Signal boost: "Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW" by chestnut_pod

[beatrice_otter]

Holy cow, you guys, go read chestnut_pod's amazing meta about democracy, infrastructure, the OTW, and anti-racism, it is incredibly insightful and is making points that are really important about the OTW's internal structure and how it works against any change (even changes everyone agrees are good and right and necessary). chestnut_pod has a ton of practical experience in organizing community groups, and it shows.

For some background: the entire OTW was started by Astolat and her friends. They were (and are) a group of very competent and dedicated people, and that's awesome! but none of them had experience with managing large groups of people, or organizing groups at a large scale, and holy cow it showed. When AO3 started growing beyond what their small cadre could reasonably handle, things started getting dicey behind the scenes. None of the policies and procedures scaled up very well, they didn't listen to people outside their own sphere, there was huge burnout among volutneers, incredible lack of transparency, and a whole host of other problems. This led to major conflict over elections in 2011 and 2015 (the 2015 election was pretty wild), the latter of which ended with the entire existing board flouncing in a huff which allowed a whole new cadre to come in, and many of that completely-new-board had experience with large nonprofits. Things have been better since.

But, and this is the crucial bit, there was no restructuring of the organization. The people running those structures knew way more about how to competently administer large organizations than the previous group had. But the structures were still the same ones that had been fine back when AO3 was tiny and just getting started, but really need to be updated and modernized. And that's never happened!

There is no transparency, there is almost no accountability, and if Astolat-and-company didn't foresee something as being a potential problem back in 2008 there's no way of making sure it gets handled unless it is some volunteer's pet project and something they can do by themselves with minimal support.

chestnut_pod does a great job of laying out why this is a problem, why it's getting in the way of anti-racism initiatives and everything else the OTW wants to do, and what could be done about it.

Here are some of my favorite bits:

(when dealing with large groups of people) It is impossible to have really free and fair elections without proper representative structures. Those representative structures will sometimes mean that the people you elect are going to make decisions in the moment that you don't like. But those same structures will ensure that, when the next election rolls around, there is something you can do about that. In the absence of representative democracy and structures that channel a large base into smaller, more nimble, but inherently rotating, core of decision-makers and buck-stoppers, "direct democracy" ends up just looking like an equally small group of decision-makers undemocratically decided upon via inertia, a group who can't be easily ousted, but who also can't make decisions quickly when called for. The worst of both worlds!

It is my impression that this is absolutely what happened within the OTW wrt the 2020 statement. (For what it's worth, I think it has happened in the past with things like "podfic streaming" and "dealing with certain spam works" -- it's just that those were far less consequential problems and so didn't gain this much traction or attention when the OTW failed to quickly and adequately address them.) Again, credit where it is due: the OTW has a very complicated job which they never really expected to grow to this scale. It was founded by a small group of people who all knew each other and had similar positions on most matters. It was the late naughts. All of this is true, and also, it's now 2023, the AO3 specifically is enormous, and the world has changed! It is simply not workable any longer to have some committee chairs who are not elected and have no term limits, no easy onboarding for new volunteers, and no clear hierarchy between the Board and the committees and between the committees themselves.

...


In short, each of the broken-down problems begs a certain number of questions, the answers to which we do not know, because the OTW has either not seen fit to try to answer them, or has never shared their answers broadly. This is a major problem either way, and I think it is the first thing that needs to happen, because having accurate knowledge is the first step to solving any problem, much less one as complex and multifaceted as the multiple facets of racism as they appear in OTW spaces. Having a good grasp on what the problems really are, whom they most affect, and how, is fundamental to enacting solutions that actually help, and, at the very least, proceeding with the knowledge of how these solutions are incomplete and imperfect, as they inevitably will be.

...

I think where the OTW has fallen down most is in not making that space to hear and listen. A lot of the solutions people propose out there in the wide Internet -- most notably anything about new mandatory tags of in-fic content moderation -- get shot down immediately as impossible. As I argued in the previous section, I don't think we actually know what is or isn't possible, because the OTW has done a terrible job telling us clearly what the impediments are to a variety of proposed fixes. Moreover, the discussion around those suggestions easily becomes acrimonious. Moderation isn't a dirty word; it's vital to having constructive conversations. Just like how having representative structure makes a space more democratic, moderation makes speaking out more democratic, because in an unmoderated space, the loudest voices drown out the rest.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I never thought about it until I read the post, and then I sat there going "wow that's obvious, how come nobody ever thought about that before?"