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* Instead of making a budget to pay writers, Netflix execs are seeking $166million in additional pay for the work they did *last* year. In addition to this being a slap in the face to the writers, this isn't how a company behaves when it sees a bright future. One of the things being talked about in the strike is how Hollywood is being run on a vulture capitalism model, extract the wealth and get out. Leave the husk to fall apart and then go 'huh, I guess market forces did that, world has changed'. Yeah these jerks need to pay the writers, but we also need to think about them de-stabilizing a major US industry that has been a reliable job creator for a century.
* A number of ongoing situations over at AO3 are coming to light right now, and it's a bit of an evolving situation. Synecdochic (co-founder of Dreamwidth) has a good post on it here. I support any volunteer who leaves, whether to put pressure on them to change or for other reasons. I also support any who stays because they might have more perspective on things or good reasons. But I will say that sometimes leaving is the only way to force change when there's an entrenched problem. I've been in that position, I've left places because I knew that was the only way shit was going to get fixed. Lack of best practices and maybe the legal team needing replacing aren't problems that just suddenly happened.
* A number of ongoing situations over at AO3 are coming to light right now, and it's a bit of an evolving situation. Synecdochic (co-founder of Dreamwidth) has a good post on it here. I support any volunteer who leaves, whether to put pressure on them to change or for other reasons. I also support any who stays because they might have more perspective on things or good reasons. But I will say that sometimes leaving is the only way to force change when there's an entrenched problem. I've been in that position, I've left places because I knew that was the only way shit was going to get fixed. Lack of best practices and maybe the legal team needing replacing aren't problems that just suddenly happened.
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Date: 2023-05-31 10:58 pm (UTC)From:I kind of think Denise is more suggesting people get out before they're next on Legal's hitlist, but either way! The whole situation is fucked.
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Date: 2023-06-01 01:12 am (UTC)From:Yeah, I get that. I just know/have known some long term volunteers and don't want to sound like I am telling them what to do. Whatever they do, I support them.
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Date: 2023-06-01 04:26 am (UTC)From:The AO3/OTW stuff is pretty distressing, honestly. (Thank you for the link, because I've mostly seen people talking about it without giving any specifics/links to actual discussion.) I'm not surprised at where a lot of the failures seem to be occurring (the perennial problem of scaling), but they're handling a LOT of things terribly... and it's particularly horrible to be throwing a volunteer under the bus. I think there's a lot that does need to change, structurally, and a lot of those issues are as pressing/catastrophic as they are now because those difficult decisions didn't happen back when they really should have. It's going to be very difficult to create those changes, but the issues will keep getting worse without that.
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Date: 2023-06-01 06:16 am (UTC)From:Yeah, it's a mess but it's mostly not a new mess. I think some of the changes can happen, but certain people trying to use this for clout or to just attack AO3 because they want to is going to get in the way of getting stuff done. I know from experience how those attacks and bad faith actors just make people circle the wagons. The people obsessed with tearing shit down and attacking can be a lot.
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Date: 2023-06-02 03:53 am (UTC)From:Yeah. I think that a lot of things right now are causing that mess to come to the surface and get attention that was likely overdue.
But that's I think a big issue with all of this - the number of bad-faith attacks/accusations/"chance to try and tear this space down over personal grudgewank"/etc. ends up drowning out the legitimate and actually constructive criticism/suggestions. Or if not truly drowning those out, at least makes it much easier to ignore or dismiss the reasonable ones.
Particularly with The Big Current Thing, there's quite a bit of nastiness and bad faith shit on both sides of it, and I think that's doing a lot to diminish effectiveness and the likelihood of good progress. :/
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Date: 2023-06-02 08:53 pm (UTC)From:The sheer mental burden of fandom suddenly focusing on people who are usually pretty invisible is a lot. I fully support everything Denise (Synecdochic / Rahaeli) is doing and saying, but she is also in a position of having a lot of connections, knowledge and knows where to draw fine line. For me, I am trying to support while not adding to the whole glaring down like a spot light with possibly wrong assumptions and also maybe... other things I don't know how to explain without examples.
Basically, when most of your free time for the past few years as been dedicated to an organization and spending time with this people, suddenly a bunch of people angry 'on your behalf' doesn't play out as some people would assume. They are all volunteers, no one is being financially forced to do this. The factors preventing walk outs in other situations doesn't apply here.
And that's just the pressure from the good faith people! Add onto that all the bad actors attacking what they put years of their lives into building...
But yeah, I think failure to scale is a huge problem. I also think they need to give up on someone doing the diversity work for free at this point. Sitting around putting vibes out into the universe hoping that someone makes the right connection at a UCal Berkley alumni party to get free work is not happening. We almost got someone who was going to be that for us, but she was a POC running for the board in 2020 and suddenly BLM stuff was popping off and she chose that for her free time instead of us, very understandably. Running a fan archive and dealing with it's issues and running protests with online meetings and communication and conflict resolution when you can't be face to face? Same skills. We had a drain of... what small diversity had been built up in 2020 and for good reason. Fandom's massive racefaking problem means that building diversity was done along personal connections so we didn't wind up with the exact sort of BS that has happened in fandom time and time and time again. Anyway, yeah, there is a lot of work to do, now more work than ever, and at this point no one is going to do it for free. OTW is huge, it's time to budget/fundraise for an endowment specifically for a diversity consultant.
You need a level of privilege to devote that much of your life to a non-profit. This isn't an OTW specific problem, it's a problem with non-profits and volunteering in general. It's hard to build diversity, but that's also sorely needed.
Sorry, that went a bit astray from the problematic image content problem, but it is also part of the scaling issue. They aren't a small group that can rely on networking for free work anymore, and that's a cultural change they need to make. Even if that one person has still been able to run for the board, maybe we were expecting waaaay too much of her in the same way a lot of orgs expect too much of diversity hires. "do your job and be everyone's go to and also tell us how to fix everything... and then explain why and deal when we don't actually want change" is a thing that happens.
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Date: 2023-06-03 04:51 am (UTC)From:But for the rest of it:
I do think that a lot of people have a hard time conceptualizing how much needs to change for AO3 to work as a large org. And it IS a large org now, even though it started small with no aims beyond "maybe kind of medium-sized." There are good guiding principles that still work... but *structurally*, there has to be change. And yeah, few of the complaints of dysfunction are new ones.
And yes, there are definitely a lot of assumptions being made, and things that are being discussed in a very "single viewpoint" way. The OTW/AO3 has often stayed very quiet about internal things, often for good reason. (I know we very recently talked about transparency and how it's sometimes good but sometimes not.) Add to that general messaging issues (where it takes a long while to craft a statement with the needed information, with input from the correct internal groups, presented well for people unfamiliar with the situation, etc.), and some of those issues compound. It's in a lot of ways better for them NOT to "defend themselves" and get into escalating internet slapfights (and a lot of their recent statements have NOT BEEN GREAT, so it's probably best to avoid foot-in-mouth disease), and statements have different impacts when it's one person saying something vs. an organization as a whole saying something... but it also means that to an extent, people can just sort of say anything without anyone refuting it.
(I am NOT saying I'm disbelieving people who are speaking up about problems and issues... just that it IS pretty uni-directional.)
Definitely agreed that they likely need to look at someone as a PAID diversity consultant. And quite possibly a few other paid positions. It's not that it's not a worthwhile goal to have it be something fully by-us-for-us-volunteered-no-money-involved... but as the scale has grown to a point that it's beyond a full-time job to deal with some of these roles... they might have to look at ways to compensate people so they CAN devote the needed time and energy to it. Yes, that IS a huge can of worms, but some of these bigger roles are way beyond a typical "volunteer" position. But even if that IS a line they don't want to cross when it comes to the rest of the org... they need to pay for a diversity consultant.
But no kidding - I completely understand why there has been a certain amount of "we have to actually know you" that's gone on, even if it looks cliquish from outside... there's been SO much racefaking or bad-faith grift shit out there, no one wants to risk that.
That is a big part of the issue that is hard to solve - how there is a certain amount of privilege involved in having the time and flexibility to volunteer, particularly when it requires a lot of time and energy, AND is additionally often pretty thankless work.
No, I don't think it's off-topic. The problem of scale is the most significant one, imo. There DOES have to be a big culture shift within the organization, and it's going to be a tough one to make happen. Some change is also likely to be invisible, and so if there is good-faith effort going on behind the scenes, it likely won't be obvious on a fast enough timetable for a lot of the people who are pushing right now.
It IS likely true that even getting the perfect candidate who could try to help with the diversity issues... yeah, would end just like you mentioned. "You've got your job, but we all need you to advise us, but also we might not want to listen, and that'll also be your responsibility..."
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Date: 2023-06-03 09:39 pm (UTC)From:I've been with a few orgs dealing with growing pains. It's not exactly comparable to OTW, but it gives me a frame of reference. For a time, a lot of anime cons went from basically a meet up group to hosting bands and flying in guests from other countries and also having enough capital that we needed to make bylaws to prevent the coffers being raided. (We actually had people planning to take over the board of an org I was on to vote to end it and, as the 'owners' split the profit. We spent a year going over nailing down vulnerabilities and also best practices for blyaws) It's a lot and no one is ever going to thank the bylaw committee for a threat most people didn't know about, because we didn't advertise that, before the change, there were legal ways to basically vulture capitalism us and we had a group of very keen raiders taking aim.
Also, some actor named Misha Collins never thought his pet projects to play with fandom were going to get THAT big or get SERIOUS amounts of money. He was not prepared to deal with his own creation. Not telling tales out of school here, he's publicly said so. I was with Random Acts while they transitioned to having a paid person in charge and man, that was disruptive. Paying someone to do work you did for free? That can feel demeaning. People who did good work can suddenly feel terrible about all they did. If I had talked publicly about any of the problems I had with the changes, fandom would 100% have misinterpreted all of it.
I know people want to help, but we need to at least try to acknowledge that things might be more complicated over there than they seem. But at the same time they need to get on paid diversity consultant, best practices for reviewing visual content and walk back this AI shit.
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Date: 2023-06-04 04:02 am (UTC)From:But oh yikes at the "attempt to take over and cash out" grift. BIG yikes. It's a pretty common frustration, that no one ever sees or appreciates the disaster that was avoided. Sorting out rules to prevent someone from taking advantage or fucking over an organization can be a huge deal, but when effective, means that no one ever knows! It's kind of that Y2K thing, where people think it was a bunch of overblown nonsense, because it had few widespread effects... except that's thanks to work put in to prevent the worst effects!
But oh yes. That was one of the scenarios I was thinking about with the can of worms that beginning to have paid positions would open. There could absolutely be resentment and hurt feelings (not undeservedly!) when it comes to suddenly paying someone to do work that other people DID do as volunteers. Because that IS a huge change, and it's frankly NOT a fair one... which makes it feel shitty, even if it helps to address some other problems.
And yeah, big agree. Things are almost always more complex than people want to acknowledge. It really isn't as simple as a lot of people want to believe it is. But a paid diversity consultant is long overdue. They also really do need to improve internal communications and best practices. And I definitely wish they'd reexamine their stance on AI.
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Date: 2023-06-04 07:35 am (UTC)From:Yeah, change, even if needed, can feel very shitty and it's important to try to be mindful of the people who kept the ship going through all the storms.
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Date: 2023-06-05 03:01 am (UTC)From:But yes. The bigger the change, the more disruptive it's going to be, and there are ways in which the changes aren't really very fair to people who have been involved from the start. Waiting doesn't make it more fair, and some of those difficult changes may be needed for long-term health and viability of the org... but it still needs to be done with care.
(Yet another issue, where there seems to be a lot of expectation that things be done now now now, quick quick quick. Yes, the org has been slow as sludge in some cases where it should have moved a bit more quickly, and that's one of the things they need to work on, but... making decisions FAST is often not a good idea when it's something like this.)
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Date: 2023-06-05 10:37 am (UTC)From:Go slow and fix things is the way. Mostly... the images best practices and searching for a diversity consultant should start right damn now but a lot of the changes to the archive and power flows and other stuff takes a while to get right. Trust me, I am a Portlander... I well know the outcomes of 'act now think later' in policy changes....
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Date: 2023-06-07 04:25 am (UTC)From:Yes. I agree that image best practices, maybe a careful cleanup/expansion/clarification of internal policies (though I don't know what those look like as-is), and finding a diversity consultant who can help point to what policies could/should be improved as well as how to improve conditions for volunteers are things that should be prioritized, and action can at least start on those. But broader changes to the hierarchy and function of the org as a whole? Yeah, that's got to be done carefully.
Hooo boy, yeah. "ACT NOW, THINK LATER!" causes a lot of new problems out of well-meaning "solutions."