AO3/OTW paid positions

[thisaintbc]

In the wake of the OTW’s finance chat, a lot of people on twitter seem to be discussing the possibility of ao3 introducing either full time, part time, or contract-based paid positions, and I’m curious what people in my corner of fandom think those positions should be! I made a poll on twitter (I don’t think you need a twitter account to vote)—I don’t have a paid dw account, so I don’t think I can make a poll here, but if you have an opinion feel free to tell me about it on twitter, comment here, both, neither, wherever!

Comments

[juniperberry]

I have 0% knowledge of what the OTW/AO3 actually need, but I would say a dev of some sort to set up the big code pushes they've been talking about, or the sort of features that would impact the whole archive (like the block/mute feature) that might not be as easy as other bits of code to implement site-wide. But I know devs make a LOT of money per year and IDK if the organization could do such a hiring for more than a year.

[thisaintbc]

That makes a lot of sense!! Some of what inspired this conversation on twitter is the fact that the otw has enough of a surplus for the budget for the next 2-3 years & that surplus only seems set to keep growing, and they’ve mentioned potentially using those funds to hire a few people. So there is some money! Devs do make a lot, but I know a lot of devs also work on a contract basis—maybe it might be more cost efficient to have a full or part time project manager (which I’ve been referring to as a “trail boss” in my head, lol) who could contract with devs as needed? Idk!