As part of our second call to action, we’re asking fans to attend OTW Board meetings and ask questions about what the Board is doing to fulfill the promises it made to combat racist harassment on its platforms and make the organization and its projects more welcoming to fans of color.
With thanks to Punk for allowing us to utilize their work, here’s what you need to know about Board meetings:
Board meetings are held quarterly (every three to four months) and are open to the public. You don’t need to be an OTW member to attend! Meetings are generally announced on the OTW Twitter about a week before and again an hour before, though this lack of transparency is something we’re pushing the OTW to change. As part of our call to action, we’ve launched a letter-writing campaign urging the OTW to make these announcements more broadly across its social media and on the OTW News site itself.
Right now the only place on the site where you can reliably find the meetings is on the Board’s Google Calendar, which you can add to your own and set notifications for new events. The agenda for the next meeting can also be found at the bottom of that page.
Here’s the currently planned agenda for the July 2 meeting:
If it’s your first time on the server, you’ll have to agree to the rules of conduct in #01-some-rules with a thumbs-up and choose a role in #02-role-selection. Then you’ll be allowed into the #public-board-meetings channel.
Board meetings are scheduled for an hour. During the meeting, the Board takes relevant questions about the business at hand. If there’s time, there’s an open question period at the end, but you have to get your question in before the hour’s up. We don’t know about you, but we definitely have a list of questions that need answering. It’s also helpful to ask follow-up questions if a Board member gives an evasive or vague answer. Pressing for more information in these meetings is often the only way we get it.
If you aren’t already on our Board meeting mailing list, you can sign up for it here, along with our other End OTW Racism projects.
More than 15,000 hotel workers are seeking higher pay, better benefits, and working conditions. This includes an across-the-board $5 an hour raise, as well as affordable healthcare and better pensions. They also are seeking a ban on the use of E-Verify, which is used to deny employment to undocumented workers and workers involved with the criminal justice system. You can follow what is happening at their Twitter.
Thinking today about how as someone with major texture issues around most fruits and vegetables, it would have helped so much if someone had come to me years ago and said
Hey:
Make it tiny
Mix it with something Good Texture that you like
“Eat healthy!” they say, and then they show you pictures of a smiling woman digging a fork into half a butternut squash or eyeing a bowl of whole blueberries like a ravening wolf and your spine wants to crawl out through your skull at the thought of that Texture in your mouth.
But you know what I can do? Cut zucchini into paper-thin slices and cook it with noodles and marinara. Chop that spinach fine and scramble it with eggs and cheese. If I’m having a day where the thought of a grape popping in my mouth makes me nauseous, I can cut it in half. My chinese takeout gets diced into tiny pieces and mixed into the rice. It doesn’t work with everything - seeds are still a Major Problem - but the number of fruits and veg and even world cuisines that I can eat has expanded SO MUCH since I discovered this. YMMV, but it’s such a stupidly simple thing to do, and nobody ever told me.
Publish fanfic for the rotation of 3-6 people who are devoted readers and will either go feral or leave you very nice words and yell with you about it.
