Matty Bowers

Fan
Name:	Matty Bowers
Alias(es):
Type:	OTW Board Member and Staff Member
Fandoms:
Communities:	Organization for Transformative Works
Other:
URL:
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Matty Bowers stood as a candidate for the OTW Board of Directors in the 2015 Board Elections and was elected to serve on the Board beginning on December 1, 2015.

In the wake of the resignation of the 2015 Board of Directors, when she and Atiya Hakeem were the sole members of the Board of Directors, Matty was elected to replace both Andrea Horbinski as Secretary of the OTW and Eylul Dogruel as President of the OTW, effective from 15 December 2015. Following the appointment of runner-up candidates Alex Tischer, Aline Carrão and Katarina Harju to fill the three recently-vacated seats, Alex Tischer was elected to replace Matty as Secretary of the OTW.

In an open Board meeting on 16 October 2016, Matty stepped down as President of the OTW (while remaining a member of the Board of Directors) and Aline Carrão was elected to replace her.

Matty is an ex-chair of the Policy & Abuse Committee, and has previously served on the Support and Tag Wrangling Committees as well as the AO3 Documentation Workgroup.

OTW Bio

Her bio from the OTW website states:

Matty first stumbled upon fandom back in May of 1998; however, she didn't truly get involved until 2001. Her first fandoms were Highlander and Buffy, however she quickly fell into a variety of other fandoms. These days she is very much a fan of fandom; she’ll read pretty much any epic length work in any fandom! Matty mainly lurked the first few years, but eventually started contributing to fannish projects such as newsletters and rec communities. She was fascinated and intrigued when she first heard rumblings about building a place where fandom owned the servers, and joined the OTW as a tag wrangler when the call for volunteers was made in 2009. Since then she has worked on the Support, AO3 Docs, and Policy & Abuse committees. Matty graduated with a degree in Education and spent over ten years teaching before moving on to a job in the tech field. She is currently working as a manager for a local business, and in her spare time works as tech support for her many friends and family.

Some 2019 Thoughts

I joined the Organization for Transformative Works as a tag wrangler back in 2009. I had been following the development of the OTW and the Archive since their inception and was thrilled to be able finally to help in a concrete way.

Tag wrangling in those days was both exciting and nerve wracking! One wrong push of the button could cause havoc. Early wranglers may remember the frantic searching when we repeatedly lost the Justin Timberlake tag, the terror of sharing a single spreadsheet that tracked all the fandoms on the Archive and the volunteers who wrangled them (and the screaming when someone sorted the sheet while others were trying to type), and the many, many, many long discussions that took place on our mailing lists while we tried to write our policies.

After Tag Wrangling I moved to Support, before sliding over to the Policy and Abuse committee (PAC). It is funny to compare how much things have changed between now and then. For the first few years PAC received less than 50 tickets a year. Now we sometimes receive 50 tickets in an hour, or more! The types of reports we receive have also changed. Initially, the vast majority of reports were about plagiarism. These days we see more reports about non-fanworks (such as RP ads, fic searches, etc). The size of the committee has also grown enormously; when I joined we had 3-4 active volunteers and now we have over 40! While the work can be overwhelming at times, it has also been incredibly rewarding.

I am so incredibly proud of the Organization and its volunteers for making our projects so successful. While there have been some growing pains over the years, we’ve built something amazing that we all should feel proud of!