Seven weeks so far…

[maia_bob]

454 emails this week of which 303 are labeled OTW - !General and 134 are labeled OTW – Board. The proportion of emails to IM chats is moving towards more chats. My calendar says ~15 hour week. I didn’t make it to a single official committee meeting which kind of blows my mind because it feels like this whole week has been All-OTW, all the time. *reads transcripts*

One of things I couldn’t talk about last week (Six weeks so far…) and the week before (Five weeks so far…) was Meta and you're lucky I only joined the board recently or I would have been not talking about it for over six months. if you're interested, my personal decision making process went a lot like this:

I would like to emphasise that this is a Board decision, and while AD&T, Support and Comms are receiving the feedback, they are not the instigators. Keep communicating, this is important. Be kind, this is important too.

I am also open to continuing discussing it, this is an invitation to comment or PM me if you want to talk about it with me.

ETA: Also! HUGE thank you to J. who got up when I called him at 1:35am his time because the AO3 was down for logged out users. THANK YOU!

Comments

[zooey_glass]

A certain post could only have made that clearer if that was, er, true. But since the communication from Board made it clear that this was a done deal, there was only so much that could be done vis-a-vis external communication.

[unjapanologist]

I was wondering about that. Why the decision not to have more input from elsewhere?

(Not attacking here, I can think of several reasons for such a decision. But I find it odd that absolutely nothing was mentioned about it.)

[maia_bob]

First up, I will never assume I'm being attacked and thank you for asking the question :)

Second, the Board is drafting up a post so you'll get an official response.

Third, me rambling... I think there were a lot of factors, some of which were apparent to me as a new board member, and some are slowly emerging as I follow all the reactions.

Apparently last year there was a lot of discussion about what the role of the Board actually was, and whether it was a 'lead and guide' kind of thing or more of a 'serve the wishes of the community' kind of thing - not that they are mutually exclusive :p One approach does lend itself to a little more in-Board decision making over community-consultation though - not that they don't both happen, it's a sliding scale.

There was also a metric ton of discussion about Meta (of which I have read much of the past discussion but by no means all of it) and some very heated views about whether to include or exclude. That paired with said lack of clarity about who could actually make that decision, made this an exhausting and difficult discussion.

When we convened as a board for 2013 we revisited (or visited in my case) the issue, and the history, and found that we didn't have conflicting views. I think that came as something of a relief after the months of debate. There was also a stronge sense that this was a policy issue: whether meta fell under transformative works as we defined them for AO3 and that setting this kind of policy is a Board level task.

I think this is where we could have handled it better - we were clear that we wanted the decision made, that we were in agreement on the outcome, and that we felt it was reasonable for the Board to make it.

What we didn't do, is the next level of organisation / communication where we got all the affected committees together and jointly worked out what the next steps were going to be RE: implementation.

Now this is just my opinion and it's early days, which means my analysis is still developing so I'd really like to know what other people's perceptions are (I always want to know). Please let me know if this doesn't in any way match your experiences, and help me (and the Board) do better by the OTW and the fannish community.

[unjapanologist]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, that makes sense! I don't see any problems with the Board making a reasonable decision after extensive debate. We all want to have our say all the time, but there also comes a point where you have to trust the people you elected to make intelligent decisions on your behalf.

FWIW, I agree with the decision about meta so I obviously don't mind too much how we got to it. But if I'd been of the opinion that meta doesn't belong on the AO3, I imagine I'd be a lot more cranky now. Maybe it would have been nice at some point to see a list of the issues the Board was considering, so that everyone could feel assured that their Important Personal Opinion was already among the things under discussion - or make a comment if they had an objection or argument that wasn't on the list yet.

I guess for me, it was just a little weird and frustrating to hear "We're talking about it" for months and months and months and have absolutely no idea on what part the Board was stuck ;)

[maia_bob]

My pleasure, I'm glad it seems to make sense.

...a list of the issues the Board was considering... that's a good idea. I'll talk to the Board and see what we can do. While we're past the decision-making point, we can strive for as much transparency as possible in our comunication.

I wasn't actively part of that months long discussion so I may need to be corrected here but I would say:

• Performance - what if the AO3 gets swamped
• Functionality - we don't have it (yet)
• Resources - who is going to code said functionality?
• Policy - how do we define and manage Meta?

Certainly they are things I am concerned about!

[maia_bob]

I could be wrong, but I got the impression Sam was saying it's a done deal in that we're explicitly allowing meta, but it's not a done deal in how that will be implemented.

[samjohnsson]

This. I was actually even confused by the original message from Board: until all this elaboration (and elsewhere), I had received that the message was along the lines of "we shall welcome everything you call meta, starting tomorrow!" Having had that clearer in the first post...ah, well. Learning experience for Board, and for us: howl louder, next time! ^^

[maia_bob]

...first they come in twos and yea shall build an ark!

Learning! Promise!