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 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.