Jenny S-T

I live in a flat and have been working on trying to get myself a combined "mini-split" air con/heat pump system, that will give me air conditioning in summer, and efficient eco-friendly air-source heat pump heating in winter. I have been documenting some of the process as it's remarkably painful and it's something I think more people should do in future. Technology Connections on YouTube has some great videos about the benefits of these systems.

( Read more... )

Today I want to talk briefly about TOR and PGP. There has been a lot of recent discussion in light of political changes in the US.

One thing you can do to help the community is start using TOR (download their Firefox version from torproject.org). It works better when more people are using it, and this will help journalists and human rights activists if more people are used to using it for their everyday browsing. Websense currently blocks it as "Proxy avoidance" - let your workplace know why this is a bad thing if they use it.

Another thing you can do to help is get used to using PGP to sign or encrypt your emails. Thunderbird makes it relatively easy, and it's also possible in Outlook. It's harder but possible in the Gmail web interface. GPG helps you get it set up. Find a friend you can meet in person and sign each other's keys, extending the web of trust. I am happy to do this with anyone in my area.

Chatter about the OTW seems to have gone quiet again since the election. This is a critical time, as things calm down again - as puckling said, having engaged members in between elections is really useful for the org. Someone was setting up a Google group, on which I haven't seen anything for several months. It would be great to get that going again.

Reading minutes from 15th Dec, the board appointed the other candidates (apart from Andrea and Sanders), which I think was a good move. Atiya becomes Treasurer, which is a tough job. They're still trying to get a budget published. The next meeting is 8th Jan.

A load of things are obviously delayed by the holiday period - some volunteers suddenly have a lot of free time, and others suddenly have none, which means things move in odd fits and starts.

I've volunteered as a coder and tester again, which is interesting. I haven't yet been officially inducted, so I'm not getting all the back-channel discussions or volunteer communications, but I've been hanging out in the main chat channel as well as getting familiar with the status of things.

My 5 big posts on the state of the servers were all written several weeks ago and are stuck in holiday limbo, waiting for approval from several different committees.

The holiday period has been hard for the core team - the 10 or so most active people across Systems, AD&T and Support who keep everything up and running. Yuletide was a drop in the ocean compared to the sheer mass of people spending more time reading during the holidays, though they did have some specialist support for their assignments and tags, which was made easier by half their founders and mods also being OTW founders and volunteers. Having Elz working full-time as a contractor is good. James has been spending a lot of time coaxing the servers through overload. He's suggested $6k of new hardware which should give some breathing room, but it's going to stay painful until we get that bought and installed. The last deploy (.100) has helped the databases a bit, but we had a lot of downtime when the firewall went temperamental. There are 40 open pull requests, and a lack of senior people with time to review things, though not nearly as bad as it used to be.

For context, an enterprise application of this size, if it's business-critical or business-important, will often have a team of over 200 full-time employees, across operations, 1st line support, application development, application maintenance, all the design, build and test teams, project management, etc. If you exclude tag wranglers and translators, which are a special type of work, the AO3 has under 100 volunteers in equivalent areas. And although many are very dedicated and spend a lot of hours working for the org, it's not reasonable or sensible long-term to rely on volunteers spending 40 hours a week or more on org work. AO3 has 700k users. You could easily have 200 people working on a business system with 10k users, though obviously there are also examples on the other end of the scale with millions of users, lots more than AO3, with even fewer people running it.

Volunteer management is the hardest thing around, in many ways, and is an old and well-worn problem. The OTW has a lot of easy tasks that you can dip in and out of, like Fanlore editing, and some bits of Translation, Tag wrangling or help with Journal. But there are a lot of tasks that require keeping up to date, current skills and large amounts of time. Writing and editing the major journal articles needs experienced academics, though the Symposium section of the journal and the Fanhackers blog welcome essays from everyone. Several of the groups that keep the Org running need people who are familiar with all the processes and areas of the org and up-to-date with what's going on in each, and that needs a certain amount of ongoing time - improving efficiency helps, but fundamentally you need various roles that are in touch with each other. Support need to be familiar with all the Archive functionality, common mistakes by users, common requests for features and the official answer. The documentation is all there, but getting familiar with it takes time. And the biggest one - coding and sysadmin work takes skills, and those skills take time to develop. Either you need to be someone who already has those skills, from their day job or elsewhere, or you need to learn them, which takes a lot of time. And even once you have those skills, you need to get familiar with this particular project. Obviously there's more that could be done to make it easier for people with those skills to drop in to the AO3, but it's a lot better than it used to be, and fundamentally this is a problem that all volunteer projects face - it takes a lot of time, and dedicated people are thin on the ground.

How can we get some of those people who were spending lots of time talking and writing back in October, and get us to keep talking, to keep reading meeting minutes and news posts, asking questions, and spreading knowledge? How can we get the word out to people who were keen to help back in October, and get them now to do little but useful things like explaining to their friends how to recognise when "The AO3 looks weird and broken" is "Bug, report it via Support" and when it's "CSS hasn't loaded, hit refresh, report to Support if it keeps happening"?

I'm reading a good article at work from the Harvard Business Review, and a few bits stood out to me.

More than 25 years ago the social psychologist Faye Crosby stumbled on a surprising phenomenon: Most women are unaware of having personally been victims of gender discrimination and deny it even when it is objectively true and they see that women in general experience it.

I've seen this happen and felt horribly betrayed by women who said they'd never suffered from sexism, but the article explains how this is often because they don't want to admit to something that they feel they can't fight.

How work is valued may similarly give men an advantage: Research indicates that organizations tend to ignore or undervalue behind-the-scenes work (building a team, avoiding a crisis), which women are more likely to do, while rewarding heroic work, which is most often done by men. These practices were not designed to be discriminatory, but their cumulative effect disadvantages women.

I've definitely seen this happen - it's very hard to shout about how I've prevented a crisis when others are shouting about how they solved all the crises (that they created).

These kinds of subtle biases are something we need to talk more about with mixed groups.

We've achieved a lot, despite the problems. More members, from a wider audience, will help us achieve more. Please signal-boost to groups that currently aren't as well represented - membership from this drive will let you vote in the election next year.

It's posted.

I have so many feelings, and not enough time or energy to post about any of them. But at least there are others who are going to pick up the baton. As Elections Officer, I sent out the call for candidates for this year's election today.

Most of the recent news is on the OTW blog - check it out! It includes more information about performance of the AO3, invitations on the AO3, the latest survey data, and it will shortly have a post about elections that has been consuming a lot of my energy for the past few weeks. The board minutes for the last few meetings are now also online.

awatson wrote a great post on burnout recently. I've mostly been suffering from those symptoms too much to write in here, despite my early dreams. If you want more OTW news, renay and hl are also writing a bit from different perspectives.

Board is difficult. We have three people who can hardly ever make a meeting at the moment. I would say you can see from our minutes, but I'm having trouble getting a quorum to approve the minutes so I can post them. And it's getting to be holiday season, so it's only going to get harder. We can't really have the discussions of big issues that we need if only half the board are there. So we tick along on the admin side, and work on making specific committees more sustainable.

That's an uphill battle, too. We have had an unlucky year, with six chairs having to step down in the first six months of the year - that's significantly higher than normal. We've also had a lot of experienced staffers finally hit the point of "too much". So for those who are left, training newbies is balanced with keeping things running, and trying to fit in some long-term strategic thinking in the gaps. It's easy to think that all we need to do is train and mentor more people for future leadership, but mentoring is hard work, even if it's rewarding. There are people who say they have tons of professional experience, but then don't seem to apply any of the expected skills to their org work. Which applies to me some days, too - I forget that the day-job skills for dealing with difficult clients could be applied to fannish friends in the org.

The AO3 performance problems have slipped off the headlines, but behind the scenes everyone knows it's only a temporary reprieve - we need to fix the actual problems so they don't recur. And because of the stress that's causing, still no-one wants to talk about any of the issues that were raised publicly during the last election.

I wanted to end this on a hopeful note, but I can't think of one right now. I guess that's another of the symptoms of burnout. Anyone want to volunteer for Board next year?

I think it's time for a little more chat about the work I'm doing for the OTW at the moment.

I started this year with several overlapping roles:
- Board member
- Board secretary
- AD&T staff member
- AD&T training lead
- Open Doors board liaison
- Support board liaison
- Finance board liaison

I've now stepped down from AD&T (last week), but am still doing the rest and have joined Finance staff as well. Each of the other board members has something similar - a combination of chair position(s), staff position(s) and liaising, and we each have about 6 different hats to wear.

In a normal week, this means I would have the following regular tasks:
- Attend board meeting (2 hours)
- Write up board meeting minutes, get them approved by the rest of the board and send them to Webmasters for posting
- Attend AD&T meeting (1.5 hours)
- Attend Finance meeting (1 hour)

I'd also attend Support and Open Doors meetings (neither of them meet every week), make notes towards the monthly board newsletter update, follow up via email on any discussions or other projects, and spend some time coding. I'd aim to have a 1:1 catch-up via email or Gtalk with each of the three chairs I liaised for at least once a month, and ideally more like once a week when things are moving fast.

Support started the year on a good footing, having carried on working during the break. Matty has set up the new AO3 documentation workgroup to revamp the FAQs with AD&T's help. They've added a new staff member and have been handling tickets as usual.

Open Doors were very quiet in previous years. This year they started off with the SSA import, which required a ton of help from Support, Comms and AD&T. Their chair, Heather, had to step down fairly shortly after that, as her day job is busy and she didn't have the time for the increased workload. Mishie stepped up as the new chair, and has done an excellent job. Most of the committee are new, and the experienced people have fairly limited time. They're writing a lot of processes from scratch, preparing for importing more archives to the AO3 - we have a queue of archives which have asked for help.

Finance are having a big focus on documentation this year - they've previously had several expert committee members who had all the information in their heads, but would now like to have things clearly documented as well, to make training new people easier. They're also aiming to formalise the budget process and publish detailed accounts more often - there's a fair amount of information in the annual report, but that's only once a year.

The other new role I've added to my workload is Elections Officer. The latest Board minutes talk a bit more about the exact scope of this role - one of the issues Ira struggled with last year is that the role is not very well defined. She produced a great report on the difficulties faced last year and how we can improve the elections process. For example, a lot of voters were confused by how to vote and the difference between being an AO3 member and an OTW member, so we're updating the FAQs and making them easier to navigate. Also, the candidates really struggled with the overflow questions after the chat, so we'll be considering other ways to let voters understand the candidates' views and get to know them without putting too much burden on the candidates.

There are several things that worked well when the org was small, with uncontested elections and few candidates, that don't scale with our larger numbers of members and more frequently contested elections. Given the success of our recent donation drive, we'll probably have double the number of voters next year that we had last year, so this will be even more important, to let all voters feel that they have a voice and a chance to question the candidates.

The other issue we're looking at is term lengths - due to several board members stepping down early, and a lack of clarity in the byelaws, we have some decisions to make. The previous board explained that in a post at the end of their term, and we'll be talking more about that over the next few months.

The other implication of this is that I won't be endorsing any specific candidates next year - as Elections Officer, I have to remain neutral. While we haven't yet started the process and I have no idea who potential candidates will be, I can make a couple of general comments, though. You already know most of my views from last year, and I don't think the OTW's priorities have changed. We still need board members to focus on sustainability, transparency, diversity (i.e. non-English-speaking and non-Western-media-centric fandom communities) and volunteer retention. We'll need people who will continue the work we're doing on the strategic plan, the code of conduct and various documentation and communication projects. We'll need people who understand the difference between doing the work of a committee, managing a project to achieve something, and managing people to train them and prevent them burning out, and people who have experience doing those, so can support chairs and staff, but who can also do the work of the board in focusing on the big picture and long-term strategy. Regardless of who steps down, we will already have board members with knowledge and experience of all the OTW committees and projects - we're deliberately rotating liaising this year to achieve that.

Oh, and just in case I didn't have enough work, I'm still in the workgroup for the systems training project, I've joined the survey results analysis workgroup, and I'm liaising for the strategic planning workgroup. And a full time day job.

The OTW's twice-yearly donation drive has just started. We need your support, in both time and money. Please signal-boost, comment, and talk about the posts, and let us know which areas of the OTW you'd like to know more about. And please donate - all of our projects are entirely funded by fans. We're applying for arts grants for the history and journal and tech grants for supporting coders, but we'll still need the majority of our funding from our users, just like Dreamwidth.

Our annual report will be coming out soon, with all the details of last year's finances. We still have a good cushion of cash to cover operating costs, but donations last year didn't increase as much as our userbase did. So we're in great shape for now, but our main aim is not just to get more money from people who've donated before, but to encourage new people to donate who haven't donated before but who enjoy using our projects (AO3, Fanlore, etc.) so that it's sustainable in the long term. If we keep growing at our current rate, several costs are going to increase - not just more new servers to run on, but more bandwidth, more space for backups, etc.

So please spread the word to friends who may use the AO3 but who may not have heard of the OTW - we need ongoing, regular funding for the servers. You can even set it up as a monthly or quarterly donation, which helps us plan ahead.