Following a blowout in November resulting in the resignation of the entire board of the fandom-run Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit group is working to pick up the pieces.
The board quit after an uproar developed over former member Andrea Horbinski getting appointed to a seat after she came in last during the recent membership elections. New board members elected before the shakeup, Matty Bowers and Atiya Hakeem, officially took their positions Tuesday.
Wednesday the duo announced they’ve appointed the previous election’s runners-up Alex Tischer, Katarina Harju, and Aline Carrão to fill the open seats until the next regular election. They will be filling the seats left open by Jessica Steiner, Margaret MacRae, and Soledad Griffin. The sixth seat on the board, vacated by Anna Genoese, will remain empty and be up for election along with a seventh seat in 2016.
Bowers and Hakeem said they came to the decision mainly for practical reasons:
Over the past couple of weeks we have considered the possibility of holding another election. However, after reviewing the organization’s by-laws, consulting the Elections team regarding the workload and demands related to the electoral process — both for candidates and for the Elections team, which has just reached the end of a complex season — and considering the likelihood that the only people stepping forward to run in a theoretical election may have just gone through an election in November, we have decided to maintain the regular election schedule.
Both Tischer and Carrão ran their 2015 board seat election campaigns on increased transparency and better communication on the behalf of the board. In her original campaign, Harju stated her goals were to make the board more hands-off with individual projects, as well as to reinstate a financial committee.
Bowers, Hakeem, and the new board will resume the task of running OTW’s multiple ventures like Archive Of Our Own (AO3), a legal committee, an academic journal, a fandom wiki, and fansite preservation project Open Doors. They also promised a new budget for 2016.
“We hope that these decisions allow us to do justice to the membership’s wishes and respect established OTW elections precedent while taking into account the practical limitations of our teams’ and our Board’s workload,” Bowers and Hakeem wrote.
Illustration by Max Fleishman