Archive of Our Own

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Amy2, who volunteers on the Development & Membership committee as a Chair and Premiums Specialist.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I’m Co-Chair of Development & Membership (DevMem), which is the committee that makes sure the OTW has enough money to run all of its projects. Primarily we do this through the membership drives in April and October.

I’m also our Premiums Specialist, which means I order and then ship out most of our donation gifts; either by sending them to the donor directly, or by relaying them in batches through our Midshipmen (regional volunteers who are able to mail gifts out locally, saving us a lot of money in international postage). Last Drive, about a quarter of all individual donations came with a gift request, and about 2/3rds of the total amount donated was put towards a gift!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

It depends on the time of year! DevMem’s weekly tasks are things like keeping an eye on our inbox (we take turns signing up for shifts), answering donor questions, making sure our donor database is doing what we want it to do, and keeping the donation form and FAQs updated.

My regular weekly mission is to reach out to people who have hit the goal they set for their recurring donation gift. For those who aren’t familiar, when you sign up to make a monthly recurring donation, you can request that we send you a gift when you reach a certain total. For example, if you set up a $25 monthly donation and request a mug, we will send one to you in ten months when you hit $250. Because it can be a long time before you reach your goal—shout out to the person who finally got the discontinued tumbler we’d been saving for them, after donating $10/year for 8 years!—we send out an email first asking recipients to confirm their current addresses. Sometimes I have to email multiple times to get a response. We have a Naughty List of people who have ignored the first six messages or so, and we email blast that one every few months as well. If you’re on it, You Know Who You Are. Please email me back ☹

Once a month, a Membership Data Specialist pulls the list of people who requested donation gifts the previous month, and I get those sent out. It ranges from a few dozen to a few thousand items, depending on how recent Drive was. My typical weeks after Drive are spent packaging gifts, listening to audiobooks, and, sometimes, leaving candy out for my local postal workers so they don’t hate me.

I also track the returned gifts, and a small and wonderful team of DevMem volunteers reaches out to donors to get updated information so that we can resend them. (In case any readers need to hear this, a lot of times the post office will not deliver to your pen name. Please be sure you can receive mail under the name you give us, or else it comes back with an “I don’t know them” sticker on it and we have to use your donation to pay shipping twice.)

I am very motivated to do this because the returns live on my desk, otherwise I will forget about them. And when someone requests a recurring donation gift, we put it in a literal bin of non-infinite space called “the Hope Chest” which is, at the time of writing, on my literal floor with a dozen of its friends. (The other bins have names such as “McShip,” “The Novak”, and “Party Rock Anthem”. Five points if you can guess what’s in them.)

TL;DR: we want to send you your stuff! Please help us do that! Maybe check your spam folders!

What made you decide to volunteer?

I joined DevMem in 2018 as a graphic designer, because I liked art and fanfiction and thought it sounded like fun. Graphics is still one of my roles (the playing cards and butterfly pin are my babies) though I’m thrilled that DevMem has had an actual four-person design team the last couple years–October’s sticker set is a collaboration between them! I became a Membership Data Specialist not too long after joining because tributes were needed and I thought knowing how CRMs work might be useful.

I took on the Co-Chair and shipping roles a couple years back, when the person who had held both roles for the last 10 years(!) retired. Her name is also Amy, so I seemed like the most reasonable choice to maintain continuity with our vendors. (I kid: my real qualification was being a Data Specialist with access to a shed.)

Also, in the interests of honesty…I was delighted to have the chance to answer the question “what work do you do for AO3?” with “I’m in charge of shipping.”

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Other people have said really insightful things on other 5 Things posts, so I’m going to go with an extremely silly challenge that I’m pretty sure is unique to me as an OTW problem: I have, in my Shipping career, acquired two free disassembled sheds of questionable integrity that did not come with instructions. Some very tolerant loved ones (who were as uninterested in sharing our living space with bulk orders of OTW merch as I was) spent many hours helping me assemble them, using a combination of our wits and online manuals for similar-but-not-identical sheds. I am not an engineer, a carpenter, or even particularly good at puzzles. I did not think signing up to make Drive banners in 2018 would lead to climbing a tree in 2024 to install a tarp, having given up on keeping the shed’s original roof.

What fannish things do you like to do?

Mostly at this point I do fanbinding. I manage to actually write about one fic a year. But really what I do is put AO3 pins in padded envelopes when I should be working, typeset fics to bind when I should be putting AO3 pins in padded envelopes, and read fanfiction on my phone when I should be sleeping.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with taki, who volunteers as a User Response Translation Committee Chair, Policy & Abuse Volunteer, and Tag Wrangling Volunteer.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I've had a bunch of roles in the OTW, all of which fit into it in different ways! I started out as a tag wrangler, where I canonize and connect tags in my fandoms, helping users more easily find what they're looking for on AO3. A couple years later I found my way into the Policy & Abuse Committee (PAC), where I investigate reports of AO3 Terms of Service violations and help users who have questions about the TOS. Finally, as co-Chair and PAC liaison in User Response Translation (URT), I help run the committee that gets PAC and Support emails in AO3's busiest non-English languages translated so that people can communicate with us in their preferred language.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

In URT, what my week looks like depends on what's going on in the committee. Routine work like assigning tasks and following up on them depends on how many translation requests we get, and if we're working on a project like a boilerplate translation or having committee-wide discussions of translation standards, I keep an eye on those and help guide them if needed. If training or recruitment is going on, I need to set aside time to update related documentation or review applications. I also handle any personnel issues that come up in the committee, and regularly discuss committee changes and improvements with my co-chair, our volunteer coordinators, and the PAC and Support liaisons.

For PAC, I check our ticket management software almost every day to see if I need to follow up on any cases. At least once a week, I sit down for a longer session of investigating new cases and reviewing other volunteers' cases. Other weekly tasks include working on projects to improve our documentation, and assigning or reviewing trainee tasks when I'm helping train new volunteers (which is often, since it's something I love doing and volunteer for whenever I can).

For wrangling, I try to set aside a chunk of time every week or two to handle as many unwrangled tags in my fandoms as I can. In general, I also keep an eye on my email or our work chat channels for anything that I need to do or discussions I should contribute to in all three committees. The OTW's work chat app is frequently at the top of the list in my weekly phone screen time report…

What made you decide to volunteer?

I'd always thought tag wrangling sounded like a fun way to put niche fandom knowledge to use. So in 2021, mid-COVID lockdown, when I quit one of my jobs and saw that the OTW was recruiting tag wranglers, I thought, why not use my newfound free time to give back to an organization that has brought me a lot of joy?

I joined PAC a couple years later because I wanted to be in a more user-facing role, and I think AO3's Terms of Service and its enforcement are a big part of what creates and maintains the site's unique culture. I also really enjoy the kind of investigative work that we do a lot of in PAC!

URT was created a little while after I joined PAC, and I volunteered to Chair it because I think that as AO3 grows internationally, it's very important for users to get high quality and quick communication from us in their native languages. I've been able to see firsthand the impact that URT has had on PAC's ability to handle tickets in the four languages we currently cover, and I'm extremely happy to have contributed even a little bit to making AO3 more accessible to people around the world.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Chairing URT has been very rewarding, and I'm really happy to see how far the committee has come, but it was definitely extremely daunting when we started (we're a very young committee –⁠ in fact, the youngest in the OTW)! We had to figure out a ton of new processes and workflows to follow and, of course, write soooo much documentation. Additionally, since URT is very closely tied with PAC and Support, we had to (and still do) communicate a lot with them to balance the needs of all three committees. These days, we still face some growing pains compared to more established committees, but it feels great to have our core workflows running smoothly and to be confident we'll keep improving.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I love discussing whatever I'm currently into with my fandom friends, some of whom I met through OTW volunteering! I also spend way too much time scrolling Tumblr and reading/writing (mostly reading) meta there. In general I think meta is an underrated form of fandom engagement, I love to seek it out and wish more people knew you can actually post it to AO3. I also read fic of course, mostly in binges every few months when I suddenly get the urge to go diving through a tag, and I have dabbled in writing oneshots, the most recent of which was a joke drabble written for a friend >:)

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Magda (she/her), who volunteers as a TikTok Moderator.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I think Communications in general does an amazing job of making the OTW a bit more accessible to the average user – we get so many people commenting on our videos who are surprised that “oh, this is the official OTW TikTok!” Archive of Our Own (AO3) and other OTW projects have obviously gotten so much more popular in the last couple years, and a lot of people are interacting without even knowing there is an organisation fully staffed with dedicated volunteers making all of this happen behind the scenes. And I think it’s important for all of these new people in fandom to know what the OTW does and stands for, if only to realise that what they’re joining is a community, not a content machine.

However small their contribution, every single OTW volunteer is making this great work happen, and as a Communications volunteer, I’m super happy and proud to be able to spread the word. I think TikTok is a particularly interesting social media platform for the OTW to be on, since an average post will reach way more new viewers than followers – which obviously comes with its own challenges, but is really great for spreading the word and reaching wider audiences!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

For me personally, it’s finding fleeting moments across the week to log on and beta scripts, sign off on videos, approve any comments, etc. This is usually five minutes I have while waiting for the train or for the water to boil for my coffee. It greatly depends on my schedule and state of mind how many of these moments I find in any given week, but I try to do as much as I can. And then on the weekend, I’ll have a longer work session where I sit down to complete the bigger tasks like writing scripts and editing videos.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I’ve been an AO3 user for a looooong time, but I wasn’t super aware of all the work that goes on behind the scenes until last year. I was doing a project on fanbinding during my MA in journalism, and I got in touch with the OTW for comment on the legality of the whole thing. I got a lovely – and speedy! – response from Legal as well as the opportunity to interview Rebecca Tushnet. The thing about being a student journalist and trying to get people to agree to an interview is… not many people do. Everyone is extremely busy, I get it, but sometimes it can be discouraging. I loved my experience with the OTW, and I’ve always been a nerd when it comes to fan culture, so I made it a point from then on to make every single project about fandom in one way or another. My lecturers loved it (heavy sarcasm, although I think they learned to appreciate my passion after a while…). I’m going to use this as an opportunity to shout out Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) as well – an amazing resource for anyone doing any kind of research into fannish things.

Anyway, by the time recruitment opened for social media mod roles at the OTW, it felt like a natural progression for me, so applying wasn’t even a question.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

This is probably a boring and predictable answer, but juggling everything – a full time job, personal projects, and keeping up with not only my tasks as an OTW volunteer but also trying to keep up with everything else that’s going on within the organisation. It is genuinely wild (and amazing) how much work goes on within the OTW.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I started writing fanfiction over a decade ago – before I even learned English, I would write cringy Violetta fanfic in Polish and post it on a personal fansite. I wrote fanfic quite regularly right up until I started university. These days, I don’t get to do it as much – I only write when something genuinely moves me to a point where I just can’t stop myself from writing something (like Project Hail Mary most recently – it won’t leave me alone, someone help).

These days, my main fannish creative outlet is FANMADE – an indie magazine about fan culture, which I run alongside some amazing writers and artists. I dreamed up FANMADE as my final uni project over a year ago, and I just couldn’t let it go after graduation. We’re still here a year later, the team has grown significantly, and it’s so much work, but it’s also so much fun. Shameless plug incoming (but I was told it was okay, haha) – I encourage anyone who is slightly unhinged about fan culture to check it out. It’s very much a work in progress, but we are getting better with each issue – and above all, it’s a labour of love, as most things in fandom are.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with megidola, who volunteers as an Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Head, Policy & Abuse Volunteer & Supurrvisor, and Tag Wrangling Volunteer & Supervisor.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I juggle a bunch of different things within the org, because I like variety!

I started out as a tag wrangler, so I am part of the team of people who look at the tags you all add to your works on Archive of Our Own (AO3) and decide how to connect them on AO3's backend to help users filter things properly. I've since also become a Tag Wrangling supervisor. This means that I am responsible for all kinds of administrative tasks within the committee, helping train and graduate new wranglers, and answering questions or concerns any wranglers might have.

I am also part of the Policy & Abuse committee (PAC), or a PAC cat, as we are also called. (Meow.) We investigate user reports about content that violates AO3's Terms of Service (TOS), as well as make decisions about how the TOS should be enforced. I am a supervisor (or supurrvisor; we commit to the cat theme) for that committee as well, which comes with similar duties around dealing with admin, documentation, and enquiries from other PAC cats.

Last but certainly not least, I am head of the Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup (OCR). We are responsible for implementing the goals on the OTW Culture Roadmap, which are all themed around making the OTW a more accessible, equitable, and welcoming place to volunteer.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Because I am juggling so many different roles, my weeks also look pretty different depending on what's needed.

Generally, I'll start by logging into our org chat tool and checking what I've missed since I was last online and whether anything is urgent or needs my immediate attention. Then I'll start working down my reminder list of tasks to do. I try to keep a pretty in-depth to-do list, because my memory is Swiss cheese and things will fall through the cracks otherwise. (Thanks, ADHD.)

Which tasks are on said to-do list varies from week to week. The things I do consistently are leading OCR meetings and contributing to various project work, checking my wrangling page to make sure my fandoms are taken care of, and logging into our PAC ticket programme to take care of tasks there. This involves drafting tickets, sending tickets which have been beta'd and therefore signed off on, betaing other peoples' tickets, or responding to user replies. PAC work also often requires me to discuss our policies and guidelines with other cats to make sure we enforce the TOS fairly for all users.

Supervisor work for both PAC and Tag Wrangling depends on which tasks need doing, which rotates based on a lot of factors, including time of year. Usually it will involve a lot of writing documentation, database admin, record keeping, and various emails though. (ᵕ,—ᴗ—,)

OCR project work is really dependent on the specific project. Because so much of the culture roadmap centres around creating new processes or guidelines, a lot of our work by necessity involves writing and editing various documents. We also often find ourselves analysing and summarising survey results or facilitating communication between lots of different OTW committees. The last part especially is something I find quite fun, as it gives me cause to talk to committees and people I wouldn't normally get the chance to interact with in my other roles!

What made you decide to volunteer?

I really care about the mission of the OTW and wanted to contribute. I was around when fandom was much more decentralised than it is these days, and it makes me quite sad to think about how many of these independent fan spaces we lost when the internet became more expensive and more corporate. I am therefore really grateful to the OTW for helping archive fandom history, including through the wonderful Open Doors project. It's also important to me to have a place where we don't have to fear the censorship that permeates so many other online spaces. Being able to enforce the AO3 TOS that cares about protecting the rights of creators is a big reason why I volunteer for PAC.

By nature of being a global, entirely online volunteer organization which has grown tremendously since the OTW was first founded, there are certain challenges the OTW has to deal with as a result when it comes to managing its volunteers. I love this community, and if there is a way for me to help make our volunteers feel as safe and supported as possible, then I would like to do everything I can to ensure that. Hence why I lead OCR.

Finally, I just find categorising things really satisfying, so obviously Tag Wrangling called to me immediately. ٩(^ᗜ^ )و ´-

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

I have to be pretty careful to balance my time properly and assess my commitments to make sure I'm not taking on too much and therefore stressing myself out. When you really care about the work you do and some of it is legitimately fun, it's sometimes easy to forget that it's nonetheless work. Saying yes to too many things or forgetting to take regular breaks can lead to pretty spectacular burnout.

I track the time I spend on volunteering every month to make sure I'm not overdoing it. I also make sure to carve out regular time for my other hobbies, such as the tabletop roleplaying campaigns I am a player in, or going to gigs, museums, plays, and the cinema with my friends.

What fannish things do you like to do?

One of my favourite things is in-depth meta or analysis of my favourite characters or my favourite fandoms' narratives! I adore connecting dots on our little conspiracy boards with my friends and getting pretentious about themes. I studied film theory at university, and now there is no one to stop me from using this knowledge for evil.

I also really like writing and reading fanfic, though as someone who chronically gets invested in vanishingly tiny fandoms and ships, there is unfortunately not a lot for me to read… (◞‸◟；)

I am super grateful to the authors who have written for my tiny fandoms, and thrilled I can contribute to the org that enabled them to share their work with me. I also try my best to contribute fanfic for these fandoms myself in the hopes that someone who may become invested in my niche blorbos in the future will be just as excited to find my works as I was to find works by other authors.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Elin, who volunteers as a Communications Event Coordinator and Translation Volunteer Manager.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I currently hold two different positions at the OTW.

For one, I'm part of the Communication committee's Events Coordination team. As an example for what we do, whenever you see a post on the AO3 homepage celebrating a milestone, or on the OTW website commemorating one of our anniversaries, I might have had a hand in it! We also organize special activities to go with some events, such as a a themed bingo we did recently, the special anniversary skin we released for AO3's 15th anniversary, or even our annual International Fanworks Day (IFD).

As for my second role, I'm also a volunteer manager in our Translation committee. It's a very varied position, as volunteer managers pull the strings behind the scenes necessary to keep a 200+ people strong committee running smoothly. That encompasses a lot of different day-to-day tasks. Some of those tasks include: preparing documents for translation, and assigning them to translators, helping translate news posts and posts concerning larger events, such as the OTW's Membership Drive, and are generally being the first point of contact for any problems a translator might run into. And that's just a small part of our work!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Honestly it varies a lot! Like most OTW volunteers, I have a day job that takes up a lot of my time and energy during the week, so I'll typically do small, quick tasks on weeknights, if possible. Those tasks that require a sustained amount of focus and effort I try to save for the weekend. It also varies by time of year how much work I do for each of my roles! For example, when IFD rolls around in February (and during the months leading up to it), my workload during the week might increase for a time.

What made you decide to volunteer?

Story old as time, I suppose, but I've been reading fanfic on AO3 for a long time (since I was 14 or 15, I believe) without getting into fan communities much. I really wanted to return something to fandom space at large, and AO3 in particular. When I saw that the OTW was recruiting for German translators, I applied, and was accepted!

During my time as an active translator (volunteer managers usually mostly step back from that) my work included translating all these amazing news posts other volunteers had written. I wanted to try my hand at coming up with posts myself, which was one of my motivations to apply as an Event Coordinator. And then I realized that as a volunteer manager I'd have even more varied tasks I could tackle, so I switched roles inside the Translation committee last year!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Probably figuring out how to balance my day job/hobbies/relationships with OTW volunteering! For me personally it's very easy to head straight into burnout, as I'm very enthusiastic about any new tasks I've taken on. However, there are always more things to do, and I've had to learn to occasionally take a step back and take a break, the better to sustain my enjoyment of the work I do!

What fannish things do you like to do?

Reading fanfic, primarily! In a variety of fandoms, for a variety of ships (or platonic relationships). More recently, I've also started taking more of an interest in other online fan spaces, though I tend to lurk more than actively involve myself. Otherwise, I like creating my own AO3 site skins – ⁠I find it quite meditative – ⁠and I swear one of these days I'll actually commit to finishing a story myself and posting it.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Ellipsis, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler and also a Technical Assistant for the Communications Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I currently hold two roles with the OTW.

I wrangle tags on AO3 for a couple of smallish fandoms with lots of characters. So I’m frequently digging through wiki pages and scrubbing through episodes to figure out if the character someone tagged is from canon or an OC. It's always very satisfying to provide new canonical character tags.

I am also the "Technical Assistant" for Communications. My primary responsibility there is managing the "OTW News By Email" automations. I set up all the automations and keep an eye out for and troubleshoot any issues; this occasionally involves reaching out to Systems or the newsletter service’s support team. I also help out if any subscribers reach out for help with their subscriptions. Beyond the "News By Email" stuff, I also help with investigating or suggesting other tech solutions for the Communications committee and occasionally help to write/research some of the more technical news posts.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
I do most of my focused volunteer work on the weekends, since I’ve got a full-time job during the week (and by the time I’m done work for the day and figure out food and whatnot I don’t have much time or energy left).

Every Saturday evening I work on Comms tasks. Exactly what I’m doing depends on what I’ve got on my plate. One thing I frequently work on is writing documentation about how the News By Email automation works. (Right now I manage everything myself but it's important to make sure there is good documentation in case someone else has to hop in and do something.) I also researched and drafted a news post recently, which involved a lot of rounds of feedback from different committees since it was inspired by a request from Support and relates to AD&T. Other common tasks include helping answer support queries about the email subscription, adding new functionality (the ability to subscribe just to recruitment posts went live recently), and cleaning up unsubscribed users.

If something breaks or otherwise goes weird I’ll jump in outside of my standard hours, but most of the time things can wait.

Every other weekend I tend to do wrangling work sometime during the day on Saturday or Sunday. Often I’ll host or attend a "wrangling party" (set times when lots of folks wrangle and cheer each other on). During that time I’ll check through whatever new tags have come in for my fandoms and sort them accordingly. I’ve got a few fandoms with lots of characters, so there are almost always some new characters or relationships to make canonicals for. I’ll also occasionally dig through the additional tags to check if anything has gained enough usages to get a canonical.

What made you decide to volunteer?
I initially joined as a tag wrangler. As an avid reader of fic, a programmer, and someone who finds categorization interesting, I find the tag system on AO3 really awesome. So when I found out how it worked and that you could volunteer to wrangle tags, I started eagerly watching for recruitment posts. It took a couple rounds before there was a post that was recruiting for wranglers for a fandom I had experience with.

A couple of years ago (once I’d been a wrangler for a while), Communications was looking into sending out news posts by email. They asked for volunteers who were willing to be test subjects and report back on receiving emails. However, the services they were testing weren’t a good fit and they were running into a lot of issues. I got curious and fell down a research rabbit hole and suggested another service. The service was one that required a bit more technical knowhow, though, and the volunteers running the test weren’t comfortable setting it up, so I offered to test it out and report back. They ended up going with the service I suggested and asked me to help set it up for real. Then eventually Communications asked me if I was interested in officially joining the committee as a "Technical Assistant."

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
Executive functioning. I’ve got ADHD (and Autism) so I struggle with intrinsic motivation and easily lose track of time, especially when I’ve got a full-time job eating all my spoons (energy). When I first started volunteering, I had been laid off and was unemployed so I had a lot of spare time and energy. So finding the balance once I was back to working full time was tricky.

In the last year or so I’ve started being firmer on scheduling specific times to do my volunteer work to help avoid losing track completely. For Comms work, I have a scheduled time set up each week that I work. And at that time another Comms volunteer will poke me on the volunteer messaging service to check in and ask about what I’m doing that evening; having that sort of external check in is massively helpful for me. Signing up to host wrangling parties serves a similar purpose in giving me external accountability about being present at a specific time to wrangle.

What fannish things do you like to do?
Mostly reading so much fic. I started reading fanfiction when I was a kid, probably around 8 or 9 years old. One of my real-life friends introduced me to it and in their words they "created a monster." (I don’t know exactly when I started reading because I no longer have the email I used at that time and my autistic kid brain was hung up on "you aren't supposed to have an account if you aren’t 13" so I read for quite a while before getting my FFN account). I occasionally count up how many words I’m reading per week and I’m frequently somewhere around 200k words per week. (It varies a bit depending on the density of the fic and how much else I’ve got going on. When I’m unemployed, it goes way up.)

I try to leave lots of comments as my way of giving back to all the authors who provide all the wonderful fics I get to read for free. (I’ve recently started using the sticky note app on my phone to compose comments with blockquotes while I’m reading so I can call out favorite bits or “live react” a bit.)

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Whatsit, who volunteers as a Chair in training for the Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) and a tag wrangler.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
As a tag wrangler, I make sure that the fandoms I wrangle have properly canonized tags, which helps users find works that have the characters, relationships, tropes, and themes they're looking for. I fully and completely believe that the tagging system on AO3 is practically one of the modern wonders of the world, and I'm really pleased to be able to do my small part in contributing to it.

My other role is working for the Policy & Abuse committee, where we respond to reports of Terms of Service violations. Anyone who's ever spent time on an unmoderated comments section somewhere knows the importance of moderation in keeping a site usable and enjoyable, and PAC works (mostly) behind the scenes to make sure that's the case for AO3.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
I try to spend at least an hour or so per day on PAC work, since some of it is time-sensitive and has deadlines attached. This often involves working with tickets that have been sent in about violations, but sometimes it means working on documentation updates or helping to train new volunteers on the committee.

I usually also do at least one big tag wrangling session per week, during which I get caught up with wrangling the tags in my fandoms. I really like putting music on and settling in for a few hours (or more) of wrangling, so this setup works really well for me.

What made you decide to volunteer?
I have a background in book indexing and a particular interest in categorization and taxonomy, so as soon as I found out that tag wranglers were a thing on AO3, I definitely wanted to be one! It sounded like the kind of thing that would be right up my alley (and it was). On a broader level, I think AO3 is one of the best things going on the Internet, in terms of creating a space where people can freely share their fanworks without fear of the content purges that have plagued many other sites. With censorship encroaching on so many other spaces, I think what AO3 stands for is more important than ever. I really believe in the philosophy of the site and I'm glad to be a part of it.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
Time management! I'm on two separate committees and I also have a day job and a fairly active family life, which is a lot to juggle. But I've had success setting boundaries for myself that keep me from over-committing or burning out. I find that setting specific times during which I'll do specific tasks not only keeps that task from eating up my entire day (which either wrangling or PAC work could otherwise easily do) but also allows me to really focus on that task during the allotted time.

What fannish things do you like to do?
I'm an active fic writer and I participate in quite a few multi-fandom fic exchanges. I find that having an external deadline is great for motivating me to actually finish a fic, something I was historically not great at before doing exchanges. I also hang out on a couple of fandom discords and have been known to go to the occasional convention. And, of course, I spend entirely too much of my free time reading vast amounts of fic.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Omegas are the glue that holds us all together, providing the essential social lubricant needed for our society to function—and yet they are often maligned and treated as lesser-than. This April, we are changing part of our logo to highlight omegas as part of our commitment to the inclusion and wellbeing of our omega volunteers and users.

We believe that visibility is important. As we post this, we're home to over 2,900 omega characters and counting. AO3 is one of the only spaces online where omegas are in the limelight, and we are proud to offer this safe space.

Volunteers at the OTW are never required to state their designations, though many choose to do so. Regardless of their decision or subgender, we aim to support our volunteers to the best of our ability; our policies on short breaks and hiatuses are written to help volunteers maintain their privacy and focus on their needs. Here are some words from our volunteers on the subject:

• "As someone in a leadership position at the OTW I have always felt supported by my fellow volunteers in all matters relating to my designation. Going on break regularly is a non-issue because my alpha chair assistants hold down the nest without taking advantage of my absence, and the only comments I get from my committee are people asking whether I've had enough rest when I return." — Choux, Communications Chair (Ω)
• "Everyone gets to shine as a volunteer here, because our diverse leadership brings invaluable insight. I’m proud to volunteer for the OTW, this being one of many reasons." — orphan_account, Support Volunteer (β)
• "Fandom unites us in a way that transcends bounds. I’m incredibly proud to be a part of an organization that champions its volunteers regardless of subgender, with no tolerance for alpha posturing." — Tal, Tag Wrangling Supervisor (α)
• "As an older omega, it is a rare thing to find a volunteer community so consistently supportive. Three years of service, and the whole OTW has always had my back." — Remi, OTW Tumblr Mod (Ω)

As part of this commitment, our Tag Wrangling Committee recently canonized several tags to better represent experiences had by people of all subgenders! Here are some our omega volunteers have chosen to highlight:

• Omegaverse Bitching | Turning into an Omega
  • Consensual Omegaverse Bitching | Turning into an Omega
  • Omegaverse Alpha Bitching | Alpha Turning into an Omega
  • Omegaverse Beta Bitching | Beta Turning into an Omega
• Omegaverse Studding | Turning into an Alpha
• Female Omegaverse Alpha Characters
• Male Omegaverse Omega Characters
• Heat Suppressants
• Scent Blockers

Finally, a word from our Board President:

Dear gentlebeings at AO3, on this serendipitous day of 2026, the Board of Directors are pleased to announce that:

All our volunteers have enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; we don't feel the treachery or insecurity of omegas in heat, nor the possessiveness or aggression of alphas in ruts. We have no occasion of bribing, lubricating, or alphasplaining, to procure the favour of any great omega, or of their beta and alpha supporters. We don't need protection against dishonesty or oppression: there is neither insurance company to destroy our health, nor politician to ruin our equal rights movement; no reporter to watch our words and actions, or forge accusations against us for our designations.

Gracefully yours,

Anh Pham
President of the OTW Board of Directors (Ω)

Happy April Fools! On this day and every other day of the year, AO3 is proud to host all your efforts towards making omegas just that little bit more real! To celebrate, we've changed our site header superscript to "omega" instead of the usual "beta". If you’d like to learn more, you can visit the Fanlore article on the topic.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

ETA: We’re happy to announce that we’ve exited Open Beta! This is not part of this April Fools’ post and is a real, separate announcement.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with AuroraT, who volunteers as an administrative volunteer for Open Doors.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I'm an administrative volunteer with the Open Doors Committee, which helps import at-risk digital archives to AO3 in order to preserve fanworks that might otherwise be lost. I'm responsible for project management, walking an archive and its archivist through our lengthy import process. We put a lot of effort into keeping track of the metadata for each work and respecting creators' privacy, so a lot of what I do involves managing spreadsheets and communicating with the archivist, other committees in the OTW, and other teams in the Open Doors Committee. I also write documentation for the committee, updating or writing down our procedures and information about the archives I'm managing.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There's a lot of variety in what an import project requires, so my weeks tend to vary a lot. Sometimes, I'll spend one of our weekly meetings working on a single task, such as preparing the documents we need to initiate a new import or cleaning up a spreadsheet. Other times, I'll jump around from task to task: emailing a different committee, discussing a procedure change with other admin volunteers, responding to feedback on documentation I wrote, creating the AO3 collection where we'll add the works we imported, answering a ticket from a creator wanting to claim works we previously imported, and so on.

What made you decide to volunteer?
I'm a huge supporter of the OTW's mission to preserve fanworks and fight censorship, and I had been watching calls for volunteers for positions I was qualified for in order to contribute to those efforts. I'd recently gotten much more into fanwork preservation when I began working at a library with a zine collection, where I was managing cataloguing and shelving a backlog of donated zines. Project management and working with spreadsheets is a lot of fun! When I saw the application for the administrative volunteer position, it seemed in line with my interests and skills, so I applied.

(Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to me when I applied, the library I was working at is one of Open Doors' partner institutions for our Fan Culture Preservation Project, which helps connect donors with physical fanworks to libraries and archives with zine collections. Some of the donations I was processing were facilitated with the help of Open Doors!)

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
It's absolutely task management. Our process for importing an archive is over a hundred steps long and some of those require a lot of prep work and communication between people. And that's not even including documentation or other administrative work! Thankfully, through the miracle of digital checklists and automatic reminders, as well as the detailed procedure instructions Open Doors has written over the years, it's not too difficult to keep on top of everything. Plus, I have my lovely fellow committee members to help out when I need it :)

What fannish things do you like to do?
I read a lot of fanfiction these days, especially longfics—the one I'm currently reading is over 430k words long and still being published. I also really like to leave long comments on the fics I read. It's a lot of fun to get that sweet, sweet AO3 email that the author responded to me! Recently, I started writing fanfiction for the first time in several years. Joining a new fandom really helped get those creative juices flowing.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Julie Bozza, who volunteers as a Senior FSHP Volunteer and project manager for the Open Doors AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) for Open Doors.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I first did a Five Things in March 2022, for my role as an Open Doors Administrative Volunteer. Back then, Open Doors’ main focus was on preserving fanworks from digital archives that were at risk of being lost. We had also established the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP) which helps fans looking for a new home for their physical fannish artifacts to get in touch with interested collecting institutions, such as the University of Iowa Libraries.

Since then, I’m delighted to say that Open Doors partnered up with the fan-run preservation project Zinedom to create the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP), which runs as part of FCPP.

The OTW is keenly interested in preserving and engaging with our shared fannish history, and making fanworks available to our community. I love the thought that someone might be browsing through Fanlore, or reading an issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, and get curious about a particular fanwork - maybe dating back to a zine published 50 years ago —and then be able to find the text and related artwork preserved on AO3.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

We have a number of fanzine publishers and individual creators who are already working with FSHP to import their fanworks to AO3. The import process can be quite lengthy, and has numerous steps, so a typical week might involve anything from exchanging emails with publishers or creators, to setting up a formal agreement with them, scanning fanzines and using OCR to convert the PDFs into editable text, proofreading the text, creating AO3 archivist accounts and collections, and so on… At some point we start the actual importing of works as well!

The Open Doors team has a few informal working meetings during the week, so I do my work then and keep an eye out for any FSHP-related questions. We have a large team of volunteers who help with the various tasks, along with their other OTW work, so all sorts of queries can arise.

What made you decide to volunteer?
I used to publish fanzines myself, starting in the late 1980s, and I wrote for and read other zines. As the decades-old badge on Fanlore’s Zine page announces, “FANZINES ARE FANDOM”. That was certainly the case for me, especially here in Australia, which can seem a long way from anywhere! There were wonderful events and conventions, and a group of Australian Buckaroo Banzai fans who would meet up for film screenings and Mongolian meals, but for me the heart of fandom was not only in the people but also in the creativity to be found in zines.

When the task came up of developing the idea of FSHP, writing up the necessary policies and processes, and getting the project underway, it made perfect sense to me that I would volunteer to help drive that.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
We love spreadsheets in Open Doors, and couldn’t organise our imports of digital archives so well without them. But we knew that FSHP was going to be more complicated still, and we needed a database in order to manage a creator’s fanworks across a range of fanzines - and a publisher’s fanzine content across a range of creators - while dealing with different processes for word-based works and visual-based works.

It was a challenge—but an enjoyable one—to design and map a useful database, with helpful hints and tips from other OTW volunteers. And then to build it. And then to transfer across a whole lot of data from a number of spreadsheets that varied in content and organisation.

What can I say? I loved it! We’ve started using the FSHP Database for real now, and so far (luckily) the complaints have been minimal.

What fannish things do you like to do?
What I love most is writing, but alas I don’t do so much of that anymore. I love The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, and the related tv show, so re-reading and re-watching those is entertaining. Otherwise, Fandom is my fandom - and, now that I’m retired from the day job, I’m devoting many of my hours to supporting OTW’s work in the world. The only thing that could possibly be nicer than that would be for me to be writing again as well!

Meanwhile, if you are a reader, creator, or publisher of fanzines - and there is zine fic or art that you’d like to see preserved on AO3 - please do get in touch with Open Doors. We’d love to help!

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with ladydragona, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Tag Wrangler my job is to make sure the tags users use on their works are connected (‘synned’ or made a synonym) to the Canonical (Official) tag they most closely relate to, which allows users browsing the Archive to filter for and search for these tags! I also create new Canonical tags when specific concepts have been tagged repeatedly enough and move tags that can’t be synned anywhere, either because too many concepts are in one tag or there just isn’t one to syn it to, to their appropriate fandom.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

I work a lot of hours at my irl job so most of my volunteer work has to happen around that. I try to wrangle tags for at least an hour every day after work while Wrangling parties are hosted some weekends so I'll usually try to attend those which means I'll spend more time wrangling then.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I've always loved fanfiction and, having experienced a handful of archive purges, I wanted to be involved and help maintain this site that I love so much. When I saw a Wrangler Q&A on Tumblr I realized it was possible for normal fans like myself to volunteer and help and that Q&A really made wrangling seem to be a fun thing to do.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

My biggest challenge would probably be time-management. I'm prone to getting very focused on what I'm doing and not realizing just how much time has passed, as well as wanting to do more than I realistically have the time for. I often have to set timers to remind myself to go eat or go do something else.

What fannish things do you like to do?

My main fannish activity is writing fic! In fact, I've posted over two million words on the archive in the last 6 years and don't see myself stopping any time soon! When not writing fic or volunteering I also share fanart and metas on social media as well as help my fellow fans brainstorm their own fics in various discord servers. I like being involved in my fandom's community and have made some of my bestest friends that way.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with calamario, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a tag wrangler, I work behind the scenes of AO3 to help organise the tags that users add to their works.

This primarily involves creating new canonical tags (i.e., the tags that show up in the dropdown and that you can filter on) for the fandoms I wrangle, connecting new tags to already-existing canonicals (i.e., making those tags ‘synonyms’ of these canonicals, a.k.a. ‘synning’ them), or otherwise wrangling the tags to their correct fandoms if they can’t be synned anywhere.

For example, have you ever wondered why tagging your work with something like “a lil angst” in the Additional Tags field makes it show up in the “Angst” tag, or why tagging “anidala” as a Relationship connects it to “Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker”? That’s because wranglers have synned them there!

If you’re interested in learning more about wrangling and the terms we use, you can check out the publicly available wrangling guidelines here.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

It depends a lot on how busy my real life is! At the moment, I’m working on my master’s thesis, so I currently have a wrangling session once or twice a week, usually consisting of a few hours per session. However, one of the wonderful things about tag wrangling is that it’s super easy to scale your workload, depending on how much time you’re able to dedicate to volunteering – so during holidays and such, there might be several days a week where I spend all day just wrangling!

For a typical wrangling session, I’ll first tackle my solo-wrangled fandoms to wrangle any new tags that have shown up in the wrangling bins there, before taking a look to see if any of my co-wrangled fandoms might especially need a hand.

If it seems like there are not any new tags to handle, I might go hunting for concepts that I can canonise in one of my fandoms! Wranglers usually follow the so-called ‘rule of three’ (colloquially shortened to ‘ro3’), which means that a new concept must have been tagged by at least three separate users on three separate works. This is so that we know that there’s actually a desire in the fandom for the concept to be canonised – so if there’s a particular concept that you’d love to see get a canonical tag that you can filter on, get a couple of friends to make works about it and tag for it!

Sometimes, I might have different projects to work on besides my regular wrangling, such as a renaming project. For example, if a character gets their surname revealed in canon, wranglers might choose to update their character and relationship canonicals to reflect the change! This is a manual process that requires the wrangler to first create a new canonical with the updated format, then move over all the syns from the old canonical, and then finally de-canonise and syn the old tag to the new one. If there are a lot of tags to go through, this is a process that can take days, weeks, even months! However, I actually find renaming projects kind of soothing in their repetition, especially after having established workflows that help me get through them smoothly.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually first started volunteering with the Translation committee as a translator and beta reader. It used to be my dream to become a translator, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to both get some relevant experience on my resumé, as well as give back to a website where I spent (and still do spend) a lot of my free time on.

After a few months as a translator, I also applied to become a tag wrangler! The more I learnt about what tag wrangling was and the kind of work that tag wranglers did, the more it sounded like something I would really enjoy – and it absolutely is! There’s something about organising stuff that tickles my brain just right.

When I started university and had to scale back on my volunteering hours, I ended up giving up translation and sticking with tag wrangling, which has given me a lot of opportunities over the years to distract myself from course work, while still helping me feel productive.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

There are honestly a lot of different things I could put down as an answer to this question.

As many people know, the last few years have been turbulent for the OTW as a whole, and the Tag Wrangling committee itself has also seen a lot of internal changes in the last year or so. While I’m happy to say that we’re now seeing a lot of progress in updating our policies and getting new projects off the ground, it definitely hasn’t been without growing pains.

While I haven’t been on the front lines spearheading any of these discussions or projects due to IRL commitments on my time and energy, I have been talking privately with some of the people who are pushing to make change within the committee. It has been incredibly disheartening to hear of some of the roadblocks that have to be overcome, whether it’s organisational inertia or simple lack of manpower, but I’m very hopeful that our current momentum will prevail so that we can make this committee (and this organisation as a whole) the best it can be. I’ll definitely continue to offer my support in the ways that I am able!

What fannish things do you like to do?

Mostly, I read a lot of fic! I rarely tend to stick to a single fandom for any length of time, but my bookmarks reveal that the fandoms I’ve read a lot in lately are Star Wars, Stranger Things, Hockey RPF, The Witcher, and The Pitt.

I’ve only written a handful of short fics myself, but I also beta fics for both friends and strangers! This is something I’ve done sporadically over many years, but I’ve been trying to offer my services more in the last year or so, as a way to give back more substantially to my fandom communities than just reading, kudosing, and commenting. Fic authors are so important to keep fandoms alive and thriving, and I’m happy to support them how I can! ♥️

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Rhine, who volunteers as a volunteer manager in the Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Translation volunteer manager I mostly deal with admin work that surrounds the work our translators do – be it talking to other committees about things that are to be translated, preparing English texts for translation, making sure our version of the text is up to date, or getting texts published once they are translated – along with more general personnel stuff like recruiting new translators, keeping a clear record of who is supposed to be working on what and who is on break, checking in with translators and how they feel about their work, that kind of thing. Having been in this role for some time now, I also help with mentoring newer volunteer managers in how to do what we do, at the scale we do it.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

There isn't one singular stereotypical week in this role, but some different modes with different focuses that are more or less typical for me:

• Going on-call for a week: Translation volunteer managers work from a shared inbox that serves as a first point of contact for all inquiries related to the Translation Committee. Each week, one or two volunteer managers go on-call as the ones primarily responsible for making sure everything gets actioned and squared away as needed. This usually means spending a couple hours each day working through everything in the shared inbox, including but not limited to assigning tasks to translators, checking on translators who were on hiatus, triaging translation requests from other committees, and responding to any questions translators may have in the course of their work.
• Working on a bigger project, like a series of high-visibility posts (e.g. membership drive, OTW Board elections), opening recruitment, or internal surveys: When Translation does a committee-wide thing, it'll by necessity involve most or even all of our forty-some language teams, each with 1–8 members. Coordinating all that takes some organisational overhead (and some love for checklists and spreadsheets, along with automations where feasible), which typically means sitting down for a few hours on three or four days of the week and chipping away at various related tasks to keep things moving, including but not limited to asking other people to double-check my work before moving on to the next step.
• Working on smaller tasks: When I want to have a more relaxed week while still being active, I'll sit down on one or two afternoons/evenings, and take care of a task that is fairly straightforward, like scheduling and leading chats to check in with translators or train people on our tools, creating a template document with English text for translation, drafting and updating our internal documentation, asking others to look over and give feedback on my drafts, and giving feedback on others' tasks, drafts, and projects.
• Weekly chair training/catch-up chats: We have a regular weekly meeting slot to sit down and talk about the few chair-exclusive things in the Translation Committee, as part of chair training.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually started volunteering at the OTW as an AO3 tag wrangler back in 2020, when lockdowns were on the horizon and I felt like I could pick up some extra stuff to do. Growing up bilingual and with some extra languages under my belt, I ended up hanging out in some of the spaces with lots of OTW translators. Then I found out that I could internally apply as a Translation volunteer manager, and the rest is pretty much history. At that point I was missing the feeling of doing some volunteer management and admin work anyway!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

On a high level, I'd say it's striking a balance between the expectations and the reality of the work the Translation Committee does, including the sheer scale. On a more concrete level, it's like this: Being a translator in the Translation Committee is, by default, a relatively low commitment, with a number of optional tasks and rosters that we encourage people to take on, if they have the time and attention to spare. Part of how we ensure that is by dealing with as much of the overhead in advance as we can, as Translation volunteer managers.

This means that for instance, when the English version of a text is updated – which may take about two minutes in the original text – we go through each language team's copy of the text, make the changes as needed in the English copy, highlight what was changed, and reset the status in our internal task tracker so that it can be reassigned to a translator. This way the changed part is clearly visible to the translator, so they can quickly pinpoint what they need to do and make the corresponding changes in the translated text.

For both the author of the original English text and the translator, this is a very quick task. On the admin side, on the other hand, it's the same two-minute process of updating our documents repeated over and over, about 15 times on the low end for frequent news post series that we only assign to teams that consistently have some buffer to absorb the extra workload, and almost 50 times on the high end for some of our staple static pages that (almost) all teams have worked on, meaning it's something that takes somewhere between 30 minutes to almost two hours even when it's a tiny change and you're familiar with the workflow.

(And that's before getting to very last-minute changes and emergency news post translations with less than two days' turnaround time, where we manually track everything across around thirty teams, usually. Each time that has happened, everyone's dedication has blown me away. Thank you so much to everyone who answers those calls, you know who you are!)

What fannish things do you like to do?

I like to read, especially if it's something that plays around with worldbuilding or other things that were left unsaid in canon. I wish there were more hours in the day so that I can pick up some of my creative projects again. I suppose some of my coding projects like my AO3 userscripts and my AO3 Saved Filters bookmarklet also count as fannish?

Now that our volunteer's said five things about what they do, it's your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Mille K, who volunteers in the Support Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

So, as the blurb said, I'm a volunteer for the OTW’s Support branch, which I've been doing since May 2024! I'm sure other Support volunteers have explained this far more eloquently in the past, but we basically help users with a wide variety of things. If you want to ask how to change your password, we're the people to ask. If you run into some kind of error, shoot us a message. If a work has been tagged with the wrong language, that's also us! Basically, we help the OTW-machine run smoothly.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
Personally, that depends from week to week! We don't send out responses to users until another volunteer has read it over and given it the go-ahead (known as betaing), so some weeks I get a lot of my own tickets done, other weeks I prefer focusing on betaing for others! I like to work while I'm drinking something and listening to music, just to make it a bit more cozy. (My music of choice is Citypop and soundtracks to anime and games!)

What made you decide to volunteer?
To put it very simply, AO3/the OTW has done so much for me, and I wanted to give back. It's been amazing for my personal growth to have a place to meet like-minded people, to post my works to, to read works that have moved me in some form… and then to get to help it run is an amazing experience!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
Probably having to learn so many new things, like how to use all of our tools, or all of the internal phrasing. It's definitely been challenging to pick all of that up, but it's also been super fun, and everyone else has been incredible so far!

What fannish things do you like to do?
I mainly read and write fanfic! I also enjoy art immensely, although I can't for the life of me make it myself. I also participate in online events from time to time, such as bangs, fests, exchanges, and online cons!

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with corr, who volunteers in the Volunteers and Recruiting Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Volunteers & Recruiting (VolCom) volunteer, I help keep the OTW running from an organisational point of view. We run recruitment, offering many recruitment rounds each year so every committee has enough volunteers for their work, while managing onboarding, departures, and tool access for all volunteers. Behind those tasks is a lot of documentation that we need to keep up to date, so document reviews are a huge part of what we do. We also have various projects: one example is that we do something to show our appreciation to all our volunteers on International Volunteer Day in December each year. Other examples are the development of a Volunteer Handbook for new volunteers, the development of a Chair Training Plan, or the implementation of new tools to help the organisation run smoothly.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
It depends. I mainly focus on cases, document reviews, and projects. Some weeks, I'll be up to my knees in document reviews or planning/implementing a project, other weeks I'll mostly work on cases. Cases can be about so many different things—assistance with tools, role onboardings or departures, name changes, updating our volunteer database to account for changes in a volunteer's record, and all other questions our volunteers or interested not-yet-volunteers might have that are about the volunteering experience in general and not specific to one of the other committees.

When we have new Volcom volunteers, I help show them how everything works—I love training people, so that's a lot of fun for me. We also have regular working parties within our committee and all try to attend at least one each week, and I look at our committee chats at least two to three times a day and keep an eye on all the incoming requests.

What made you decide to volunteer?
I've been a user of the Archive for about a decade. I'm not a native English speaker and was mostly active in my native language’s fandom corner in the 00s and early 10s, so I only learned about the Archive’s existence after becoming fluent enough to enjoy writing and reading in English. Since then, I've been an avid fan: I firmly believe in the mission behind protecting all transformative works, and fanfic has kept me company through many stages of my life.

I also wanted to get more in contact with fandom-loving people who share my opinion about maximum inclusiveness of content, and I am a very curious person who likes to peek behind the scenes and understand how things work, so it was honestly just a matter of time until I applied. The last part is, apart from our committee's work involving many to-do lists and my passionate love for to-do lists, also the reason why I love volunteering for Volcom specifically: we interact with every part of the OTW, so I get to see and learn a lot about the organisation and how it works.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
Last summer, I tabled at a convention for the OTW. It was incredibly fun, and the mix of people who got excited about meeting "the AO3 people" and people who I got to explain our mission to was amazing. On a few noteworthy occasions, I even got to explain to people what fanfiction is, and I know of at least two people who googled it and got excited about reading more stories for books they enjoyed! It was a very big challenge for me, because I’m not a particularly talkative person, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Getting to talk about the OTW and especially being able to tell people about all of our other projects aside from the Archive was so much fun and incredibly rewarding.

What fannish things do you like to do?
I'm a writer and a reader. My main fandom is All For The Game, but if a hook is compelling, I'm willing to read almost any fandom. I love dark stuff - I'm one of those people who actively search for the Major Character Death warning and who find Dead Doves very intriguing! I'm active on a few fandom-related Discord servers, and I often sign up for exchanges or challenges (I keep telling myself that this time, there will be a prompt that matches a story that already lives in my head, and then completely unexpectedly get too excited about an entirely unrelated prompt. I have hundreds of half-written stories, snippets, or prompts that all wait to see the light of day).

Also, I have developed a special interest in the Omegaverse. I can talk for hours about why I think it's an incredibly interesting genre to write in and why there is sooo much interesting worldbuilding cooked into the premise. This has gotten to the point where people listened to me hold a presentation about it for over an hour, and I have become the resident Omegaverse expert in at least one Discord server and two friend groups. Recently, I was tagged with "i need your omegaverse PowerPoint, it’s an emergency" and I am pretty proud of that. Let it be known that I am always ready to help with an Omegaverse emergency!

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with orphan_account, who has been part of the OTW for 16 years—ever since the beginning! Originally a member of the Accessibility, Design, and Technology committee, they went on to serve with the Policy & Abuse committee for over a decade, before joining the Support committee in 2021.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

Sometimes, writers and artists on AO3 don't want to be associated with one of their fanworks or their fannish identity anymore. If they don't want to delete their works, then they can turn them over to me instead. They can decide to either remove their name from the work entirely or leave behind a pseud identifying them as the original creator. Either way, after the creator confirms the transfer, the work is moved over to my own account so that it won't be connected to their account anymore. I've sworn to never edit a single work under any circumstances, so once a work is in my care, it's preserved permanently.

The exception to this is if the work is in violation of the Terms of Service. I'm not responsible for checking that! If a work with a TOS violation makes its way into my hands and somebody reports it to the Policy & Abuse committee, then PAC volunteers will edit the tags, take down the work, or do whatever else needs to be done to make it compliant.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Busy, busy, busy! I get requests at all times of the day, although since AO3 is usually busiest between 14:00 to 06:00 UTC, so am I.

When somebody makes an orphaning request, first I'll ask them if they're sure. Then I'll ask them if they're really, REALLY sure, because while I can take over works, I'm not able to give them back—part of my role is forgetting who gave me the work in the first place, after all.

If they agree, then first I’ll edit the bylines on the work. If the original creator doesn't want their name associated with the work at all, then I'll just stick it under my main pseud. If they still want to be credited, I'll make a new pseud that's the same as their name, and place the work on my account under that pseud instead. (For example, here's a work that is ascribed to my good friend, testy.)

Once that's done, I'll take care of the creator's old comments by going through and editing the bylines so that the comments are attributed to me instead. This means that the creator won't be bothered by any comment notification emails. I don't touch the work's comment settings, so if the creator left comment moderation on when they gave me the work, then any new comments will remain unreviewed forever.

I can't edit what is in my works at all, so if somebody decides to leave their contact information in the notes or summary, then there's nothing I can do about it. I do warn people about this ahead of time, however! If you've given me one of your works in the past but you forgot to remove personally identifying information from it, you can ask my fellow volunteers on the Support committee to redact it from the work.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I was just a baby fan back when the OTW was first founded, but I immediately knew how I wanted to help out. Sometimes people just want to be able to move on from a work they made, but I would always feel disappointed when that meant they decided to delete it. After all, our mission as an archive is to preserve fanworks, and I wanted to provide a way for other fans to safely leave their works behind to be preserved on AO3. I feel so fortunate that the OTW has provided a lot of support and assistance over the years to help me preserve over 750,000 fanworks that otherwise might have been deleted by their creators.

Fun fact: I was one of the first ten people to sign up for an AO3 account—my account's user ID is 9! Sadly, most of the others have already deleted their accounts, though :’(

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

AO3 has grown to be a lot larger than anyone dared dream way back in the beginning. At the time, we all wanted to build an archive that would last, but we never expected way back then that it would get this big. It's like winning the lottery! Which is to say, it is AMAZING we've all come so far, but along the way there have been some unexpected pitfalls we've had to work around. These days, I have so many works that it can take me a couple of minutes to list them all out when somebody asks!

Probably the biggest challenge has been the sheer number of pseuds I've collected over the years. Because of this, you're not able to see my profile page directly—if you try, it will give you a 404 error, because I have so many pseuds. (But I'm told our technical volunteers are working on this!) Instead, if you'd like to browse the many fanworks that creators have passed into my hands, you can use a work search on my username.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I love reading, viewing, and listening to fanworks of all sorts! No matter how many fanworks I've seen or heard, I always have room for more. A couple of times, people have mistaken me for the creator of the works in my care, but I've never felt the need to make a fanwork myself. At heart, I'm a curator, and I'm happy to keep your works safe.

Happy April Fools! This post was written from the perspective of AO3's orphan account, which is a real account but not a real person. Read our Orphaning FAQ to learn more about the orphan_account, or you can check out previous Five Things posts by our actual volunteers.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with GenreCat, who volunteers as part of the Policy & Abuse Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

The Policy & Abuse committee is responsible for interpreting and enforcing the Terms of Service on AO3. When users report content that they believe isn't allowed on AO3, that report comes to us. We then investigate independently and determine if the report is about something that is actually against AO3's Terms of Service. If it is, then we'll contact the person who posted it and tell them what they need to remove and why. If it's not a violation, we'll let the reporter know, and provide information about how they can avoid seeing similar content in future. We also answer questions about what is or isn't allowed on AO3.

Because we're an all-volunteer team, and not a very large one, the wait-times on tickets can be lengthy. Here's some advice if you want your ticket to be processed more quickly:

1. Provide us a direct link to the thing you want to report. If that's a work, provide us a link to the work. If you want to report multiple works, provide links to each work in your report description. If it's a comment, select the 'Thread' button on the comment to get the direct link to that comment. If you only report the user's profile instead of the thing they posted, we have to go track it down, which immediately makes a case take longer.
2. Don't report more than one user at a time (unless they're co-creators on the same violating work). Having multiple unrelated users on one report complicates the paperwork for us.
3. Don't encourage other people to also report it. We investigate every report we receive, and we don't make rulings based on how many people reported it. All mass-reporting does is give us more admin work that has to be handled before we can actually address the problem.
4. If you're reporting plagiarism or copyright infringement, give us a link to the source material. Please don't make us guess!
5. Be succinct. We only need a short description of what and where the problem is -- a single sentence is usually sufficient.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

I usually do PAC work every day, sometimes in long chunks and sometimes just quick check-ins. If I only have a short period of time, I'll catch up on messages from other volunteers and check new tickets that have come in. If there's tickets that haven't been categorized, I'll categorize them—categories help PAC volunteers decide what tickets to work on next. If there's higher-priority tickets, I'll quickly glance at them to attach evidence and see if there's something that we can resolve quickly.

When I have more time to work in a stretch, I'll review cases that other volunteers are handling and sign off on their plans of action, or I may pick up new tickets of my own to handle. I also spend quite a lot of my time working on documentation. PAC is constantly reviewing portions of our internal policies, training, and guidance material, which I like being involved in; it helps us determine better methods of doing things and ensures that we stay consistent in our rulings.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I'd been on AO3 for about a decade, and I'd always wanted to volunteer, because I feel like AO3 is a really important thing for fandom to have. I've been in fandom long enough to remember how slash fiction was banned or highly censored on a lot of older sites explicitly because of homophobia, and compared to that AO3 was a much-needed breath of fresh air. However, the stars had never quite aligned for me to apply—until the middle of 2020, when like many people, I suddenly had a lot more time where I was supposed to be at home. So when the next round of applications opened, I sent mine in.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

The OTW is a very big organization, and it has a lot of inertia. At times, trying to push for necessary change—procedural or cultural—has been very frustrating. However, since I've joined the OTW I've seen this improve a lot, both within PAC and within the OTW overall. I'm very hopeful that we've got a brighter future ahead of us.

On a much less serious note: in terms of tickets that are challenging, personally it is the ones that are labelled only 'spam'. This is because many, many things get called 'spam', so I never know what the ticket is about until I go and investigate the link. A small sample of things I have seen called 'spam' includes: donation requests, duplicate postings of works, fanworks that have deliberately terrible grammar and spelling, fanworks that have the wrong pairing tag, comments consisting entirely of emojis, works that are just "WIP coming soon", works that are solely requests for prompts, copyright infringement, plagiarism, works with dozens of extra fandom tags, death threats, and comments from actual spambots. Some of these are violations, some of them aren't. It's nice to have a better idea of what I'm getting into before I open a report. So a request for anyone reading this—if you're reporting actual spambot spam, please say 'spambot' somewhere in your report instead of just 'spam'! And if it's not an actual spambot, please include an extra 2-3 words of description. Your ticket-handler will appreciate it!

What fannish things do you like to do?

I spend a lot of time reading and writing fic! Fellow PAC volunteers introduced me to several new fandoms in the last couple of years, the biggest of which are MXTX's novels. One of the things I love about big fandoms is that there's so much fic, it would be really difficult for me to work through it all—there's always something new to read.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with therealmorticia, who volunteers as Chair of the Board Assistants Team.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I've been lucky enough to have several roles in the OTW, but my main job that keeps me busy these days is serving as the chair of the Board Assistants Team (BAT). BAT helps the Board of Directors with the administrative aspects of leading the OTW: documentation, copyediting, project management, etc. We also collaborate with other committees to help coordinate and complete special projects that require extra support.

A lot of our tasks might not sound the most exciting on paper, if I'm being honest, but I genuinely enjoy the work—especially since it brings a lot of variety in the types of tasks I get to take on. The Board's work covers all corners of the OTW, so in supporting the Board, I get to see and work with many different areas. Many of my projects are cross-committee efforts and involve collaborating with people I may never have connected with before.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

My week-to-week varies greatly depending on what's going on. If there's a public Board meeting coming up, I’m likely focused on its preparation and scheduling, and during the meeting I will help moderate the chat and pass questions on. If we’re working on a project with an approaching deadline, that will pull my focus. In a normal week, I am helping draft documentation for the Board, beta items drafted by the Board or other BATs, and make sure requests made to the Board don’t fall through the cracks. The vast majority of my work is asynchronous, so I tackle it in bits and pieces throughout the week as I have time. However, it’s not uncommon for me to have a synchronous meeting or two, whether with the Board, other BAT members, or a project team.

As a chair, I also spend a fair amount of time on more managerial tasks. This can include handling personnel duties (such as planning for recruitment or training new volunteers), writing documentation, overseeing projects, and the like.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I first signed up to be a volunteer in 2016 as a tag wrangler. At the time, I was spending a lot of time on AO3 reading and writing, and I felt that volunteering was a way I could give back to the site that had given me so much. Since then, I’ve held several other roles across a few committees, but my motivation has remained the same. I spend a lot of time enjoying the work done by the OTW's projects—whether it's fanworks on AO3 or interesting articles on Fanlore—and it's important to me that I can contribute in return.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Tough question. The main thing that comes to mind is the process for setting up BAT in the first place. It had been a long time since the last time a new committee was created, so lots of the documentation was outdated or lost to the sands of time. This meant the BAT proposal and setup process involved a lot of back-and-forth between various committees for guidance, answers, and feedback on the next steps.

Beyond that, being a brand-new committee meant that all of our documentation and processes had to largely be written from scratch, so there was a lot of setup work to do (and in fact it is still being done). In a way, this is an advantage to BAT, as it allows us to more easily adapt to current needs; but it's also a challenge, as it means a lot of work in establishing procedures, building up the volunteer pool, and so on.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I’m a big reader, first and foremost. I’m always on the hunt for new works to consume. I've returned to an old favorite and am currently back to obsessing about Star Trek. I’ve also really gotten into Hockey RPF lately, and I’m happy to take recommendations if you’ve got any!

I’ve done some writing in the past, but that’s not a major focus of my fannish time. The main fannish activity I focus on now, aside from reading, is volunteering; it’s both enjoyable and fulfilling, as it allows me to give back and help provide some of that enjoyment to others.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Cesy, who volunteers with the Finance Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

Finance committee manages paying bills and keeping us legally compliant, publishing the accounts and getting them audited, filling in the right forms so we remain registered as a non-profit and can collect employer matching donations. We work with the rest of the org to budget our money.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Very variable - most weeks will be a mix of answering emails within the committee or from other committees, replying to a discussion in committee group chat, or attending a committee meeting and taking minutes. We review payment requests that come in from other committees to determine if the requests are in line with the OTW’s financial policies and procedures. We may have follow-up questions with the volunteer who requested the item, or send it to Board for their review.

Other weeks will be busier if it's budget time and we need to check spreadsheets to compare figures, email out to all the committee chairs, or proofread posts. Other members of the committee do monthly bookkeeping and record various accounting transactions, save all of the relevant documentation needed such as invoices or receipts, produce the annual financial statements, work with the auditors for the annual audit report or sort our state registrations. In the USA, we have to be registered both federally and in every single state that we might receive donations from, which needs a lot of paperwork to be signed and posted, though some states accept forms online these days.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I originally joined in 2009 while Archive of Our Own (AO3) was still in closed beta, as l'd been a coding volunteer for Dreamwidth, and they mentioned AO3 as being another friendly project. I wanted to improve my programming skills and spend time with fannish friends doing something useful. Over the years, l've held a variety of roles within the OTW. I rejoined Finance after there had been a change of Treasurer and Board to help the new team find missing info, document what had been done previously and sort things out.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Dealing with people - we have many different cultures represented, lots of styles of business and volunteer communication, and it’s easy to make a mistake and upset people. A moment of carelessness or tactlessness can take a lot of time and effort to recover from and repair the relationship.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I read a lot of fic. I’m mostly an old-school lurker, I try and kudos or comment or bookmark or rec. I write a little, I’ve tried recording podfic, and I watch vids occasionally. I’m known among my friends for picking up new fandoms by osmosis and never watching canon, because I struggle to watch long-form TV or films.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with LPCollins, who volunteers as a Dutch translator and beta reader for the Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I am part of the Translation committee, more specifically as a translator and beta reader for the Dutch team. (Hallo, iedereen!) I have also recently found my way into the Tag Wrangling committee, but that is all still very new and shiny, so I’ll be focussing on my role in Translation for this post. That role pretty much means that I help with the translation of the AO3 FAQs and tutorials, news posts, email templates and the occasional tag or user ticket that arrives in Dutch, a rare treat when speakers of your language are very accustomed to using English in online spaces. I am very proud of the role that our committee gets to play in diversifying the OTW and slowly but surely making it more accessible for users world-wide. Compared to the userbase speaking Chinese, Spanish or Russian, Dutch may seem like a very tiny, not-so-important piece of that puzzle, but doesn’t that only make it cooler that we can support such languages too?

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

One of my absolute favorite things about the Translation committee is that you get to schedule the work according to your own needs. I am a chaos demon with fluctuating energy levels, so I’m not sure about having a “typical week” and that’s perfectly fine with Translation.

Basically, at some point one of our lovely volunteer managers will send me an assignment, either a document that needs to be translated from scratch or a translation from one of my teammates that I need to beta read. Assignments always have a deadline too, shorter ones for urgent news posts and longer ones for longer documents. Depending on the length of the document, what I need to do with it, my mood and the alignment of the stars, I might do it right away, or spread it out over a week, or just do it on the day of the deadline. Then I let our staff know that I’m done and they send me a new task and so on. There have been weeks when I didn’t complete a single task and there have been days when I completed two, and it just works for me.

What made you decide to volunteer?

Look, I seem to be living in a world where all the paid jobs aren’t very interesting and all the interesting jobs aren’t very paid. (Will take recommendations for other worlds.) Point is, I am always drawn to ways to help organizations that I care about with a hands-on approach. Before I joined the OTW, I was a volunteer for IMAlive’s crisis support chat (big shout-out to Random Acts for providing my training), which I loved doing but unfortunately became too time-consuming when I needed to start working on my master’s thesis. Since I had been spending a lot of time on AO3 for years at that point, the OTW was an easy next target for when I did have some spare time again.

I also have a degree in Dutch and English linguistics and literature, so translator was definitely one of the most appealing OTW positions from the get-go. I distinctly remember waiting for a chance to apply, checking every Translation recruitment post that popped up on AO3 to see if they needed someone for Team Dutch yet, as the committee always recruits for specific languages. As soon as Dutch was listed in one of the posts, I didn’t hesitate about applying, and I was lucky enough to be welcomed to the team. Already two years have passed since then and I haven’t regretted it for a single second.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Not gonna lie, I have witnessed some big internal discussions since joining the OTW, both about real-world events and about our own processes. I feel like those have been fought over enough, though, so I’ll share a challenge that’s more specific for Team Dutch.

In case you don’t know, Dutch is an official language in three countries: the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. Unfortunately, Suriname isn’t currently represented in our team, but we do have both Belgian and Dutch folks, and despite our countries being right next to each other, there are actually some differences between Belgian Dutch and Dutch… Dutch. (Just ask how we end our emails.) They definitely aren’t big enough to separate the languages, but we do try to walk that middle ground in our translations and make sure that everything sounds good for everyone. So sometimes I will be beta reading a document and change something that just sounds way too Dutch to me and sometimes one of my teammates will point out that they would never use my suggested turn of phrase in the Netherlands. As a linguist, I find this very interesting, but it is also quite challenging to avoid colloquialisms when you’re not even always aware of them!

What fannish things do you like to do?

First and foremost, I’m a fanfic writer. Always have been (even before I knew that there was a word for it) and always will be. As a writer, I also have an atrocious habit and it goes something like this: start a very long fic, pour out new chapters religiously for months and months, stumble upon a different fandom, come up with a fic idea for said new fandom that “surely won’t take long and that I just need to get out of my system so that I can return to the existing WIP in peace” aaaaand repeat. Dear reader, if you happen to be following one of my stories, I am so, so sorry, I swear I will finish it one day.

The love of my life is Supernatural and I will always come back to it, but I’m also very good at falling very hard for other fandoms on the side, ranging from The Boys to Danny Phantom to the latest Neil Gaiman-related show to Helluva Boss to anything that Richard Speight, Jr. worked on. One of my favorite things to do is hyperfixate on something new, then grab my friends by the shoulders and shake them until they agree to watch it too so that I can yell at them about it.

Of course I read fanfics too, mostly in short bursts when I’m looking for a very specific type of fic. For my wallet’s sake, I limit the number of Supernatural conventions I can go to to one per year. I perpetually have a Discord tab open to stay in touch with fellow fans, will occasionally scour YouTube for fanvids and spend the rest of my fandom time on the best social media site ever, Tumblr. (Kidding, not kidding.)

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.