I volunteer for the OTW, the parent nonprofit organization that runs AO3. So do, as of the last monthly newsletter, 678 other people. The OTW has no paid employees; everyone there is a volunteer.
The average weekly work expectations for OTW volunteers run around 5 hours per week for most committees. Of course, in reality, people are all over the place. Some do 1-2 hours a week, some 30 or 40 or even more – a full work week without pay.
Let’s say that, hypothetically, a volunteer works only 1-2 hours per week, and their work is only worth $10 per hour. (It’s probably worth more – the opportunity costs of most skilled labor is worth more than that – but let’s low-ball it.) That means that every single week, that volunteer is donating $10-20 dollars of their time to the OTW. Some people are donating hundreds of dollars of their time each week, for months or years on end to help keep all its projects running.
Because of course there are multiple projects. There’s TWC, the freely available, peer-reviewed academic journal that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. There’s Fanlore, our fannish history wiki that has over 46,000 articles. There’s Open Doors, which rescues at-risk archives from disappearing. There’s Legal Advocacy, which donates legal expertise to help fans address copyright and other issues. And then there’s the AO3, which is currently listed as the 264th most popular website in the world (#98 in the US). Any one of those projects could easily encompass an entire nonprofit organization by itself. None of them has even a single paid employee. No OTW website shows any ads.
The real secret to the OTW’s success is not that it pulls in just enough money every year to cover its server expenses and overhead – though it does that, and every volunteer is grateful to our donors for keeping the lights on. It’s that the OTW somehow runs entirely on volunteer power. There’s no way we could pay for all the expertise and effort we receive. Other nonprofit websites like the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia pull in millions in funding every year to cover relatively small staffs. We survive without having to write grants or beg wealthy donors because of our volunteers’ unseen donations of their time, expertise, and effort.
Maybe this year you don’t have any money. Or maybe you do, but you’re saving for a rainy day, or you gave it somewhere else. No worries. People volunteer because we want you to enjoy this labor of love. We want you here, building the OTW with us by using our projects. If you did donate, much love to you. Your generosity is deeply appreciated, and we’ll continue being the penny-pinching, wait-is-there-a-free-option, do-they-give-a-nonprofit-discount volunteers we’ve always been, to stretch your donation as far as it can go.
If you want to give something that isn’t money, consider this: How often is a volunteer thanked by someone who isn’t a fellow volunteer? People volunteer because they want to know they’re making a difference. They want to build up the world. Think of how a kudos or a comment makes you feel, then consider how rarely volunteers get one.
You can read about all our committees here, and you can send one of them a quick thank you via the contact form, if you like. Or you can leave a comment with thanks on a Drive post on AO3. Maybe tell Finance how much you love the budget being available, or thank Development & Membership for all their hard work organizing the donation drive to keep the servers running, or show some love to our Communications Committee that’s keeping all these posts updated, or to the Translation Committee that translated them. Maybe you noticed that AO3 Documentation just put out a Tag Set FAQ in time for the exchange season. Maybe you’re wondering who keeps 679 people organized – that would be our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee. Maybe you want to thank the Systems Committee for getting out of bed way too early in the morning to fix the mailer (or whatever else decides to mysteriously break this week). However the spirit moves you, feel free to show some love. It goes a long way.
Thanks for being part of the journey.
i’m going to take this post as an opportunity to publicly say thank you to all the AO3 tag wranglers – not least of which is @wrangletangle, who has graciously explained so many aspects of how the tag system on AO3 works & been so patient with inquiries. Thank you: we’re so very grateful for your work to make the archive navigable!
I also want to second the suggestion to send a little ‘thank you’ message to the Transformative Works committee of your choice, if you’re so inclined. I’m gonna go do that right after posting this.
- as linked above: a list of the committees & what they do
- and the contact form, where you can pick the committee to reach from a drop-down menu.
(added b/c I executive dysfunction so badly if I don’t have direct, easy to see links.)
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