Anonymous asked:
In the completely hypothetical scenario that someone donated 10 billion dollars to the OTW and then each year donated enough money to keep the archive comfortably afloat, what do you think they would do with such money? What would come first and what would take time? Since money restriction is the largest reason given behind the slow development of the archive and certain things being impossible.
olderthannetfic answered:
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Well, given how everyone cries about all money spent, it would probably still be a clusterfuck.
What they should do is go back to having in-person Board retreats and telling all the crybabies who think it’s “too expensive” to fly Board members in from far away countries to go fuck themselves.
(Seriously, back in the day, I saw people whining that it was unfair to ~waste money~ on that, and why couldn’t the non-American call in??? As if the whole point of an in-person retreat wasn’t to bridge cultural gaps!)
Generally, there’s a lot of pushback to any do-gooder organization spending money on any of the things they badly need to, like professional development opportunities, living wages, etc.
The only way to judge an org is by its effectiveness at its stated goals and by how it treats its people. OTW has the same problem other orgs do with assclowns who are too stupid to deserve to have an opinion going “But the overhead!!!”
(If you donate to charities based on them having low overhead instead of on proven results, you are the problem. Do not do this.)
Broadly, the sorts of things that would make sense would be hiring someone to do payroll, an accountant, a team of coders, sysadmins, people to write documentation, various levels of manager to interface between different teams, staff to deal with Abuse reports…
Basically, anything that’s particularly onerous or where it’s helpful to have the same person working a full time workload instead of lots of volunteers doing a little bit each would work best as a paid position. There are a lot of things like this, some more to do with how AO3 functions for users and some more relevant to making the internal experience of staff and volunteers less shitty.
