jennys_t

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.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/7168.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

Renay posts about Volcom work

Sanders posts about Board work

I guess I've had some of the same problems as Sanders and Renay here, in terms of talking about my work in the OTW, except one step worse because I haven't even been keeping up with Dreamwidth.

Talking about work and my mental state is difficult. I've kind of got out of the habit. As I mentioned on my personal journal a few months back, that's partly because it's not actually that bad. I look back to my previous project at work, and yes, the end of that was very tough. At the beginning of my new project, I was exhuasted and facing the standard challenges of settling in to a new area of work. I had a week's holiday in October and it was nowhere near enough, particularly with the OTW election on top of everything else. By mid-December I was seeing my GP about depression - it was the middle of winter, my SAD was hitting me worse than it had in years, I was overloaded with work and struggling to cope. And yet the hardest thing, in a way, was that it wasn't as bad as, say, 4 years ago. I have all my coping mechanisms for when things are really bad, but it wasn't like that. I had no coping mechanisms for mild depression, for balancing the days when things were okay with the days when things weren't.

Thing have improved since then. I got a good break over Christmas, and things have been looking up in terms of work. I'm still tired, but not nearly as badly. Spring helps.

But then I look at OTW stuff. We've made huge progress. I'm so pleased about the drive going well, and emailing the AO3 users. Our strategic planning workgroup have made brilliant progress, and I'm so excited that their post is up so you can all read about it. I am ridiculously excited about the Code of Conduct, because we need it so desperately. I have dreams for my role as Elections Officer next year. Open Doors has really got going and has big plans - Mishie is doing a great job as a new chair, after Heather had to step down for personal reasons. Support goes from strength to strength, and the AO3 Docs workgroup are getting going to improve the FAQs and other documentation. Finance has new people and is looking at improving their documentation, too.

But...there's always a but. I have reached a new level of burnout. I haven't coded anything in over two months. I spent two years reading every word of every transcript in the OTW Coders room on Campfire, and I've probably spent less than an hour in there in the past month. There are some areas where I can't bring myself to care anymore, because it hurts too much. I've said before that the thing that causes burnout isn't too much work, but too little support, and I'm finding the truth of that yet again. I'm seeing more different ways that well-intentioned people can hurt each other.

I still have hope. We're still making progress, and we can make things better. But it's hard work, and we lose good people along the way, and we can't solve it all at once. Please keep wishing us well, and please keep asking questions, holding us accountable, letting us know where we need to be more transparent, and above all, whatever your level of involvement, please remember there is a human being at the other end of the computer screen.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/7126.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

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.



This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/6810.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

I know I haven't posted here much lately - that's mostly been because all the key stuff has been in the board meeting minutes, which are now being posted publicly on the OTW website. You can look there to see the latest notes on setting up our strategic planning process workgroup, getting the term going, and some wider discussions.

Essentially, all the stuff we discussed during the election is gradually progressing, but it's hard work, and it's slow, particularly as we have to keep up the day-to-day work of the board at the same time. In some ways, we've gone from crisis to crisis, and doing big-picture stuff at the same time is both essential and exhausting.

I think what I'm essentially saying is that although I know it looks from some angles like we haven't achieved much progress since the election, that's not true - we've just had to get stuff sorted out internally before the effects will show externally. And I'm also saying that it's been a tough few months, and a particularly tough week, so I in particular and probably most of the rest of the board would love some encouragement. But as usual, if you have particular questions, please ask me - I would far rather be able to clear up misunderstandings here than have them persist.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/6531.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

Our wonderful sysadmin sidra added more unicorns and now the AO3 servers are running faster. If anyone wants to send her fic in gratitude, I see she has some AO3 bookmarks which illustrate her taste. We've still got a ton more work to do on performance, but with that, the extra indexes she added, and the fixes for a few slow queries in the next deploy, we've at least bought ourselves a few more weeks or maybe months. Go Sidra! \o/

And then astolat imported her back catalogue - there were over 60,000 emails in the queue at one point yesterday, mostly for all her subscribers. sidra is hurrying those through, and then a coder needs to work on the planned split of different types of emails so we can prioritise better. We already split out some different types of emails, but not enough yet, and when we have that many, it slows down the whole mail server. Systems are also looking at other options for handling the volume of email.

Time for me to get back to work now, but there will be more Board minutes out soon, and then term starts. I'm on holiday next week, so the next couple of sets of minutes will be done by julia_beck as vice-secretary. Feel free to ask questions if there's anything you're curious about in the OTW.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/6371.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

The most recent Board meeting minutes can be found at the OTW website. We also posted a bit on the official blog there about what's been going on the past couple of months. After our Board term started on 9th December, we had several weeks where we struggled to meet, due to timezones and the holiday season. But we've now had four regular meetings, and things are starting to pick up. We're also starting to discuss some of the issues raised during the election, which is hard work, but I'm hopeful that things will improve.

We're a bit late starting the term for the rest of our committees, but once that all kicks off, there should be more news to talk about. AD&T have had more of a break than the past few years, but are still working hard on the next deploy and performance improvements, with the help of Systems.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/5902.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

It's been well over a week since my last quick update, so here are some notes of what's been going on.

We had our first Board overlap meeting! I'm expecting a post to go up on the official blog soon explaining more about what overlap is, but the people who would have been chasing it up have had RL issues (moving house, health problems flaring), so it's taken a while. But it's basically the period while the new Board can shadow the old Board, getting access to some of the Board-locked areas of Campfire and later Basecamp, and sitting in on meetings, though we can't yet vote on decisions. The meeting lasted a whopping 3 hours, but I think we heard some useful updates and laid some good groundwork - we all discussed our hopes for the next few months, and a bit about the general theory of strategic planning.

We'll be talking more about strategic planning in the next org-wide meeting, so if you're awake at 5am UTC this Saturday and you volunteer for the OTW, come along! Or maybe read transcript afterwards :S At some point I'm also vaguely hoping to do a post on the official OTW blog talking more about the process and theory. In the meantime, a quick Google or Wikipedia of "Strategic planning" gives a pretty good overview for anyone who's curious.

AO3 deploy! We had a deploy two days ago, which included fixing some urgent bugs for due South Secret Santa and other challenges, fixing bugs for the tag wranglers and for a security loophole, among other fixes. We had a great relay team working across the Atlantic in different timezones, handing over the baton to continue working round the clock and get everything sorted as soon as possible. Now it's back to working on the new parser, the remaining skins bugs and missing features that were intended for Skins 2.0, as well as fixing the remaining automated tests that were broken by the tag sets changes.

And our donation page on the AO3 is now live, linking users to the main OTW site - the next version will include some more details and graphics, but it's a great start. That was coded by our intern, Firewolf - at the beginning of October, she'd never programmed before, and now she's fixing bugs and adding new features like this! \o/

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/5657.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

As many of you are already aware, the most recent AO3 deploy did not go as smoothly as we hoped, and we’ve sometimes had issues on previous major releases. The big items are all fixed now, but it reminded me that I know a few places (both work projects at my day job and Dreamwidth) where we deal with similar issues. Here are a few ideas I have been thinking about, around the principles of managing incidents on an IT service.

Sometimes, when a technical group is trying to deal with a major problem or a code release that's gone wrong, management and task prioritisation is an issue. You have everyone putting out little fires with buckets, when actually it needs someone to go, "Wait, guys, this is a pretty big building and it's all on fire. I'm ringing the fire service - they have trucks with big hoses." But to do that you have to have one person let go of a bucket in order to pick up the phone.

( The general part )

( The AO3 part )

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/5489.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

I realised it's been over a week since the election results were posted (time has flown!) so wanted to give a quick update since it may have looked quiet.

Board-wise, we've been trying to organise our first handover meeting - with a lot of people in different timezones, all of whom need to be there, it's not easy. There's also a post in the works explaining how overlap and rollover works, so that should be posted soon. Rollover is 9th Dec, so we've got a couple of weeks once overlap starts, hopefully this week.

AO3-wise, we've been bug-fixing and recovering from a very busy weekend. Coders and testers have again been doing great work towards a bug-fix release. I've been mentoring our coding intern, Firewolf, who has done a first version of our "Donate" page on the AO3, which will link to the volunteering and donation sections of the main OTW site. Rebecca has also re-written our HTML parser, which is another big improvement. Hooray for Firewolf and Rebecca!

I have a post in the works about Incident Management principles and managing a live IT service, but it's still in draft form, as my day job has also been pretty busy these past couple of weeks, and I've been catching up on all the things since the election.

I also liked the translation spotlight that was posted this week, and want to signal boost the SOPA links roundup for fans in the USA.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/5189.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.

This follows on from Part 1 about Test-driven development, and will make more sense if you've read that first.

A lot of testing, at its heart, is about the question, "Have we done what we intended to do, and is it done properly?" And similarly, a lot of charities and companies do that kind of evaluation of their whole organisation on a regular basis - "Are we doing what we intended to do, and are we doing it well?"

For a company, that's often a case of "Are we making money, and how much?" but it's usually more complex than that - who you're making money for, which areas are making most money, and are you also complying with the law and your Corporate Social Responsibility (ethics and charity) goals. For a charity, it's more about the grey area of "Are we helping people?" than about the black and white "How many hungry children have we fed?" GivingWell has some great discussion about what this means for charities, and how to do this kind of evaluation for a humanitarian charity.

For IT projects, there's the classic 8-point requirement check, which is designed to make sure that you can test it afterwards. Similarly, people or teams may have their performance measured against SMART objectives - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. These are both tied to the idea that what gets measured, gets done. Obviously quite often people go above and beyond, so there are things getting done which haven't and maybe couldn't be measured (like making sure a company has integrity), but if there's someone measuring it and publishing the results, it's more likely to happen, even if no-one's going to yell if it's not done.

On the other side of the equation, non-profit organisations usually focus on the intangible things first. They'll have a vision or a mission statement, a dream that inspires everyone. You can see this in charities - "Make Poverty History", Unicef's aim to end child poverty, or Water Aid wanting to give everyone in the world access to safe drinking water. You can also see it in religious institutions and political lobbying organisations, though they don't always state it as clearly. The OTW has our own vision on the OTW site.

Once you have your vision, though, it needs to be broken down into goals. We have goals for the org, and some projects and committees also have their own specific goals or mission statements. Part of the strategic planning process will involve looking at the goals for the OTW, and considering whether we are meeting them and whether those are still the key goals we want to meet.

I'd like committees and projects to be able to talk more about their goals. In some cases, these might be very simple - e.g. "keep the AO3 running", and sometimes measurable - e.g. "respond to all support requests within 3 days, solve 90% of requests within a fortnight". For some committees, this wouldn't be very useful, but for others, having something to aim for or evaluate your work against is a big help.

Of course, that then comes back to the question of what happens when you don't meet your goals. Either you can set your goals really low, so you're guaranteed to meet them, or you can ignore them and never evaluate how your organisation is doing, or you have the possibility of failure. But I think that's another thing we need to talk about - that failure is not the end of the world, that people shouldn't need to resign for minor mistakes, and that there needs to be room in our organisations and friendships for forgiveness and mercy.

At the end of the day, we all make mistakes sometimes, and we're all volunteers, doing our best. We can admit our mistakes, and still encourage each other and cheer on all the many more occasions when we succeed and exceed our goals. Because despite the things we've done wrong and want to improve, we've achieved a whole lot more - the OTW has come an amazingly long way in four years.

This entry was originally posted at http://jennyst.dreamwidth.org/4865.html and has comments there. Feel free to comment on either site.