once again asking the OTW for that transparency it promised

Another month, another OTW newsletter that makes no mention of what the org is doing to fight racist harassment on its platforms.

You know what else it doesn't mention? That the minutes for the March 27th Board Meeting have finally been posted. (Edit: a link has since been added.) This was the meeting with the first ever update on the OTW's diversity work. (The edit to the newsletter still does not mention this.)

Why not send the OTW a note requesting they add a regular section to future newsletters for updates on their diversity, equity, and inclusion work? You can send it to Communications or the OTW Board. If you've already sent them a note, send another. I did.

Here's what I wrote:

It's been almost a year since the OTW published its vision statement pledging greater transparency and I am once again writing to ask that you add a dedicated section to the monthly OTW newsletters to provide updates on the organization's anti-racist work. Making this a regular part of your newsletters will show this work is a priority for the org and that there is progress being made, even if it's incremental.

For example, April's newsletter missed an opportunity to join the conversation about racism in fannish spaces when it didn't even mention that the minutes from the March 27th Board Meeting have been posted, a meeting that included the first ever update on the OTW's diversity work. A summary of this update would have been an excellent addition to the newsletter. After all, fans can't read this information if they don't know it's out there!

Thank you,
Punk

You're welcome to borrow or adapt my letter. If you write your own, considering sharing it to encourage others, and please, spread the word. You can retweet on Twitter, boost on Mastodon, or reblog the whole darn thing on Tumblr where there's also a little poll.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for linking! It does say this:

Update on the OTW’s diversity work
This section will be a permanent addition to all Board of Directors public meetings going forward, as we realize the OTW needs to be more transparent and proactive with regards to keeping fans in the loop with regards to what we have been able to do so far to make our organization and projects safer and more welcoming to fans of color.

Edit: The newsletter does already link to the minutes, also...perhaps they updated it.

Edited 2023-05-12 17:56 (UTC)

Yeeeah, that wasn't there the day the April Newsletter was published. They must have added it later, and the newsletter still doesn't mention the diversity update.

Well, glad they added it, and thanks for linking. As someone who's actively stayed uninvolved with the OTW since its inception and was AWOL from fandom at several crucial flashpoints, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Thanks for letting me know they'd added a link to the minutes! Though for a moment there I was worried I was just real bad at reading. O.o

If you're interested in a brief overview of what the OTW has been up to, end-otw-racism is a group of fans working to organize a two week action (starting May 17th) to send a message to the OTW that we'll hold them to their promises, and the group's End OTW Racism: A Call To Action covers some examples of racist harassment on AO3 and what the OTW has pledged to do to protect fans of color on their platforms. Lots of links in that post for background reading, too.

Thanks! That's actually how I ended up here. :) I'm going to be supporting and participating. But I want to make sure I understand the back story.

Hey, that's cool! They'd asked for permission to link to my posts, but I didn't realize they'd gone up yet. Thanks for stopping by!

I followed you a while back, but deepa retweeted your interview on the Fan Service podcast, and I listened to it yesterday, then came over here to see if you'd posted about the protest. So, a big circle!

It's nice to know my words are reaching people. Would you happen to have a link to that podcast?

My bad, I had the name wrong. (This is you being interviewed, right? Or am I mistaken?)

https://twitter.com/fansplaining/status/1653776434698108928

Oh, that's not me! That's Stitch! I quote their work a lot, but I could never. I can only read and learn. :D

Ah, okay! My apologies!

Not a problem!

Thank you as always. I was surprised to find the link to the minutes in the newsletter when I went back to look again when I was giving my letter a final look-over, as I hadn’t recalled it being there, and so I was second guessing myself; glad to know I wasn’t imagining it.

As a test I tried starting from the home page and it took me so long to figure out how to even find the minutes via the navigation, which was really frustrating. However, there is a direct rss to them once you get to the minutes page, so I’ve now added that to my feeds. Frustrating that they’re not included in the top level feed though.

WOW, looking for the minutes from the home page is an exciting experiment. I have them bookmarked because I can never find them when I'm looking for them and I guess this is why. Also, their "Join Us" page doesn't even mention you can attend the quarterly board meetings. Deep sigh.

I also thought I'd lost my mind a little when I saw the minutes were now linked in the newsletter, but thankfully I saved a copy in the Wayback Machine when the newsletter first came out and was able to reassure myself that, no, that wasn't there when it was published. They added it later and didn't post an update on the social medias...unlike their recent Update to OTW Signal, May 2023, which they posted everywhere. I guess they think people's concern over AIs scraping their fic is larger then their interest in what the OTW's doing to protect fans of color.

I was also very disheartened that AI scraping merited a pretty quick statement, while they just snuck in the minutes link edit. Glad you got that on wayback.

I find it incredibly frustrating that the board server invites & alerts only go out on Twitter; I just plugged it into ifttt so that I get an email alert about it, but it’s incredibly frustrating. It should be a sign up mailing list or something, or at least prominently featured on their page. (I sense that I should gather these thoughts for my next letter; note to self.)

I was going to make an rss to the board minutes if there wasn’t one, but luckily the feedbro extension lets you ask if there are any feeds on/for a page and there was one! Even though it’s not linked on the page; so frustrating. It’s https://www.transformativeworks.org/board_minutes/feed/

It's not an exaggeration to say I do more to get the word out about upcoming board meetings than the OTW does. I've been hounding them about this for a while now. There's no reason they can't share the meeting dates on Tumblr and Dreamwidth, too, and a mailing list is also a really good idea. It's like they don't want people to know there are public board meetings?

That RSS feed for the minutes is also very useful! Thanks for finding it. I've added it to Dreamwidth so people can follow it here: otw_board_minutes_feed

You are doing [whatever centralized or diffuse force drives the universe]'s work here.

Like, I don't know how we solve OTW's racism problem--I rely on other voices to help guide my thinking on that--but I do know communication and I know it's the absolute bare minimum required to start work on the problem. So I have been working on it. <3

once again asking the OTW for that transparency it promised

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