Published on: 03/30/26

#development-logs

Welcome to the fifth BobaBoard end-of-year retrospective! This year is all about bubbles and parallel work, which is like parallel parking, but in co-op. Not sure how we got here? We’ve got you. Check out this handy recap to retrace our steps over the last few years!

One of the things we’ve always prided ourselves on as an organization is being transparent and upfront about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how. (This retrospective you’re reading is part of that tradition.) So in the spirit of that, we want to share with you our decision to shift our focus away from BobaBoard the software as our main deliverable.

This was not a decision made lightly, or by an individual person; following our sociocratic principles and after a very challenging year, we determined, as an organization, that our current framework cannot support tackling a massive task like BobaBoard in its entirety. There’s a bunch of reasons why, and if you’re interested in the tea about the inner workings of our decision process and what went into it, the next section will tell you all about it.

In the meantime, here’s what this means, in practice:

• We’re not dissolving the org or throwing in the towel. Quite the opposite! This decision was made for the well-being of the organization and to chart a new, healthier course for our future. We are hopeful that, once we stabilize and grow enough to sustain it, we’ll naturally find our way back to chipping away at BobaBoard more consistently.

• BobaBoard is not dead or abandoned. Since inception, BobaBoard has always been modular software. What our decision means is that instead of trying to build all the modules at once, and shipping them all together as a single deliverable, we’ll focus on specific ones and deliver them as stand-alone pieces of software that will, hopefully, one day assemble into BobaBoard.

• This is actually good news. It’s shocking news, for sure. It’s a big change, and it’s going to cause a cascade of other, smaller changes all across the org. But internally, we’re actually really excited about the new focus and the improvements we’re working to implement based on it.

Okay, so we’re not working on BobaBoard the software as our main priority anymore. Then what? Well, smaller projects that are still aligned with our ultimate mission of saving the internet and providing fandom with the tools to build spaces in an increasingly hostile environment. You know, same mission, different road towards it.

Our main focuses for 2026 are:

• Astrolabe: The text editor component of BobaBoard, now a standalone piece that can be used in other environments. It also reinforces our support for the ATmosphere model for social media, which we think aligns best with our overall mission.

• AO3.js: A node library to access AO3 data, but also a fun entry point for more complex fandom projects. Basically catnip to bring people into our wider ecosystem.

• Educational Content: 2025 was the year of the “oh crap, we need an article about that” moment. There’s obviously an audience for our quirky yet straightforward approach to learning, and we’re looking forward to delivering more this year.

BobaBoard exists, at its core, because we all firmly believe the current state of fandom is precarious, and long-term unsustainable. Fandom priorities are very much not aligned with the sites and services that are currently hosting fandom spaces on social media, often reluctantly. And as the discrepancy grows, fandom communities find themselves threatened and splintered by TOS updates and uneven policy enforcement. Collectively, BobaBoard is a response to the state of fandom and a loud assertion that things must change. That we must be that change, for the better, and for the long term.

2025 was a very challenging year for the org. And by challenging, we mean we chose to tackle several structural changes throughout the year that combined to create a lot of pressure and forced us to sit down and reevaluate a lot of the hows and whys of what we’re doing:

• We became a sociocratic organization, fully self-driven and trying our best to step away from a traditional hierarchy. What this means is that we moved from authority-based decision making, towards consent-based decision making. This was a very significant change in how we do things, and it required a lot of work to figure out the scaffolding we had to build for these new principles to work. We had to create bubbles for specific key tasks and assign responsibilities and then create a completely new framework for accountability, pretty much from scratch.

• We lost more volunteers than we onboarded, and some of those were in key positions in the organization, which resulted in struggles to find replacements in a timely fashion. We have a fantastic team and the new structure allowed people to step in and step up, in times of need. But the fact remained that key people became overburdened to compensate for the loss, and that’s not a sustainable environment long term.

• …it was 2025. Which, it’s now 2026. Yes. [Gestures at all of the fire, which is on all of the things.] But that takes a toll, especially when a key requirement to do the kind of work we’re trying to do is to face reality. We cannot afford to build on ideals disconnected from the truth, but it’s also undeniable that it weighs on people. And we want to be compassionate and empathetic about giving people space to recover and recharge. But we also have to acknowledge that means we have to slow down in places, and maybe not achieve as many things as we would have wanted.

All of these things, together, drove us to take a really thorough look at ourselves, our goals, our mission, and our means. And the reality of it was undeniable: we were in an unsustainable position, stretching everyone to snapping point, chasing after deliverables that would require years of that same grueling pace to come close to completion. And we knew that would not be feasible.

So we made a decision together. Through our governance process, through open dialog and discussion, and being realistic about our expectations, our objections, and our concerns. We all agreed to a six-month trial period: a test-drive, just to see if it was better. We set aside BobaBoard and its codebase, and instead focused on smaller projects that we could ship out in that timeframe. We wanted things that were visible and meaningful, for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit of completing something. And it worked! And it felt good!

But it also meant the logical, sensible choice would be to commit to the change and officially refocus the organization. And that was hard. We want you to know it was really hard. No one believes in BobaBoard more than we do. We want you to know that nobody gave up on BobaBoard. Because we still believe in the promise of what BobaBoard represents, and as hard as this choice has been, we’re convinced that it’s the best choice we can make right now to make that promise a future reality.

And with this, let's dive deep into 2025!

Following up on Our 2025 Plans: Sociocracy Intensifies

Starting out with the most important question as we move further into 2026 — did we accomplish the things we outlined in our 2025 road map? Let's break it down in a little more detail.

Following up on Grow sociocratically

In 2024, we looked at Sociocracy as a governance and hierarchy model and went: yes, that one!

In 2025, we found out actually implementing the principles into practice is a little more difficult than confidently snapping “bet!” when prompted.

The first thing we did was to divvy up the work into four main bubbles:

• Boba Builders: the coding backbone of the BobaBoard project.
• Docs: the Words Good folk who write how-tos and manuals for all our stuff.
• Volunteer Wranglers: cat-herding group looking after our contributors.
• Steering: the unglamorous, day-to-day pragmatists from all other bubbles that keep us all from accidentally deleting win32.

Each bubble has its own domain, which is the stuff they’re good at and which they’ve claimed responsibility for. We have a breakdown here of what each bubble did in 2025, and what we learned and are taking into 2026.

But we also want to call out the more general lessons gained this year. For example, we’ve become really good at managing consent and objections, using Sociocratic principles. We’re still learning, though! We found ourselves drowning in bureaucracy (meetings and the prepwork for those meetings), which didn’t exactly translate into engagement or actual deliverables. But the bureaucracy is important, it gives shape to spaces for conversations and guardrails for interactions. It’s just about balance.

We’re looking forward to reevaluating our approach between participation in work towards our goals, and participation in governance. We’re still firmly committed to Sociocracy, and we still think it’s the best choice for our org. We just need more experience to nail the right balance for us.

Following up on Operate by Department

In our last retrospective, we talked about the bubbles we set up and our plans for each group. We did that!

Steering a ship that changes size every time you look away

The challenge for Steering is our dual nature as the literal steering wheel that keeps this ship from Titanicking on an iceberg, but also being responsible for the “and everything else” domain. We knew it was important for us, as helmsmen, to have room to change course, if the aforementioned icebergs started showing up.

And Steering stepped up to meet those expectations: not as an authority figure issuing commands, but rather as facilitators for difficult conversations and responsible for creating an environment where people felt comfortable sharing their feedback candidly. Our intention was to give Steering flexibility to respond to all the changes we knew would cascade from our new structure.

But that flexibility also came at the cost of putting too much strain on key contributors and causing uneven work distribution across the org. This began an unintended cycle, where key contributors burned out and eventually left, and in redistributing their work while a replacement was found, key contributors were further impacted. Ultimately, this caused a lot of friction and tension, and Steering had to refocus away from our core job, and instead mediate interpersonal conflicts.

Steering built a Code of Conduct to, pun intended, steer people back towards our goals, but it didn’t work perfectly. By October, Steering was presented with the biggest challenge in our organization’s history: to lead, moderate and facilitate the discussions surrounding our focus on BobaBoard the software, and our capacity to actually deliver on it.

As explained above, that was not an easy conversation to have, but Steering saw it through: we set up a space for people to share their objections to the change, and encouraged discussion until consent was achieved. We kept track of those objections to better address them, and in February 2026, Steering passed a formal accountability proposal. This will ensure the people putting in the work are also proportionately represented in the inner workings of the organization.

Our main takeaways for 2025 are:

• Learning how to address problems directly:
  • Leaving and letting go without guilt
  • Criticism is structural, not blame seeking
  • Accountability must come with teeth
• Momentum is hard to maintain when results are nebulous and hard to parse.
• Capacity management requires honesty about who is actually doing what.
• Follow-ups are crucial and must be timely and consistent

Steering’s primary goal for 2026 is to ensure the survival of the org as a whole. It sounds dramatic, but there are a lot of icebergs out there, and Steering is committed to keeping us safe.

Building for the future, one API at the time

BBB, legal name Boba Builders Bubble, spent half of 2025 doing a lot of hard, crucial work for the BobaBoard infrastructure that was also really hard to see. But we did lay out the groundwork to make returning to BobaBoard easier, once we’re ready for that.

BBB identified issues with capacity and scope that would eventually echo throughout the whole org: too few people working on delivering too much at once. So we sat down and reworked the roadmap. We focused on prioritizing work that would enable projects to ship, scaling down as much as possible to account for the people available to complete the work.

BBB also had a task, at the beginning of 2025, to build sub-bubbles to handle specialized work needed for BobaBoard, but we realized we’re just not big enough for that kind of granularity. Instead, they focused on two smaller projects:

• Astrolabe, the rich text editor module initially designed for BobaBoard, and now reinvented as an ATmosphere-friendly piece of code.
• AO3.js, a project that allows access to AO3 data, designed as a starting point for other fandom projects.

For 2026, BBB wants to grow in people, but not in scope. We want to bring in new blood and new perspectives, while maintaining lean goals for our projects. We want to ship more, and better, while building a stronger team.

Docs: Because it’s Better to have it in Writing

Docs, short for Documentation (the bubble), was super successful in 2025, even though we didn’t even exist when bubbles were first created. Talk about a dark horse! Docs’ success was measured by being able to ship the most content out of any bubble, consistently. We achieved this by working with FujoCoded LLC and building strong, reciprocal partnerships with them.

Like the rest of the org, Docs, too, determined that we needed more hands, stat, more so because we kept finding more and more things we needed to document. But even stretched thin, we went the extra mile to deliver some really cool stuff:

• NVM guide, fully tested on three operating systems.
• Astro/Starlight migration from Docusaurus
• API endpoint documentation for BobaBoard, in partnership with BBB
• Vidders sub-bubble, the first ever sub-bubble in the org
• Landing page design, including mockups and brand design
• Documentation intake process for other bubbles

There is a huge appetite for the kind of learning material that we can produce, and we keep finding more and more opportunities to step up and fill in gaps for learners. We’re very excited for all the shiny new things we’re hoping to ship out in 2026!

Wrangling Them Volunteers, Or, Human Resources and You

VW, full name Volunteer Wranglers, was the one bubble that stuck most firmly to our initial assessment from the beginning of the year about the work we wanted to tackle.

An early win in 2025 was the completion of a functional task list system, alongside its documentation, to enable follow-ups and check-ins not just within VW but across the org. We identified the need for specific support and went on to build the structure for it. This included the role of “PingYou” to help keep track of tasks, using a dedicated Discord channel. We also set up comprehensive policies and procedures around task claiming, the task list and weekly pings.

We did also pour a lot of hard work into delivering a policy to minimize risks and concerns surrounding volunteer onboarding. The catch is, while the rest of the org pivoted in a different direction, VW focused on the work we had committed to. Unfortunately, under our new scope, that work ended up mismatched to our current needs.

For 2026, VW’s main challenge is to fall in step with the rest of the org in our new direction and enable crucial growth by supporting the onboarding of key contributors that will support the rest of the bubbles in their work. A first step towards that was the creation of new onboarding documentation for our upcoming new contributors.

Following up on Building Fiscal Stability

A big takeaway from 2024 was the need for a Fiscal Host: like a sugar daddy, but institutional and reported to the IRS. Given the structural changes we made throughout 2025, we decided to stay put and wait on entering the market for a Fiscal Host. While it’s still a priority for the long-term well-being of the org, our goal is to stabilize its new form, so that any pitch we make is coherent and something we’re able to commit to in terms of years, not months.

Quite a bit, actually!

• We published several materials across our platforms:
  • Onboarding materials
  • Collaboration docs
  • Accountability proposals
  • Internal documents for each bubble

• Consistent collaboration:
  • All bubbles stuck to their meetings and projects and kept themselves from drifting or ghosting
  • Mobility within the org allowed people to step in and step up, as needed
  • Meeting facilitation structures were created
  • Accountability systems were built, tested and learned from
  • Built the API infrastructure for realm admin work for BobaBoard (and documented it!)

• Spread the word:
  • “Working Together in a Dying World”, a talk given by Ms Boba at CitrusCon 2025, focused on the challenges of trying to build something while current events are eventing all around us. Candid, honest and irreverent, with that signature Boba optimism that characterizes our org work.

We cannot emphasize enough what a big deal it is that we survived our first year as an independent organization. It took a lot of work, and we learned a tremendous amount, which we’re looking to put into practice this year.

So here are our key goals for 2026:

The Big Bad currently threatening BobaBoard is burnout. To combat its spread and avoid the same cycle we saw in 2025, we need to rework the basics and lay down solid foundations that protect current and future contributors against it. We want better governance for the org, improving how we assign work and how we keep track of it. We want to trim down the excess processes that dragged us down in 2025 and focus on improving what made us better. Ultimately, we want a lighter, more responsive structure with strong guardrails that protects us as we pick up speed.

The obvious solution to our scope problems is to bring in more people—and we’re already working on it!—but we need to make sure new people coming in are able to actually do what they’re coming in to do. That means setting things up and being intentional in our hiring: being clear in our expectations and making sure onboarding doesn’t come at the cost of keeping our existing contributors from actually doing work. This also includes building a structure where the work is distributed and paced according to our headcount and is capable of adapting to changes without overwhelming anyone.

Small is good! But small is not enough, on its own, for us to prioritize work. Our challenge as we follow our new direction is to make the right call on what we should focus our efforts on. We want to follow up on Astrolabe and AO3.js, as the model for what our target deliverables should look like: practical, useful building blocks that address real needs or opportunities, and align with our overarching mission to empower people to build their spaces. This applies to our educational content too: clear, fandom-friendly and targeted to specific gaps in knowledge. Our goal is to build bricks, one by one, so that ultimately we can be the bridge that connects our community with a better internet.

This is still the million dollar question! And since no one took up our offer to buy a few million yaoi paddles (you can still get yours here!), we’re bringing back the big 3 from last year:

As mentioned, BobaBoard's crew of volunteers always has room for more. Having relevant skills is great, but being able to show up and pitch in is worth a lot on its own. We need people who are ready to:

• Join a sociocratic organization
• Be part of a team
• Make collaborative decisions
• Provide thoughtful feedback
• Keep coming back month after month

We make calls for specific skillsets using the FujoCoded Newsletter and our socials, but if you’ve got that urge to help, reach out! We’re always happy to get fresh perspectives and skills.

While BobaBoard is still waiting on a nonprofit fiscal host to enable us to take donations, the best way to help our efforts is to support the financial stability of our sister for-profit, FujoCoded LLC.

FujoCoded's ability to produce high-quality educational resources aimed at fans is directly linked to BobaBoard's ability to recruit and train its volunteers, so throwing money at the former is a huge help to the latter.

You can give FujoCoded money in many different ways:

• Recurring Support: Become a FujoCoded $upporter on Patreon
• One-off Support:
  • Buy something physical from the FujoCoded store—a funny sticker, a memeable T-shirt, a nostalgic piece of BobaBoard merch, or, tastiest of all, a Fujoboard to serve goodies on during your next party
  • Buy something digital from the FujoCoded store—last year’s HTML/CSS/JavaScript Learn Along or the cute Boba-tan Emoji set.
  • Buy a digital Certificate of Ownership for your favorite ship
  • Buy—SOON!—the digital preview version of the first issue of the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. Sign up here to know when it ships!
• Limited Edition Support: Coming Soon! …as is April 1st tradition 👀

BobaBoard exists to empower fans to take control of their own internet experience. Everywhere we turn, social platforms are enshittifying and user interfaces are becoming more hostile to curation and customization. Whether or not you're ready to get involved directly with BobaBoard, you can still help us in our overall mission by taking steps to empower yourself!

For you, that could mean:

• Learning how to use Terminal to access files and execute programs without the help of a slick user interface
• Learning how to use HTML & CSS to cultivate your own website outside of a corporate walled garden
• Learning how to use Git to collaborate with others on software, and to supercharge your power to improve and evolve your own
• Learning how to handle conflict in productive ways
• Learning how to build and maintain non-hierarchical communities that empower everyone to make and lead change

Skills like these lay the foundation for the world BobaBoard wants to see. We hope you'll pick up a few for yourself and help make that world a reality!

2025 can be best summarized as:

And we are, understandably, pretty happy about that. But for 2026, we want to do more than survive. We want to thrive. And we think we have what it takes to build a kinder, sturdier org. An org that can grow into lofty goals, safe in the foundations we’ve laid down.

See you next year, we can’t wait to see what we’ll have shipped out by then! And all we’ll have learned along the way!

As always, with all our love,
An assortment of Boobies BobaBoard Volunteers

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