The Otherwise Award’s Motherboard is seeking two new members. Please consider applying, or sharing this with others!

The Motherboard – what other nonprofits would call a Board of Directors – guides and leads the Otherwise Award Council, making decisions about policies and programs, and more generally on the direction that the Award and the Fellowships take. Currently there are five of us.

As a Motherboard member, you would commit to making the Otherwise Award a priority for at least one two-year term. (You can continue for multiple terms if you want to.)

The Motherboard is unpaid.

Role requirements

To become a Motherboard member, you must be:

• Interested in gender issues and speculative fiction.
• Onboard with intersectional feminism.
• Collegial, and able to manage disagreements in a spirit of good faith.
• Reliable and reachable. If you find you can’t fulfill a commitment, you communicate about it immediately. You usually have reliable Internet access.
• Willing to keep confidential things confidential – for example, we know the names of Award winners for a short period before we publicly announce them.
• Willing to publicly be named as a Motherboard member, such as on our website.

We also especially encourage candidates who fit one or more of the following:

• Live outside the United States.
• Face marginalization in some way because of their identity, such as race, gender, gender expression, disability, or other dimensions.
• Have participated in public conversation on gender and speculative fiction—on social media, in academic work, at conventions, on podcasts, or elsewhere.
• Create, edit, publish, market, write about, or otherwise participate in speculative fiction other than written prose, such as games, music, film, video, poetry, or comics.

Specific duties

This is a summary, and different board members do carry out the role differently. Board chair Sumana Harihareswara is happy to converse with prospective candidates to share more detail about our processes and what might work as a set of duties for you; email info@otherwiseaward.org to ask!

Required

• Attend Motherboard meetings. (2-6 meetings/year, ~1 hour each, videocalls, scheduled for members’ convenience.)
• Participate in high-level decisionmaking in meetings and email, on topics such as jury member invitations, contractor hiring, and policy questions. (For example, the Motherboard decided on our Otherwise Award process changes in 2024.) If you’re going to be unavailable for over a week and won’t be able to reply to email in that timeframe, let us know ahead of time.

Preferred

• Work on the organization’s projects for about 3 hours/month. For example:
  • Write blog posts/newsletters/social media posts, or make graphics.
  • Represent the organization at events (virtually or in person).
  • Respond to external communication, such as email sent to our general info@ address.
  • Share fundraising requests with your social and professional networks.

Ideal

• Manage or run some of the organization’s projects. For example, you could manage one or more of the following ongoing needs:
  • Put together the Award jury, and liaise with them during their deliberations.
  • Chair the Fellowship jury, evaluating and selecting Fellow candidates.
  • Track incoming recommendations for works to consider.
  • Manage our paid part-time contract workers.
  • Raise funds (such as through bake sales, grants, auctions, online crowdfunding, soliciting individual donations, or merchandise sales).
  • Document processes.
  • Serve as liaison to treasurer.
  • Manage our website and other Internet stuff.
• Propose high-level additions or changes to our work, such as bylaws changes or new programs.

Context

For sustainability, we want to grow our current board from 5 to 7. Some current board members want the flexibility to potentially leave within the next few years, and we want to nurture future replacements to our current Chair (Sumana Harihareswara, who has been Chair for over five years now).

We have a fairly standard set of bylaws for a California-registered 501(c)3 nonprofit. Our budget is under USD $10,000 per year. We don’t have any paid full-time staff; volunteers, including board members, do most of the organization’s work, though we do pay for some specialized work such as accounting. Motherboard members collaborate via email, phone calls, and videocalls, rarely meeting in person since we’re so distributed, but if we can make it to WisCon in Madison, we try to meet there. Our board discussions are calm and productive, and we find productive ways through any disagreements.

Why you might want to do this

You’ll help maintain a small but steady part of the infrastructure of inclusion in speculative fiction. You’ll get a new line on your CV/résumé. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes understanding of forces and structures affecting our fields, such as publishing schedules, organizations’ budgets, publicity and fundraising dynamics, changes in career possibilities for authors, and competing access needs. You’ll get to work with thoughtful, funny people who share your values. You’ll have a new tool at your disposal to start conversations with sf/f people and institutions. You could come up with an idea for a new way we could be encouraging and celebrating speculative fiction that expands our notions of gender, and then implement it.

And there’s the small secret pleasure of knowing who the Award and Fellowship winners are before they do, and before the public finds out.

How to apply

Please apply by December 1st by sending us an application email at info@otherwiseaward.org. In it, please write a few paragraphs about your past experience that would help you be a board member and why you’re interested in serving, and share some good dates and times for a conversation (probably by videocall) with a current board member. We may follow up with requests for more information, such as references, before scheduling a call. And in any case, thank you for being interested in helping serve our mission!