Nov. 13th, 2011 11:16 am
Last-minute OTW elections thing
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unjapanologistIn this post:
*Grumblings about the "I don't speak for the OTW" disclaimer and about diversity
*Very lengthy rantings about copyright legislation and why the OTW should do its utmost to make sure all fans feel comfortable approaching it for tools and resources
*An endorsement of Betsy Rosenblatt for the board
If you're pressed for time, please skip the grumblings and rantings and go straight to the endorsement. Lucy Pearson withdrew her candidacy while I was writing this, so I feel it's doubly important to stress why Betsy deserves a vote. Also,general_jinjur explained the OTW's voting system with pictures of smarties on a pai sho board yay very clear graphical representations, and what it comes down to is, the order in which we rank candidates during voting can matter a lot.
In case you weren't inside or near the storm, the OTW board elections that will take place in a few days have turned into a rather massive debate about the direction that the org should be taking from now on. A lot of important stuff has already been discussed. People have gathered many links and said many very impressive things. Things to check out:
*Tireless election officer Ira Gladkova has prepared compilations of all statements made by the candidates, per candidate
*lian has been collecting all posts related to the electionon Pinboard
*starlady has been making excellent link recs
*added:ainsley has a long and handy links list
*The OTW's mission statement (basics are fun)
Diversity, transparency and sustainability seem to be the biggest issues, in the sense that people want there to be more of all of that. It appears that the OTW is currently burning through volunteers far more quickly than necessary, and is having a hard time really appealing to fans outside the Western media journaling sphere (symptomatic of which is that discussions about the election disproportionately take place on DW/LJ). I agree that all these things are crucial issues, and although I mostly talk about the importance of diversity in this post, transparency and sustainability are very closely connected to diversity. No diversity without more transparency, and no sustainability without diversity and all that.
The obligatory disclaimer, and diversity
I'm not very fond of the "I'm just one member and I don't speak for the OTW" disclaimer that we generally tack onto OTW-related posts. It makes sense, of course; we need it to keep people's personal opinions, misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and other foibles from reflecting onto the entire org. (I'm an OTW member and volunteer, by the way, and everything in this post is my personal opinion. Hence the overuse of "I". EDIT: And I've only been a volunteer for half a year or so, so I'm not an expert on anything org-related. Please tell me if I say something that's incorrect.)
However, I suspect that for a non-OTW person, these disclaimers could be painting a rather inaccurate and unintended picture of how the OTW and its members relate to each other. When people say that they "don't speak for the OTW" in personal posts, that sounds as if there is some kind of OTW party line that people are expected to follow. It gives those who aren't involved with the OTW the idea that members of the OTW are expected to agree on a set of opinions, and must paper their posts with disclaimers if they want to break ranks for some reason.
The OTW doesn't have a program. There is no list of opinions that all of its members are asked to agree on. (The org seems to have very few fixed official stances on any topic at all, except that fanworks are transformative works under US law and therefore legal in that country, and there are probably members who disagree even with that. The org does have values that it endorses, but there's no set of talking points that people have to agree on.) I've said something to this effect in comments, but the OTW is not and should not be an organization that people feel they must subscribe to. It's an organization that expands to include any fan who joins. Every person who gets involved with the OTW enriches it with their own fannish experiences and opinions, and they should feel like room in the org has been prepared for them, not like they have to work to carve the room out by themselves.
If that's not what it feels like to people, that should change, because we won't get a step closer to real diversity if the OTW continues to be seen as a place where everybody agrees with each other. The OTW is full of people who are disagreeing all the time, people who have very different fannish backgrounds and very different ideas about how or why the org does what it does, but that's not what it looks like from the outside. I think it would help a lot if the org was more transparent about the disagreements between its members. I also think it would help if there was more actual, visible community-building on the OTW's main site, for instance with forums, so that casual visitors can immediately see what kind of people are involved in this organization.
I think it's incredibly important to make the OTW, staffers and volunteers and members and all, into more of a social community that is very visibly diverse in backgrounds and opinions. If people get the idea that signing up for the OTW means that they need to fit themselves into some kind of mold, then that needs to change. No fan wants to get it suggested to them, however unintentionally, that this fannish organization cannot expand to include their way of being a fan and supporting fandom. If people do get that impression, they're not going to stick around. The OTW can't afford to present itself as an organization that has a Diversity Checklist on hand it tries its darnest to follow; it needs to be obviously and visibly diverse in and of itself. If the org is clearly diverse and listening to the concerns of its diverse membership, then an occasional bad call may be easier to bear. But if the org seems to be following a checklist, any bad call (such as the server naming fiasco) just looks like one more damning bit of proof that the org Does Not Get It And Never Will, Why Bother. I get the impression that the org is actually pretty diverse in its membership. But it's not using that diversity to breed more diversity, because the voices of those hundreds of members are scattered all over personal journals and other parts of the internet instead of visible on the main OTW site.
Diversity is massively important for a large number of reasons that have been explained all over by some of the candidates and many other people. Since this post should probably go out sometime before the election actually takes place, I'll limit myself to articulating some Feelings about why the OTW should be a place where all fans feel welcome to blunder in and ask for help.
Why is it so important to have an organization that all fans feel comfortable approaching?
Now, the OTW could probably do quite well for itself as an organization that is recognized and recognizes itself as being Western media fandom-centric. We could do a great job serving Western media fans. However, I think it would be a tragedy for all fans if the OTW tries and publicly fails to show that fans from very disparate communities can organize and have some common concerns. As in, concerning concerns about actual real problems, concerns that won't get addressed until there's more awareness about them at the very least.
Allow me to tl;dr about one of those concerns. (This is a Thing I've been stewing on for quite a while. It probably sounds a bit overblown in places, but it explains a lot of why I believe as strongly as I do in the OTW as an organization that all fans should feel comfortable approaching. Please excuse any general incoherence.)
I very firmly believe fans should be more aware about how copyright legislation impacts our fannish business, and how company actors are obtaining more and more technical and legal means that may allow them to regulate or co-opt fannish activities. I think the OTW is perfectly placed to play an essential role in raising this awareness, and that for this reason alone, it should make sure that as many fans as possible are willing to engage with the org.
While the OTW can and should learn more from fannish organizations worldwide, if you consider copyright legislation to be a major concern for fandom (and I do), it's probably appropriate for this organization to be in the US and focus on US law. Like it or not, what the US wants regarding copyright legislation is going to have a huge influence on what people in other countries will experience. A lot of copyright-related stuff is decided on an international level these days, and it touches more people and more of the things we do day by day.
It may not look like anything's amiss right now, since we are all having happy gratis fun times on the internet now instead of mailing zines and fansub tapes through the post (which then had to be converted from NTSC to PAL and it cost an arm and a leg and oh god, I'm so glad it's not 1997 anymore). But the scope of copyright legislation and the things that media companies can regulate has gotten pretty damn stunning. The things that companies can regulate without ever involving actual law enforcement people whose job includes bothering with due process and assuming innocence and such. DRM, the DMCA, EULAs and other tricky licensing inventions, etc etc - companies are allowed to do crazy things to consumers compared to a few decades ago.
Basically, companies are increasingly getting the right to decide what consumer rights in the digital age should amount to. That terrifies me, because consumers have not been given equal rights to bypass courts and judges and decide what companies are allowed to do. (Lots of good stuff has been written about this topic; Tim Wu's The Master Switch, William Fischer's Promises to Keep and Lawrence Lessig's Remix are good starting points if you're a book-buying person. Blog-wise, I don't even know where to start recommending, but Techdirt is especially good at keeping up with incidents of mostly media companies going haywire over copyright. I very, very much recommend anyone of a fannish persuasion to read Suzanne Scott's dissertation, which talks about how media companies in the happy age of convergence culture cherry-pick which kinds of fan activities they feel comfortable legitimizing and which they prefer to keep marginalized (guess where the porn goes). It's engagingly written and freely available at Revenge of the fanboy: convergence culture and the politics of incorporation.)
There is nothing to guarantee that happy gratis fun times on the internet will last for us. We're not protected by any laws, and the laws that theoretically do protect us are often ignored or bypassed by or in favor of those who can lobby harder than us. Awesome new media promising unprecedented openness and cultural democracy have a very regrettable tendency to get regulated to pieces until they become yet another medium that companies can rearrange into the perfect money-making system and everybody else is only allowed to use, not modify. (This happened to telephone and radio, for example.) We really shouldn't assume that all the freedom of operation that fans enjoy today is magically going to last.
Sure, of course there will always be fanwork no matter what. Even if the MPAA is crowned king of the world tomorrow and all human endeavour on the internet is made illegal, fans will find a way to carry on under the radar. We're damn good at that. People will always find a way to get together and tell each other what a story meant for them; that's not a behavior that can be legislated away. (The MPAA is not about to be crowned king of the world. I'm probably exaggerating the risks here, but the general point stands.)
But having to hide again would massively limit the accessibility of fandom for very many people who can now access it while they couldn't before, and that would be bad, whoa bad. Fandom is a beautiful place. It has taught me to write and draw, it has taught me that I can reshape the things I'm told instead of shutting up and listening. It's been a refuge for me when I needed one, it's been a place where I've been challenged more than anywhere else, where I learned more about society and how others live in it than I've ever learned in any other space. I feel like I'm so much better for having been in fandom, both inside and towards the world that I trample through and influence every day. Fandom is an experience that I don't want to deny to anyone. It should be an accessible, open, guilt-free experience for anyone who wants to live it, and I'm afraid that if we don't learn how to defend it, it may be changed for us in ways that we can't imagine right now.
The internet has given us a platform for unprecedented creativity and growth, but the same technologies that have allowed fandom to explode like this also put it squarely out in the open, in a place where everyone can see it and muddle with it and take a shot at co-opting it, at making it into a marketing tool and trying to bury the parts of it that are inconvenient for marketing purposes (like the parts that talk about sexuality and other hard topics).
And yet, it seems there are still people who complain that it's bad for an organization like the OTW to talk about fans too loudly or claim that what fans do is legal, because that might increase fandom's visibility and invite attention from copyright holders. That sort of attitude is silly to the point of being outright dangerous. We are on the internet, and so is everybody else and their dog, and their lawyers. Companies know exactly what we're doing. The horse of visibility left the barn so many years ago that it is now the proud great-grandmother of numerous herds of extremely visible horses. Short of unplugging the computers and going back to mailing zines and tapes, there is nothing we can do to get back under the radar.
Problem is, companies know, but most other people don't. Legislators and the General Public and others who might have an impact on consumer rights have no idea why fandom is valuable and important. And by staying quiet and in faux-hiding, fans are letting companies shape other people's idea of what fandom is -and what it should be, for the good of society. They're also letting companies shape future fans' idea of what fandom is and how fans should behave. Quoting Scott:
We can't get back under the radar. The only thing we can do to is to stake our claim to the space we currently think we're squatting on. Talk about ourselves more and louder to everyone who doesn't yet know that we're here and we're awesome, say that yes, we do have the right to write fics and make vids and doujinshi, yes, this is all good and legal, and if it isn't properly legal then it should be. Every single one of us should be aware that we're not squatting, or leeching, or poaching, or otherwise conducting ourselves in a manner that suggest that the culture we produce is somehow illegitimate. We are an intrinsic part of the way the digital age works, like we were an intrinsic part of the way the nineteenth bloody century worked, and that should be recognized and protected. What we do creates so much value and beauty for so many people that the way our communities function should not be jeopardized just because some industry actors can't deal with the fact that their business models are unsuited to the year 2011.
Back to how the OTW figures in that
And now this has gotten all gooey and ranty and off-topic. In brief, I think it's important that fans -all the disparate individuals and communities that count themselves as fans- have somewhere to turn to when they need help defending their spaces. When they need information, or tools, or legal advice, or a place to find allies. It takes an organization with womanpower and resources and knowledge and connections to build that sort of toolbox. I'm first in line when it's time to laud the myriad ways in which technology and the internet have empowered individuals, but they've also empowered everybody else including the people who had more power than us in the first place, so we shouldn't overstate what individuals with limited time and resources can accomplish on their own.
And we definitely shouldn't underestimate the chilling effect of the mere idea that a company might do something legal-ish if a fan "steps out of line" somehow. Sadly enough, consumer rights don't really matter much if consumers don't band together and defend them, because what individual consumer is going to risk getting embroiled in a lawsuit with a large company? Any fan who feels like she stands alone is not even going to think about doing something that might rock the boat. I hate, hate, hate the way that uncertainty and fear of lawsuit monsters places artificial limits on imagination and shackles creativity.
We need clarity about what the law does and does not let us do, and strength in numbers. Preferably numbers who have the means to organize when they must, and who have a hotline to a friendly and available group of fan lawyers that every fan who is befuddled by something law-related feels comfortable poking. I think, I hope, that the OTW can become an organization that is just there whenever fans need it -that gives people the tools they need to empower themselves (own the servers!) and the means to organize if they need to. The OTW should be only one of many fannish toolboxes. Hopefully, its existence will inspire a lot more fan-run "we are here, hear us roar" projects that strive to make a dent in the world outside of fandom (such as the fannish bookmarking service project that's been getting off the ground since Deliciousfail).
I'm pretty confident that the OTW can do this. Making and keeping fannish activities as accessible as possible is right there in its lists of values and goals. Accessibility is all about making things legitimate and okay and valuable in the minds of everyone, about creating the tools to realize that accessibility, and about giving people the means and the right to defend their spaces.
That's also why I love the OTW's emphasis on "building the builders", on mentoring, on awareness-raising, and on empowering people by giving them resources and tools. The OTW is not (and should not be) a group of fans who can claim to speak for all fans just because they are BNFs, or have degrees, or are otherwise privileged enough to be able to grab the megaphone and then hog it. The OTW should be the place where there's a big pile of megaphones that anyone can go grab when they need them, and where they can also enlist a megaphone operator who knows lawyerspeak if they need someone like that to help them say what they want to say, and where there are mechanics who can show them how to build their own archive, and a big warehouse where people will take their stuff and keep it for them if they don't need it anymore but don't want to let it go to waste, and where there's a journal that speaks academese and can help the researchers who tell the world about fans how to do it right, and so on. The OTW should be a place that gathers people who speak many tongues and jargons, so that when someone needs to make their fannish self understood to some person or entity, the OTW can help them translate.
(And here is where I toot my own horn, because I'm volunteering in the Translation Committee. Translation matters! It's so very important to have in-house capacity for speaking different languages. The OTW's translation processes are hardly perfect, but it's fantastic that the org recognizes the importance of trying until it damn well works.)
That's a lot of stuff to ask of one organization, though. Several candidates have spoken about the OTW needing more of a strategic plan, and astanaqui said, doing all the things is not a plan but mission creep. The OTW doesn't need to do all the things. In fact, it definitely shouldn't, because that could make it end up as the one fannish org to rule them all (at least on the English-language net; it's definitely not the only org of its kind in the world). The OTW should support, train, and inspire all the peoples, so they will go forth and do all the things just the way they want them done.
That wasn't very brief at all. One more try. The OTW is awesome and it can be so much more than that, and it is necessary, and I'm thrilled that I can be a part of it. I hope I will vote wisely and that everyone else will do the same, because if you are a person who makes fanstuff on the internet, you probably have at least some interest in seeing this organization fulfill its mission.
Preferred candidate line-up
I'm voting for Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Jenny Scott-Thompson, and Betsy Rosenblatt.
There's been a lot of fascinating analysis about each candidate's statements and goals for the org, and it doesn't need repeating. Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Lucy Pearson, and Jenny Scott-Thompson are wonderfully excellent candidates and I endorse them and their ideas for diversity, sustainability, and transparency without any reservations. Many other people who are better writers than me have already explained at length why they're awesome. But as we draw closer to the election and the plot thickens, with Lucy Pearson withdrawing her candidacy, I'd like to take a moment to talk more about what Betsy Rosenblatt has told us about her ideas for the org.
Short version: A lot of people have been recommending Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Lucy Pearson, and Jenny Scott-Thompson as a group. If you were going to vote for that group, I very, very emphatically recommend that you give your free vote to Betsy Rosenblatt now.bookshop has all the reasons why this is probably not the time to vote Naomi Novik back onto the board; I have nothing to add to that post. But I think that whoever else is a candidate in this election, Betsy is just the kind of person that the OTW needs on its board right now.
I admit, I did spend ages waffling between Betsy and Lucy before finally settling on Betsy. Some of her early responses didn't appeal to me much. But she really won me over with the excellent suggestions and insights that she lobbed around in the follow-up answers.
Such as in the second follow-up to the second chat:
Look at this bit again:
And I'm impressed in general with Betsy's take on the legal issues that fans face. The OTW's legal advocacy is wildly important for all of us, and I wish we'd focus more on it (I wish I'd asked more about it during the last couple of weeks). The "every nonprofit board should include a lawyer" statement drew a lot of flak, but I believe she explained it well afterwards. Especially this particular organization, which deals with things on which copyright legislation has such a massive impact, can never have enough people keeping an eye on the legal side of things. Betsy seems to be someone who can make sure that the org stays focused on what I believe is one of its core functions: to tell the world, including fans themselves, that fanworks are or should be completely legal, and that anyone who tries to mess with what fans do is wrong. I especially like that Betsy seems to be thinking beyond the borders of the org. Her talk about getting other scholars who work on copyright matters up to speed with what fandom needs/wants has me shouting YES YES YES again:
(Note: derivative work and transformative work aren't the same thing, obviously, but I'm skipping over this distinction for now and using "derivative" in the above paragraph because that's the word a lot of the researchers whose work I read seem to use.)
I also agree that getting stuff onto Wikipedia is important in informing the wider world about what's going on with us and why it matters.
Betsy also thinks beyond the borders of the US regarding legal issues, which is another YES YES YES, because the OTW can learn so very much from how fans and fannish organizations elsewhere handle copyright legislation and keeping a more or less healthy relationship with copyright holders. I liked her answers in the second follow-up set of questions about outreach for much the same reasons thattroisroyaumes liked them, particularly the things she suggested in response to the question about concrete ways to reach out to anime/manga fandom:
The idea to get someone onto the legal committee who's an expert on Japanese law really appeals. I obviously have an occupational bias in favor of all things Japan, but I really do believe that this country is where a lot of the most fascinating and promising experimentation with fan-industry relations is taking place. The OTW can benefit immensely from knowing more about it. Also, this:
As an aside, I was also delighted to see Betsy mention the importance of TWC, and also its upcoming issue on Boys' Love. TWC is another OTW project, besides legal advocacy, that I'd like to see discussed more. This election centered on other topics, and rightly so. But I think a lot of people are unsure about what TWC contributes to the OTW, and I'd like to see that rectified, because the journal is a very valuable resource and tool. (Though it probably needs to be a bit more accessible in people's minds before it can help draw members of underrepresented fan communities to the OTW in the way Betsy suggests.)
Just FYI, another related quote from the second follow-up:
I very much hope to see Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Jenny Scott-Thompson, and Betsy Rosenblatt join the board.
*Grumblings about the "I don't speak for the OTW" disclaimer and about diversity
*Very lengthy rantings about copyright legislation and why the OTW should do its utmost to make sure all fans feel comfortable approaching it for tools and resources
*An endorsement of Betsy Rosenblatt for the board
If you're pressed for time, please skip the grumblings and rantings and go straight to the endorsement. Lucy Pearson withdrew her candidacy while I was writing this, so I feel it's doubly important to stress why Betsy deserves a vote. Also,
general_jinjur explained the OTW's voting system with In case you weren't inside or near the storm, the OTW board elections that will take place in a few days have turned into a rather massive debate about the direction that the org should be taking from now on. A lot of important stuff has already been discussed. People have gathered many links and said many very impressive things. Things to check out:
*Tireless election officer Ira Gladkova has prepared compilations of all statements made by the candidates, per candidate
*
lian has been collecting all posts related to the electionon Pinboard*
starlady has been making excellent link recs*added:
ainsley has a long and handy links list*The OTW's mission statement (basics are fun)
Diversity, transparency and sustainability seem to be the biggest issues, in the sense that people want there to be more of all of that. It appears that the OTW is currently burning through volunteers far more quickly than necessary, and is having a hard time really appealing to fans outside the Western media journaling sphere (symptomatic of which is that discussions about the election disproportionately take place on DW/LJ). I agree that all these things are crucial issues, and although I mostly talk about the importance of diversity in this post, transparency and sustainability are very closely connected to diversity. No diversity without more transparency, and no sustainability without diversity and all that.
The obligatory disclaimer, and diversity
I'm not very fond of the "I'm just one member and I don't speak for the OTW" disclaimer that we generally tack onto OTW-related posts. It makes sense, of course; we need it to keep people's personal opinions, misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and other foibles from reflecting onto the entire org. (I'm an OTW member and volunteer, by the way, and everything in this post is my personal opinion. Hence the overuse of "I". EDIT: And I've only been a volunteer for half a year or so, so I'm not an expert on anything org-related. Please tell me if I say something that's incorrect.)
However, I suspect that for a non-OTW person, these disclaimers could be painting a rather inaccurate and unintended picture of how the OTW and its members relate to each other. When people say that they "don't speak for the OTW" in personal posts, that sounds as if there is some kind of OTW party line that people are expected to follow. It gives those who aren't involved with the OTW the idea that members of the OTW are expected to agree on a set of opinions, and must paper their posts with disclaimers if they want to break ranks for some reason.
The OTW doesn't have a program. There is no list of opinions that all of its members are asked to agree on. (The org seems to have very few fixed official stances on any topic at all, except that fanworks are transformative works under US law and therefore legal in that country, and there are probably members who disagree even with that. The org does have values that it endorses, but there's no set of talking points that people have to agree on.) I've said something to this effect in comments, but the OTW is not and should not be an organization that people feel they must subscribe to. It's an organization that expands to include any fan who joins. Every person who gets involved with the OTW enriches it with their own fannish experiences and opinions, and they should feel like room in the org has been prepared for them, not like they have to work to carve the room out by themselves.
If that's not what it feels like to people, that should change, because we won't get a step closer to real diversity if the OTW continues to be seen as a place where everybody agrees with each other. The OTW is full of people who are disagreeing all the time, people who have very different fannish backgrounds and very different ideas about how or why the org does what it does, but that's not what it looks like from the outside. I think it would help a lot if the org was more transparent about the disagreements between its members. I also think it would help if there was more actual, visible community-building on the OTW's main site, for instance with forums, so that casual visitors can immediately see what kind of people are involved in this organization.
I think it's incredibly important to make the OTW, staffers and volunteers and members and all, into more of a social community that is very visibly diverse in backgrounds and opinions. If people get the idea that signing up for the OTW means that they need to fit themselves into some kind of mold, then that needs to change. No fan wants to get it suggested to them, however unintentionally, that this fannish organization cannot expand to include their way of being a fan and supporting fandom. If people do get that impression, they're not going to stick around. The OTW can't afford to present itself as an organization that has a Diversity Checklist on hand it tries its darnest to follow; it needs to be obviously and visibly diverse in and of itself. If the org is clearly diverse and listening to the concerns of its diverse membership, then an occasional bad call may be easier to bear. But if the org seems to be following a checklist, any bad call (such as the server naming fiasco) just looks like one more damning bit of proof that the org Does Not Get It And Never Will, Why Bother. I get the impression that the org is actually pretty diverse in its membership. But it's not using that diversity to breed more diversity, because the voices of those hundreds of members are scattered all over personal journals and other parts of the internet instead of visible on the main OTW site.
Diversity is massively important for a large number of reasons that have been explained all over by some of the candidates and many other people. Since this post should probably go out sometime before the election actually takes place, I'll limit myself to articulating some Feelings about why the OTW should be a place where all fans feel welcome to blunder in and ask for help.
Why is it so important to have an organization that all fans feel comfortable approaching?
Now, the OTW could probably do quite well for itself as an organization that is recognized and recognizes itself as being Western media fandom-centric. We could do a great job serving Western media fans. However, I think it would be a tragedy for all fans if the OTW tries and publicly fails to show that fans from very disparate communities can organize and have some common concerns. As in, concerning concerns about actual real problems, concerns that won't get addressed until there's more awareness about them at the very least.
Allow me to tl;dr about one of those concerns. (This is a Thing I've been stewing on for quite a while. It probably sounds a bit overblown in places, but it explains a lot of why I believe as strongly as I do in the OTW as an organization that all fans should feel comfortable approaching. Please excuse any general incoherence.)
I very firmly believe fans should be more aware about how copyright legislation impacts our fannish business, and how company actors are obtaining more and more technical and legal means that may allow them to regulate or co-opt fannish activities. I think the OTW is perfectly placed to play an essential role in raising this awareness, and that for this reason alone, it should make sure that as many fans as possible are willing to engage with the org.
While the OTW can and should learn more from fannish organizations worldwide, if you consider copyright legislation to be a major concern for fandom (and I do), it's probably appropriate for this organization to be in the US and focus on US law. Like it or not, what the US wants regarding copyright legislation is going to have a huge influence on what people in other countries will experience. A lot of copyright-related stuff is decided on an international level these days, and it touches more people and more of the things we do day by day.
It may not look like anything's amiss right now, since we are all having happy gratis fun times on the internet now instead of mailing zines and fansub tapes through the post (which then had to be converted from NTSC to PAL and it cost an arm and a leg and oh god, I'm so glad it's not 1997 anymore). But the scope of copyright legislation and the things that media companies can regulate has gotten pretty damn stunning. The things that companies can regulate without ever involving actual law enforcement people whose job includes bothering with due process and assuming innocence and such. DRM, the DMCA, EULAs and other tricky licensing inventions, etc etc - companies are allowed to do crazy things to consumers compared to a few decades ago.
Basically, companies are increasingly getting the right to decide what consumer rights in the digital age should amount to. That terrifies me, because consumers have not been given equal rights to bypass courts and judges and decide what companies are allowed to do. (Lots of good stuff has been written about this topic; Tim Wu's The Master Switch, William Fischer's Promises to Keep and Lawrence Lessig's Remix are good starting points if you're a book-buying person. Blog-wise, I don't even know where to start recommending, but Techdirt is especially good at keeping up with incidents of mostly media companies going haywire over copyright. I very, very much recommend anyone of a fannish persuasion to read Suzanne Scott's dissertation, which talks about how media companies in the happy age of convergence culture cherry-pick which kinds of fan activities they feel comfortable legitimizing and which they prefer to keep marginalized (guess where the porn goes). It's engagingly written and freely available at Revenge of the fanboy: convergence culture and the politics of incorporation.)
There is nothing to guarantee that happy gratis fun times on the internet will last for us. We're not protected by any laws, and the laws that theoretically do protect us are often ignored or bypassed by or in favor of those who can lobby harder than us. Awesome new media promising unprecedented openness and cultural democracy have a very regrettable tendency to get regulated to pieces until they become yet another medium that companies can rearrange into the perfect money-making system and everybody else is only allowed to use, not modify. (This happened to telephone and radio, for example.) We really shouldn't assume that all the freedom of operation that fans enjoy today is magically going to last.
Sure, of course there will always be fanwork no matter what. Even if the MPAA is crowned king of the world tomorrow and all human endeavour on the internet is made illegal, fans will find a way to carry on under the radar. We're damn good at that. People will always find a way to get together and tell each other what a story meant for them; that's not a behavior that can be legislated away. (The MPAA is not about to be crowned king of the world. I'm probably exaggerating the risks here, but the general point stands.)
But having to hide again would massively limit the accessibility of fandom for very many people who can now access it while they couldn't before, and that would be bad, whoa bad. Fandom is a beautiful place. It has taught me to write and draw, it has taught me that I can reshape the things I'm told instead of shutting up and listening. It's been a refuge for me when I needed one, it's been a place where I've been challenged more than anywhere else, where I learned more about society and how others live in it than I've ever learned in any other space. I feel like I'm so much better for having been in fandom, both inside and towards the world that I trample through and influence every day. Fandom is an experience that I don't want to deny to anyone. It should be an accessible, open, guilt-free experience for anyone who wants to live it, and I'm afraid that if we don't learn how to defend it, it may be changed for us in ways that we can't imagine right now.
The internet has given us a platform for unprecedented creativity and growth, but the same technologies that have allowed fandom to explode like this also put it squarely out in the open, in a place where everyone can see it and muddle with it and take a shot at co-opting it, at making it into a marketing tool and trying to bury the parts of it that are inconvenient for marketing purposes (like the parts that talk about sexuality and other hard topics).
And yet, it seems there are still people who complain that it's bad for an organization like the OTW to talk about fans too loudly or claim that what fans do is legal, because that might increase fandom's visibility and invite attention from copyright holders. That sort of attitude is silly to the point of being outright dangerous. We are on the internet, and so is everybody else and their dog, and their lawyers. Companies know exactly what we're doing. The horse of visibility left the barn so many years ago that it is now the proud great-grandmother of numerous herds of extremely visible horses. Short of unplugging the computers and going back to mailing zines and tapes, there is nothing we can do to get back under the radar.
Problem is, companies know, but most other people don't. Legislators and the General Public and others who might have an impact on consumer rights have no idea why fandom is valuable and important. And by staying quiet and in faux-hiding, fans are letting companies shape other people's idea of what fandom is -and what it should be, for the good of society. They're also letting companies shape future fans' idea of what fandom is and how fans should behave. Quoting Scott:
(... ) what may be at stake is not our current conception of fandom (vast, organically-formed online communities and niche subcommunities that are bonded by their mutual affect for a pop culture text, and solidified by the production and non-profit exchange of their own transformative works inspired by that text), but rather the future conception of “fandom” and who is most influential in shaping it. The “more is more” ethos of the media corporations and conglomerates pushing transmedia storytelling techniques and developing ancillary content models is perhaps more concerned with indoctrinating the next generation of fans than wooing those currently entrenched in existing fan communities. (Scott, p. 158)
We can't get back under the radar. The only thing we can do to is to stake our claim to the space we currently think we're squatting on. Talk about ourselves more and louder to everyone who doesn't yet know that we're here and we're awesome, say that yes, we do have the right to write fics and make vids and doujinshi, yes, this is all good and legal, and if it isn't properly legal then it should be. Every single one of us should be aware that we're not squatting, or leeching, or poaching, or otherwise conducting ourselves in a manner that suggest that the culture we produce is somehow illegitimate. We are an intrinsic part of the way the digital age works, like we were an intrinsic part of the way the nineteenth bloody century worked, and that should be recognized and protected. What we do creates so much value and beauty for so many people that the way our communities function should not be jeopardized just because some industry actors can't deal with the fact that their business models are unsuited to the year 2011.
Back to how the OTW figures in that
And now this has gotten all gooey and ranty and off-topic. In brief, I think it's important that fans -all the disparate individuals and communities that count themselves as fans- have somewhere to turn to when they need help defending their spaces. When they need information, or tools, or legal advice, or a place to find allies. It takes an organization with womanpower and resources and knowledge and connections to build that sort of toolbox. I'm first in line when it's time to laud the myriad ways in which technology and the internet have empowered individuals, but they've also empowered everybody else including the people who had more power than us in the first place, so we shouldn't overstate what individuals with limited time and resources can accomplish on their own.
And we definitely shouldn't underestimate the chilling effect of the mere idea that a company might do something legal-ish if a fan "steps out of line" somehow. Sadly enough, consumer rights don't really matter much if consumers don't band together and defend them, because what individual consumer is going to risk getting embroiled in a lawsuit with a large company? Any fan who feels like she stands alone is not even going to think about doing something that might rock the boat. I hate, hate, hate the way that uncertainty and fear of lawsuit monsters places artificial limits on imagination and shackles creativity.
We need clarity about what the law does and does not let us do, and strength in numbers. Preferably numbers who have the means to organize when they must, and who have a hotline to a friendly and available group of fan lawyers that every fan who is befuddled by something law-related feels comfortable poking. I think, I hope, that the OTW can become an organization that is just there whenever fans need it -that gives people the tools they need to empower themselves (own the servers!) and the means to organize if they need to. The OTW should be only one of many fannish toolboxes. Hopefully, its existence will inspire a lot more fan-run "we are here, hear us roar" projects that strive to make a dent in the world outside of fandom (such as the fannish bookmarking service project that's been getting off the ground since Deliciousfail).
I'm pretty confident that the OTW can do this. Making and keeping fannish activities as accessible as possible is right there in its lists of values and goals. Accessibility is all about making things legitimate and okay and valuable in the minds of everyone, about creating the tools to realize that accessibility, and about giving people the means and the right to defend their spaces.
That's also why I love the OTW's emphasis on "building the builders", on mentoring, on awareness-raising, and on empowering people by giving them resources and tools. The OTW is not (and should not be) a group of fans who can claim to speak for all fans just because they are BNFs, or have degrees, or are otherwise privileged enough to be able to grab the megaphone and then hog it. The OTW should be the place where there's a big pile of megaphones that anyone can go grab when they need them, and where they can also enlist a megaphone operator who knows lawyerspeak if they need someone like that to help them say what they want to say, and where there are mechanics who can show them how to build their own archive, and a big warehouse where people will take their stuff and keep it for them if they don't need it anymore but don't want to let it go to waste, and where there's a journal that speaks academese and can help the researchers who tell the world about fans how to do it right, and so on. The OTW should be a place that gathers people who speak many tongues and jargons, so that when someone needs to make their fannish self understood to some person or entity, the OTW can help them translate.
(And here is where I toot my own horn, because I'm volunteering in the Translation Committee. Translation matters! It's so very important to have in-house capacity for speaking different languages. The OTW's translation processes are hardly perfect, but it's fantastic that the org recognizes the importance of trying until it damn well works.)
That's a lot of stuff to ask of one organization, though. Several candidates have spoken about the OTW needing more of a strategic plan, and as
tanaqui said, doing all the things is not a plan but mission creep. The OTW doesn't need to do all the things. In fact, it definitely shouldn't, because that could make it end up as the one fannish org to rule them all (at least on the English-language net; it's definitely not the only org of its kind in the world). The OTW should support, train, and inspire all the peoples, so they will go forth and do all the things just the way they want them done.That wasn't very brief at all. One more try. The OTW is awesome and it can be so much more than that, and it is necessary, and I'm thrilled that I can be a part of it. I hope I will vote wisely and that everyone else will do the same, because if you are a person who makes fanstuff on the internet, you probably have at least some interest in seeing this organization fulfill its mission.
Preferred candidate line-up
I'm voting for Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Jenny Scott-Thompson, and Betsy Rosenblatt.
There's been a lot of fascinating analysis about each candidate's statements and goals for the org, and it doesn't need repeating. Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Lucy Pearson, and Jenny Scott-Thompson are wonderfully excellent candidates and I endorse them and their ideas for diversity, sustainability, and transparency without any reservations. Many other people who are better writers than me have already explained at length why they're awesome. But as we draw closer to the election and the plot thickens, with Lucy Pearson withdrawing her candidacy, I'd like to take a moment to talk more about what Betsy Rosenblatt has told us about her ideas for the org.
Short version: A lot of people have been recommending Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Lucy Pearson, and Jenny Scott-Thompson as a group. If you were going to vote for that group, I very, very emphatically recommend that you give your free vote to Betsy Rosenblatt now.
bookshop has all the reasons why this is probably not the time to vote Naomi Novik back onto the board; I have nothing to add to that post. But I think that whoever else is a candidate in this election, Betsy is just the kind of person that the OTW needs on its board right now.I admit, I did spend ages waffling between Betsy and Lucy before finally settling on Betsy. Some of her early responses didn't appeal to me much. But she really won me over with the excellent suggestions and insights that she lobbed around in the follow-up answers.
Such as in the second follow-up to the second chat:
I have long thought that one of the greatest challenges fandom faces is its “in the closet” nature, which means that people who participate in fandom are often not its spokespeople. TWC provides a crucial legitimizing window into fandom. As for legal advocacy, not to go too far into a flight of fancy, but the relationship of creativity to the law is a particular interest of mine. The law can help foster creativity, or stifle it, and too often it does the latter while purporting to do the former. We live in a world where people are often afraid to express themselves for all too many reasons: social, cultural, personal…legal reasons shouldn’t be among them. (None of them should! But legal problems are solveable; the others are harder.) As creative people it is our responsibility to make sure that the law reflects, permits, and even encourages the wide and free expression that brings us, and so many others, joy.
YES. YES, THIS. A THOUSAND TIMES THIS. Look at this bit again:
As creative people it is our responsibility to make sure that the law reflects, permits, and even encourages the wide and free expression that brings us, and so many others, joy.
Yes, it is our responsibility to take care of our spaces and make sure that they remain there, and accessible, to anyone who wants or needs them. I'm so glad that somebody is putting that into words.And I'm impressed in general with Betsy's take on the legal issues that fans face. The OTW's legal advocacy is wildly important for all of us, and I wish we'd focus more on it (I wish I'd asked more about it during the last couple of weeks). The "every nonprofit board should include a lawyer" statement drew a lot of flak, but I believe she explained it well afterwards. Especially this particular organization, which deals with things on which copyright legislation has such a massive impact, can never have enough people keeping an eye on the legal side of things. Betsy seems to be someone who can make sure that the org stays focused on what I believe is one of its core functions: to tell the world, including fans themselves, that fanworks are or should be completely legal, and that anyone who tries to mess with what fans do is wrong. I especially like that Betsy seems to be thinking beyond the borders of the org. Her talk about getting other scholars who work on copyright matters up to speed with what fandom needs/wants has me shouting YES YES YES again:
I can work to develop relationships between the OTW and these (and other) groups with common interests, to build the respect, legitimacy, and legal understanding that these segments of the organization work toward.
Copyright scholarship does have a significant impact on legislation, and one of the things I've noticed while reading ALL THE ARTICLES for my thesis is that even copyright scholars who talk about derivative works almost constantly are very often simply ignorant of fanwork. This is not good, because a very big portion of all the cultural goods that are labeled "derivative work" are actually fanwork. It's pretty alarming that many influential scholars seem to be unaware of the particular needs and wants of the biggest community of derivative works creators anywhere. The gendered aspects of fanwork and fan communities in particular are virtually never mentioned. If this situation is allowed to continue and well-meaning but non-fannish people get to determine what a legitimate "derivative work" is, female fans' works might end up getting pushed to the periphery again -this time the periphery of "derivative works". Betsy's proposal about getting influential scholars to understand the particular situation of fannish creators is very important. Crucial, I'd say.(Note: derivative work and transformative work aren't the same thing, obviously, but I'm skipping over this distinction for now and using "derivative" in the above paragraph because that's the word a lot of the researchers whose work I read seem to use.)
I also agree that getting stuff onto Wikipedia is important in informing the wider world about what's going on with us and why it matters.
Betsy also thinks beyond the borders of the US regarding legal issues, which is another YES YES YES, because the OTW can learn so very much from how fans and fannish organizations elsewhere handle copyright legislation and keeping a more or less healthy relationship with copyright holders. I liked her answers in the second follow-up set of questions about outreach for much the same reasons that
troisroyaumes liked them, particularly the things she suggested in response to the question about concrete ways to reach out to anime/manga fandom:Link and/or create resources for fansubbing and scanlation (as we have for viding)
Seek out anime and manga fandoms for Open Doors treatment
Add information as appropriate about the OTW to relevant Wikipedia pages that address anime- and manga- fandom related topics
Include an expert on Japanese law on the legal committee
(Full disclosure: this was my question, so various candidates' responses to it probably had a disproportionate influence on my impression of them.)Seek out anime and manga fandoms for Open Doors treatment
Add information as appropriate about the OTW to relevant Wikipedia pages that address anime- and manga- fandom related topics
Include an expert on Japanese law on the legal committee
The idea to get someone onto the legal committee who's an expert on Japanese law really appeals. I obviously have an occupational bias in favor of all things Japan, but I really do believe that this country is where a lot of the most fascinating and promising experimentation with fan-industry relations is taking place. The OTW can benefit immensely from knowing more about it. Also, this:
outreach isn’t just about growing our roster and archive – it’s about providing fandoms with helpful resources and advocacy
Exactly.As an aside, I was also delighted to see Betsy mention the importance of TWC, and also its upcoming issue on Boys' Love. TWC is another OTW project, besides legal advocacy, that I'd like to see discussed more. This election centered on other topics, and rightly so. But I think a lot of people are unsure about what TWC contributes to the OTW, and I'd like to see that rectified, because the journal is a very valuable resource and tool. (Though it probably needs to be a bit more accessible in people's minds before it can help draw members of underrepresented fan communities to the OTW in the way Betsy suggests.)
Just FYI, another related quote from the second follow-up:
Because the legal mission and the journal are both, mostly, self-sustaining without input from large populations of volunteers, they can easily get brushed aside as things not to worry about. I know that our committee’s regular update of “still not sued!” helps perpetuate the notion that all we do is sit around and wait for a lawsuit, and that’s not true at all. We field inquiries from fen, we work with the board and other committees on developing org policies, we write materials for public and political consumption…right now members of the legal committee are working on the org’s official support for a continued DMCA exemption for transformative works. This work is crucial to the org’s mission, but it’s mostly in the background. The same is true for the journal: from the point of view of many of us, it just magically appears, with its amazing content, and although I am sure a huge amount of work went into it, it was all in the background.
And as a last aside, I think Betsy's suggestion of making it so that more programs in the org don't require constant attention from people to keep running is very sensible and important. This is an excellent way of lightening the load on volunteers. The need to keep a constant eye on everything instead of having issues come to my inbox to be solved is exactly what makes the current OTW translation system difficult to work with for me, and I suspect this is a problem for a lot of other tasks in the org. I very much hope to see Julia Beck, Nikisha Sanders, Jenny Scott-Thompson, and Betsy Rosenblatt join the board.
