In 2016 we brought several interactive fiction services together under the legal umbrella of the "Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation", a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit.. This let us combine hosting resources and legal backing — and of course gave people a way to donate money to support IF.

I was a founding board member and the organization's first treasurer. More importantly for this portfolio, I wound up in the role of tech lead for the organization. I set up servers, managed our DNS records, and acted as admin for our AWS, Slack, and similar tech accounts.

I was by no means the only admin for IFTF. Each one of our services — the forum, the wiki, and so on — had its own admin. Mostly they managed things on their own. I was the coordinator and backstop "I don't know how to do this, can you help?" person.

As the organization grew, it outgrew various long-standing hacks. I had to research and set up scalable solutions. (Open-source and self-hosted, where possible.) Email was the first of these; I oversaw the transition to an organization-wide Fastmail setup. I also replaced Mailchimp with a self-hosted solution and set up an org-wide password vault.

After eight years, I managed myself out of that role by heading up the search for a replacement tech lead. (And treasurer as well.) I trained up my replacements and stepped down at the end of 2024.

(I was also the long-time admin of the IF Archive; I am still wearing that hat. But I'll list that role separately here.)