How To Reinvent The OTW
2012-07-19 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rodoI mentioned to anehan a while back that I had Thoughts on how to save the OTW and that I should really post them. This is that post. There are a lot of posts out there about what is wrong with the OTW (and OH GOD, it is a lot), but very few on how to change things for the better, so I thought I’d give it a try. Caveat: I am not an expert on anything, least of all all of the things mentioned here, so take it with a grain of salt. I am mainly speaking from my experiences in International & Outreach (IO) and Translations too, which are sort of the red-headed stepchildren of the OTW, at least it feels like that to me.
Part 1: Radical restructuring
By now it should be quite obvious that the way things are currently set up doesn’t work. It might work with fewer people, but it doesn’t with dozens of committees and hundreds of people. The organisation’s current set-up is much too flat and needs to be more hierarchical. There also have to be clear guidelines on who has the power/responsibility to do and decide what, which is currently … well. It works on the level of a committee. The chair is the boss and that’s that. But as a part of IO, I experienced lots of inter-committee work, and many things we tried needed the approval of the board, because we did not have the power to do anything. Which meant that whatever we wanted to do had to be done by consensus – we had to talk everyone else into doing what we thought would improve outreach. Looking back, it’s a miracle we ever got anything done, or rather,julia_beck is very good at talking to people.
I think it is basic logic that if you recognise a problem and try to solve it, the people you appoint to it need to be given the authority to do that, but within the OTW framework, a chair is a chair, a staffer is a staffer and they are all on the same position in the hierarchy. A chair cannot tell another chair what (not) to do, only a board member can do that. And that, of course, leads to an increased workload for the board and the org politics we’re all so sick of.
I have a vague idea on how to reorganise the structure, but explaining that is a bit complicated. On top of it all is, of course, the Board, but I think it should take over some responsibilities from Communications (namely, the PR part not based on website posts) and Volunteers (appointing people to a committee or team). The current committees Wiki, Systems and Legal I would leave largely untouched and Finances and Membership/Elections could, in my opinion, merge.
Another committee should be Website (including Webmasters and parts of IO), which would be responsible for managing the various things related to the website, with the Journal as a sub-committee and Content as another sub-committee which would be responsible for creating the content on the website (duh), like the FAQ and the blog posts, thus taking on the other part of Communications duties and the entire Vidding committee.
The next big committee would be Archive (including the rest of IO and the current content policies committee), with the sub-committees Coding, Tags and Abuse & Support (having worked on both on another archive I can assure you that merging them works). AD&T would probably be split between the most appropriate places, mostly Coding and Archive.
The two odd ones out in this case are Translations and Open Doors, because they are associated with both the Website and the Archive, so I would create them as sub-committees to both, Translations being told what to translate for Website and the Archive, and Open Doors working with the archive or the website, depending on the needs of the project. This is all still rather rough, since I probably forgot some committees or teams, so I’ll explain using an example:
The Board gives people broad directions of what to do, say “Prioritise introducing fanart to the archive”, the Archive team decides on how to do that by telling the Coding team “Include a way to mark type of fanwork, code specific posting forms and categories, hosting, etc.”, the Abuse and Support team “draft possible image-specific policies/FAQ to hand over to Legal for approval” and the Tagging team “Work out list of canonical tags/categories for fanart, e.g. ‘drawing’, ‘digital painting’”. And the teams would then go to work, with the Archive team answering questions and mediating the interest. When someone on Coding has an idea for a new feature, they tell the Archive team and that works it into a rough work schedule and maybe amend the plan with details and considerations.
The Board would, of course, receive scheduled reports from all the teams so that they are informed of what progress they have made, so that they actually do know what all the parts of the organisation are doing, which informs their broad directives.
An important element to this hierarchical approach would be the rule that one cannot occupy more than one position within a chain of command. I don’t think there would be a problem with, say, a Fanlore editor also working on Tags, but there is a conflict of interest in a Board member coding the archive (really subtle example here, I know). For one, the other members never know whether or not they are speaking to the coder or the Board member. For another, the Board member will likely be tempted to bypass the chain of command, and lastly, the “middle management” would have problems receiving and giving orders to the same person. Of course, this also frees people from juggling multiple responsibilities and allows them to focus on one thing.
Part 2: The Leviathan of Our Own
It’s become obvious that the AO3 has problems, and that the current efforts are a bit like chugging water out of a sinking boat. I don’t know anything about coding, but people who know more about it have written detailed posts on what is wrong. I only know that a translatable interface was promised to us years (four, I think) ago and that the whole “international” part of IO isn’t much good without it. And nothing happened. Instead, new bells and whistles were added, which didn’t make much sense to me since a translation interface would affect the whole site, so shouldn’t it be done first? The biggest problem there was, I think, that the coders weren’t up to or interested in the problem, and so it wasn’t solved.
There are probably a lot of problems in the code that the volunteers either can’t or won’t work on, and that is not their fault. They’re doing their best for free. So I think it would be best to hire a specialist, even if part time, to fix things. Maybe even more than one, if necessary. That way, the volunteers can still work on what interests them, while the other, less interesting things get done too. And if the funds don’t cover that, introducing a way to donate only to the AO3, without any membership rights attached to it, might help. I remember seeing some people say that they would donate to the AO3, but not to the OTW, so why shouldn’t that be possible?
A paid coder would also make it easier to stick to a roadmap without veering off the path too much, which is pretty much what happened to the last roadmap that I remember so well because I translated it in painstaking detail, just a thought.
And before I forget it – please differentiate between freeform tags and tags like pairings/characters/fandoms, because those are the most important for browsing and people will probably be able to deal with not having all the freedom in the world there. Yes, it will lead to problems – I wrote a fic that would be without a character in the character field without the current system, but on another archive, I dealt with it. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. As does “Hey, I’d like to have X character added to Y fandom, please” – hell, having wranglers who do only that would definitely improve on the ff.de solution, where you have to wait for weeks or months to post your fic.
anehan a while back that I had Thoughts on how to save the OTW and that I should really post them. This is that post. There are a lot of posts out there about what is wrong with the OTW (and OH GOD, it is a lot), but very few on how to change things for the better, so I thought I’d give it a try. Caveat: I am not an expert on anything, least of all all of the things mentioned here, so take it with a grain of salt. I am mainly speaking from my experiences in International & Outreach (IO) and Translations too, which are sort of the red-headed stepchildren of the OTW, at least it feels like that to me.Part 1: Radical restructuring
By now it should be quite obvious that the way things are currently set up doesn’t work. It might work with fewer people, but it doesn’t with dozens of committees and hundreds of people. The organisation’s current set-up is much too flat and needs to be more hierarchical. There also have to be clear guidelines on who has the power/responsibility to do and decide what, which is currently … well. It works on the level of a committee. The chair is the boss and that’s that. But as a part of IO, I experienced lots of inter-committee work, and many things we tried needed the approval of the board, because we did not have the power to do anything. Which meant that whatever we wanted to do had to be done by consensus – we had to talk everyone else into doing what we thought would improve outreach. Looking back, it’s a miracle we ever got anything done, or rather,
julia_beck is very good at talking to people.I think it is basic logic that if you recognise a problem and try to solve it, the people you appoint to it need to be given the authority to do that, but within the OTW framework, a chair is a chair, a staffer is a staffer and they are all on the same position in the hierarchy. A chair cannot tell another chair what (not) to do, only a board member can do that. And that, of course, leads to an increased workload for the board and the org politics we’re all so sick of.
I have a vague idea on how to reorganise the structure, but explaining that is a bit complicated. On top of it all is, of course, the Board, but I think it should take over some responsibilities from Communications (namely, the PR part not based on website posts) and Volunteers (appointing people to a committee or team). The current committees Wiki, Systems and Legal I would leave largely untouched and Finances and Membership/Elections could, in my opinion, merge.
Another committee should be Website (including Webmasters and parts of IO), which would be responsible for managing the various things related to the website, with the Journal as a sub-committee and Content as another sub-committee which would be responsible for creating the content on the website (duh), like the FAQ and the blog posts, thus taking on the other part of Communications duties and the entire Vidding committee.
The next big committee would be Archive (including the rest of IO and the current content policies committee), with the sub-committees Coding, Tags and Abuse & Support (having worked on both on another archive I can assure you that merging them works). AD&T would probably be split between the most appropriate places, mostly Coding and Archive.
The two odd ones out in this case are Translations and Open Doors, because they are associated with both the Website and the Archive, so I would create them as sub-committees to both, Translations being told what to translate for Website and the Archive, and Open Doors working with the archive or the website, depending on the needs of the project. This is all still rather rough, since I probably forgot some committees or teams, so I’ll explain using an example:
The Board gives people broad directions of what to do, say “Prioritise introducing fanart to the archive”, the Archive team decides on how to do that by telling the Coding team “Include a way to mark type of fanwork, code specific posting forms and categories, hosting, etc.”, the Abuse and Support team “draft possible image-specific policies/FAQ to hand over to Legal for approval” and the Tagging team “Work out list of canonical tags/categories for fanart, e.g. ‘drawing’, ‘digital painting’”. And the teams would then go to work, with the Archive team answering questions and mediating the interest. When someone on Coding has an idea for a new feature, they tell the Archive team and that works it into a rough work schedule and maybe amend the plan with details and considerations.
The Board would, of course, receive scheduled reports from all the teams so that they are informed of what progress they have made, so that they actually do know what all the parts of the organisation are doing, which informs their broad directives.
An important element to this hierarchical approach would be the rule that one cannot occupy more than one position within a chain of command. I don’t think there would be a problem with, say, a Fanlore editor also working on Tags, but there is a conflict of interest in a Board member coding the archive (really subtle example here, I know). For one, the other members never know whether or not they are speaking to the coder or the Board member. For another, the Board member will likely be tempted to bypass the chain of command, and lastly, the “middle management” would have problems receiving and giving orders to the same person. Of course, this also frees people from juggling multiple responsibilities and allows them to focus on one thing.
Part 2: The Leviathan of Our Own
It’s become obvious that the AO3 has problems, and that the current efforts are a bit like chugging water out of a sinking boat. I don’t know anything about coding, but people who know more about it have written detailed posts on what is wrong. I only know that a translatable interface was promised to us years (four, I think) ago and that the whole “international” part of IO isn’t much good without it. And nothing happened. Instead, new bells and whistles were added, which didn’t make much sense to me since a translation interface would affect the whole site, so shouldn’t it be done first? The biggest problem there was, I think, that the coders weren’t up to or interested in the problem, and so it wasn’t solved.
There are probably a lot of problems in the code that the volunteers either can’t or won’t work on, and that is not their fault. They’re doing their best for free. So I think it would be best to hire a specialist, even if part time, to fix things. Maybe even more than one, if necessary. That way, the volunteers can still work on what interests them, while the other, less interesting things get done too. And if the funds don’t cover that, introducing a way to donate only to the AO3, without any membership rights attached to it, might help. I remember seeing some people say that they would donate to the AO3, but not to the OTW, so why shouldn’t that be possible?
A paid coder would also make it easier to stick to a roadmap without veering off the path too much, which is pretty much what happened to the last roadmap that I remember so well because I translated it in painstaking detail, just a thought.
And before I forget it – please differentiate between freeform tags and tags like pairings/characters/fandoms, because those are the most important for browsing and people will probably be able to deal with not having all the freedom in the world there. Yes, it will lead to problems – I wrote a fic that would be without a character in the character field without the current system, but on another archive, I dealt with it. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. As does “Hey, I’d like to have X character added to Y fandom, please” – hell, having wranglers who do only that would definitely improve on the ff.de solution, where you have to wait for weeks or months to post your fic.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 04:09 pm (UTC)now onto details :)
First of all I agree with Ira's comment above on journal. Journal committee maintains an academic journal, and a lot of the work they do has very little to do with webdesign. You are on to something here through. One of the biggest organizational hiccups of the current system is that technical skillset is mixed up with projects and sometimes in a very dysfunctional way.
I'll post something more detailed on this on my journal but essentially we have this problem where it is not clear if say Journal needs technical help, where they will get it. I THINK the current solution is that there are people assigned to help out, and web does help if further assistance is needed? But then again, is a fulltime person needed just for that job? It seems a lot more straightforward if everyone who needed coding or designing could put a ticket in, and someone from the pool would respond. Granted we would have people specializing in projects (in addition to skillset) and some projects would have a lot more bugs etc than others but it would help using the people we DO have more effectively.
Second issue this on about ao3 development is that it is again mixed in coding. There is no design process (which in all fairness is a common problem in a lot of OSS or probably in small companies). You cannot just add a feature out of blue because a coder wanted it, or anyone wanted it really. /o\ There needs to be a reason, an understanding of the user base, how they will use it then optimize the UI for it. Similar types of consideration goes into feature and bug prioritization. On this note I agree that having a paid coder, even on contract basis to make things that volunteers will not or can't do could be useful. Again more on this in my post since I am already hogging the space here but the point is that, I do agree with the whole archive project management, its just... we have bigger problems in our software development system. (a lot of it is due to sudden growth of the projects, so it is probably normal: we just need to fix it)
About the donation issue I disagree, a lot. The reason is that the OTW projects are part of an ecosystem. The AO3 might be more visible (and for now taking most of the money anyway) but for example works on AO3 and from there AO3 would be affected if legal wasn't there protecting the org from being sued :) and working to defend the legality of fanworks all over. We do need the internal resources the org uses to keep track of documentation,to make sure we can recruit the personnel that the archive needs like all other projects, do outreach to increase our visibility, etc etc. You can just put the servers in a vacuum, and expect the rest to work. The issue is that this is not necessarily visible to average AO3 user. The situation is actually a little similar to Mozilla's case where their flagship software are Firefox and Thunderbird (and a lot users probably don't know what Mozilla exactly is or do) but the donations are generic (as far as I can tell at least. Ye goodness it was hard to reach to their donate site!)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 05:44 pm (UTC)Which is pretty much why I put it as a subcommittee of the general Website committee. Not because I think the people should have much of an intellectual input in this case, but because Website would be responsible for maintaining the technical side of things and would thus be able to tell Journal what they can and can not do with the software.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 07:06 pm (UTC)