the comfort this cast gives me is unmatched

apparently europeans have the impression that US Americans never learn the metric system.

My comment on the OTW's most recent announcement post

It addressed the End OTW Racism campaign, but not any of the things Azarias revealed or things she has requested from the OTW Board and Legal committee. You can find her comments on the post here and here.

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I have been a member of AO3 since 2009. I was proud to support an organization with a vested interest in making a place for all fanwork, including kinds which for-profit corporations would find objectionable. It is a thing I supported with my money, my words, and posting my fanwork on AO3. I was also a tag wrangler for a little bit, because I wanted to use my labor to improve AO3 for everybody.

I have seen the OTW promise movement on many things regarding user safety, welfare, and DEI, some of which have been done. But the truly substantiative, laborious, gnarly work required has not actually progressed significantly. It is absolutely ridiculous that it has taken almost three years to move forward on recruitment of a DEI consultant/officer. I also understand that TOS updates take time to think through and require community feedback, but my understanding is this is something that has been in the works for, again, about three years. I'm not saying people should expect instantaneous results, but your stakeholders deserve more clarity than has been provided.

This is something I have felt for a long time, before the revelations about how poorly the Board and Legal handled the 2022 CSAM attack and the aftermath. It is one thing to drag your feet on things promised, it is completely different when organizational dysfunction, personal vendettas, and overreach from Legal contributed to grievous harm of at least one volunteer.

I would like to think we, as fans, understand that we do the things we do out of love. Certainly there will be annoyances and irritations in the process, but those are not the same as genuine harm. I know for many of us, fandom has been a refuge from extremely awful things in our lives. It tears me up inside that a thing you do out of love can lead to such a devastating trauma because people who should have given a shit absolutely did not.

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The rest of this message is addressed to the Board of Directors and the Legal Committee. I want a public response, preferably in the comments. (Others can feel free to +1/ditto/support this.)

* Given how grossly you violated the Code of Conduct all OTW personnel are supposed to abide by, there is no way any reasonable person (AO3 user, OTW member, anybody in fandom) can trust any of you to make decisions on behalf of the OTW. When can we expect your resignations?
* Do you have plans to retract the defamatory statements you have made in response to Azarias's revelations about how she was treated? Will you apologize to her for how she has been treated while volunteering for your organization? Will there be any counseling or therapy conducted by qualified practioners specializing in exposure to CSAM offered (and paid for by OTW) to Azarias or other affected volunteers, for as long as they need?
* Were there ever any intentions to address the possibility of another CSAM attack, or any plans to prevent or mitigate them? You can be honest.

I'm not asking these questions to be dramatic, but rather out of frustration there is very little certain stakeholders (AO3 users, people who won't give money to become voting members) can do to demand accountability and redress for a fellow fan and volunteer who has been grievously wronged. This organization can practice transparency and start making amends by answering them.

If this is something you'd also like addressed, I'd love it if you could go here and make a +1/upvote/supportive comment. Feel free to say your piece too. I also encourage you to go through the other comments on the main post and +1 the ones that speak to you.

Colorado used to be the Weed State. It used to be the only place in America you could get weed, and everyone wanted a piece of the Colarado Pie. But then weed got legalized everywhere. Now Colorado's only claims to fame are its Perfect Squareness and the fact that South Park takes place there, both fates that I would not wish upon my worst enemy

also, hot take, but speaking as someone who has volunteered to work on big projects tackling difficult issues out of community love in the past, I am just. is the otw probably a really toxic place to volunteer and work right now? Sure is, probably! Is public pressure that doesn't come with an influx of new people volunteering to do the messy work of figuring out what a better policy is, how to create anti harassment safeguards, and otherwise fixing the problem actually useful? Fuck no it is definitely not!

like I will be 1000% honest, I have in fact been asked personally to volunteer to help a community transition on a much smaller scale to fix problems of this magnitude to encourage a much smaller scale organization to work and perform a community service. and I took that job with a strong sense of "ye gods this is going to suck and I'm going to piss people off by doing things wildly imperfectly, but if I don't help provide my work it might not get done because this is fucking hard and no one is paying."

and I did it and I stopped as quickly as humanly possible. now that shit is someone else's volunteer problem and I'm delighted, because let us be real I'm a disabled middle aged lady with a day job and I don't have full time professional effort to dedicate to stuff I do in my spare time for free. that's one of the fun things about disability actually, it constricts the total store of focused labor hours available to me to put in, especially on landmine topics like extending the scope of my archiving projects to create a farsighted anti harassment policy that can't be weaponized.

so like. the work needs doing. anything anyone does is going to be imperfect and problematic and bad, because it is being done on an almost purely volunteer basis by people who are for whatever reason willing to donate high level professional skills and labor for free and don't need to do stuff for actual money and support instead. like sure the budget is enormous for servers but none of that goes to labor.

Outrage is going to do jack shit unless people volunteer to roll up their sleeves and start doing the work to donate a better policy, or better management. This shit is fucking difficult, exhausting, and impossible to do without pissing people off. I am damn sure not getting involved right now, and that's why I have not been commenting. Public pressure is not going to do jack shit if it didn't come with support.

If this is an issue that is important to you, you have to back up your outrage with resources. Since the AO3 does not exchange money for labor, that means showing up to offer to help build something different. as I said, I am a middle aged disabled lady who finds fandom and archive repositories to be important and helpful and I don't have any labor left to donate, so I have been reserving comment on complaint. If this is a thing that matters to you, congratulations! Public pressure is only useful insofar as it can be used to make the org let you help. It's up to you to actually help.