experience answering creator tickets, researching prospective archive imports, and completing some rote manual tasks at bottleneck stages of the archive and fanzine import process. After 2-3 months, the trainee will discuss with a chair whether they are ready to progress to the junior admin period. If the trainee is not ready, they may extend the trainee period, transfer to the role of import assistant, or leave the committee, depending on their initiative and availability.

During the junior admin period, the volunteer will do a few more self-guided tutorials and then begin claiming their own imports and learning to project manage them with guidance from tutorials and from meetings with mentors. This phase lasts for multiple months, and junior admins work with mentors to keep track of which parts of the import process they’ve learned and which ones on which they still need to be trained. When volunteers reach a standard number of tasks completed (usually 80% of the tasks on their training checklists), they will complete a final live training with a chair or chair assistant to officially “graduate” from training.