Me, Myself and the OTW

[rodo]

Now I hope that the OTW archive will be a lot like Animexx (which is for fanart and dōjinshi as well, and which is the website of an association), but with less focus on anime fandoms and better rules. I have also been told by someone in the OTW that they want to make it more international than ff.net, which is what I volunteered for. My Thoughts on Yaoi/the OTW by rodo, 13th January 2008

First off, this is not an election post. It is an evaluation of sorts, and an explanation as to why I do not think I can justify working for the OTW for longer if there aren’t some drastic changes. This is not me being dramatic, in fact, I feel rather sober about it all. I did cry over my keyboard, but that’s not why I write it. I did have volunteer burnout, but that was years ago. I just came to realise that within the organisation, I am powerless to express my dissatisfaction on a wider scale, and that my hopes for the OTW will likely never be realised. I can not change that, which is partly due to the communication culture within the organisation, a culture that I am not equipped to deal with.

1. Forced Positivity – the OTW’s equivalent of Newspeak

When I read the latest post on the OTW blog, I felt sick. I felt disgusted. I felt as if I was trapped in some parallel version of reality where everyone was always saying good things. And I wasn’t even surprised by this response, because I’ve been attending the monthly, organisation-wide chats more or less regularily. During these chats, I started to black out. All the “\o/”s and “YAY”s are foreign to me, they’re white noise filling the space between the important bits. I have no idea if this is cultural or personal, but I am not a cheery person. I don’t feel enthusiastic, I don’t feel like cheering for every tiny success and I think that there is a limit to how much positive reinforcement a person can take before it becomes hollow, meaningless and a lie. I am sarcastic, cynical, pessimistic and focused on facts. I can’t parse texts full of meaningless white noise, and I tend to write shortish posts and texts myself. Why waste a thousand words on something that can be said in a hundred?

In the OTW, I often feel like an outsider because of that, and it doesn’t help that communication that is not full of Bauchpinselei, assurance that this isn’t personal and so on, is censored, at least when it comes to lobby work. I actually like to be passive-aggressive now and again, and when someone else is passive-aggressive towards me, I can parse that information. Hell, I can even deal with aggressiveness to some degree. But the forced positivity inside the OTW robs me of my words. Within these restrictions, I can not express myself properly. It’s as if the emphasis on politeness keeps certain opinions from being expressed, especially by people who are not super-savvy when it comes to communicating in this manner. Like, maybe non-native speakers, people from other cultural backgrounds and people from other educational backgrounds.

I know some people disagree with me on how to approach internal communication, among the my (likely soon to be former) committee, but this is how I feel, and maybe I am not alone in being silenced by an atmosphere.

2. What I Came To Achieve and What I Didn’t

As you can see above, I had a vision. I had a vision for the archive and for the OTW, and that’s why I volunteered and why I was a paying member for three years. I wrote that four years ago, and to make my goal when joining the OTW clearer, I will summarize it:

I wanted the OTW do be truly international. Not to pay lip service, but to produce its products with an international audience in mind. I wanted internationality to be the norm, and not an afterthought. I wanted the AO3 to be multilingual, as well as the other projects. And because other people had the same vision, even back then, I joined.

A multilingual archive was promised to us very early on, in 2008, I think. I know that I wrote Why The AO3 Needs To Be Translated in October 2009 because I was frustrated with the work being delayed again and again, because it was too difficult, because the software infrastructure was more important, because Yuletide needed to be done, because there were no coders, and nobody seemed to remember that internationality was supposed to be more than an afterthought. It was why in 2010, International Outreach was established, and I joined that committee as a staffer.

We figured out quite early on that actual outreach was out of the question until we had something to offer the groups we wanted to reach out to. It’s the reason why I never pimped the AO3 to German users, and why I wouldn’t pimp it to K-Drama fans either. It’s just not useful to people who don’t speak English very well and without an option to filter for language and canons that are K-Dramas. Currently, looking at the TV Series page, I have to scroll and jump between tabs and wikis to even find out that there are no fanfics for a series.

Initially, I was happy when the Archive Roadmap came out. It contained a timeline for when to expect a translation interface, I know that because I worked on the translation. Now the planning for including art and vids has already begun, something that was meant to be worked on after version 1.0 was finished, while the translation interface remains unfinished. I agree that including art and vids is important, but I don’t think it’s more important that working on those parts of the architecture that affect the entire archive (like the mess that are tags and translation), before trying to add new storeys and rooms. It also means that effectively, internationality is and afterthought, it will never be a priority or standard if there aren’t any drastic changes in the next half a year.

Another project that meant a lot to me was the restructuring of the categories. IO worked hard towards it for over a year, although it was a proposal that we stole from the tag wrangling mailing list. I think the current categories, fashioned after fanfiction.net, are too broad and make it hard to find some canons and harder to categorise others. Dinner for One can be found under movies, for example, under its original title. I looked for fanfic for Powerful Opponents and it took me a while to figure out that even if there were any, they would be under “G”, not “P” or “K”. Manhwas aren’t mangas, and frankly, putting superhero comics and Franco-Belgian comics in Comics is weird if you seperate Japanese comic canons from them. How to manage international co-productions? Why are there two categories for real persons? I think there is a lot to be improved there, but the proposal was really controversial and seems lost in communication right now.

This is sad, and it’s a failure not only of other people, but also a failure of mine. I should have been able to put people under pressure or stop believing in half-arsed excuses sooner. I should have made my problems with all of this clearer, but I didn’t. I am doing it now.

After about four years, here I am, trying to figure out the chances of the OTW becoming what I dreamed of. And I think they are slim. I fought windmills for years and failed. So unless somebody can convince me that there absolutely will be radical changes soon, I don’t think I can justify my continued involvement. Because after four years of development, how can my priority not be an afterthought?

Comments

[rodo]

Hey, Germans like talking about inane stuff too. But generally only if there's nothing they want to solve. Solving now, smalltalk later. At least that's what I prefer.

The problem with being tenacious is that people don't like it when other people annoy the hell out of them, and my kind of annoying doesn't work that well within the OTW, I think. Makes more enemies than it gets anything done.

[franzeska]

Yeah, that too. :(