OTW: all content

AD&T Chair Update: Open Beta

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:29:49 -0800

OMG we did it people! It's almost exactly 2.5 years (17th May 2007) since a certain someone said we should build an Archive of Our Own and I am so proud of us!We didn’t have a meeting this week unless you count staying logged into the chatroom continuously from Friday afternoon to Monday morning (I lie, I left to sleep occasionally). We *did* have a number of passionate discussions which revolved around performance, squee, bugs, more squee, support, and you know, squee. More details after the cut!

Fun things (some of them) I have done in the last 5 days.

Ticked a tickybox marked “Invite from queue enabled ” and clicked ‘Update’
Entered ‘50’ into a field marked “Number of people to invite:” and clicked ‘Invite from queue’ I did that a lot! My apologies to people kicking the queue during the times I was asleep in Australia, we decided it would be easier if one person managed invite issuing.
Posted a few times
Sleep - still building up to that :p

AO3 Launch Update: zooey_glass masterfully summarised the launch in her fabulous post Open Beta - How the party's going! and we’ve set up an AO3_Status on Twitter to let people know what’s going on in the (hopefully extremely rare) event of an outage.

AO3 Invitation update: We were issuing 30-50 per hour for a fair amount of the weekend. We're now switching to letting the automated job issue about 50 per day. We'll re-evaluate this on the coming weekend.

Stats as of Wed 18th 1:00 am UTC for the curious :)

Number of shareable invitation codes issued to account holders: 531
Number of invitations issued to addresses from the queue: 1305
Total invitations issued: 1757
Total unused invitations out there: 520

Number of accounts before Open Beta: 347
Number of accounts at present: 1663
Potential number of accounts: 2104
Accounts created during Open Beta: 1316
Percent invitation uptake: 79%

Percent increase in accounts: 379%

Number of works before Open Beta: 6598
Number of works at present: 13502
Works created during Open Beta: 6904
Percent increase in works: 205%

Number of fandoms represented before Open Beta: 674
Number of fandoms represented at present: 1104
New fandoms created: 430
Percent increase in fandoms:164%

AO3 Help:zvi has generously contributed a fabulous explanation of how the tagging wuzzle system works and in that vein I have bookmarked some other great posts I have seen. Comment and let me know if you see, or would like to contribute something. We're conscious we need to do more of this so if you have an urge to write 'help using the AO3' documentation we're keen on recruiting you. We'll do this regardless (the writing, not the recruiting although we like doing that too) but we love new people and welcome fresh views.

AO3 Support: We're doing our best to respond to everyone and we're delighted people are talking to us - we're also getting a lot of requests so please, be patient with us if we don't respond immediately.

Deploy Schedule:We have a mini-release called Release 0.7.1.1 (heh, 'mini', it has 29 items so far) of fixes to some of the most commonly reported problems. We'd like to deploy it this weekend but we're making changes to the Post Work form so if it doesn't test clean we'll delay until it does.

If there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. I am disabling comments elsewhere as I would like people to be able to share any discussion with each other.

Archive of Our Own: Tags (Wuzzles) Explained

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:03:32 -0800

Dear AO3 users and interested parties: Zvi, in a moment of inspiration has written up a fabulous explanation of how Tags Wuzzles work and has generously offered to let us post it. If you've been wondering how it all works, read on after the cut!

Tags Wuzzles explained

Tags are mysterious deep voodoo a mix of freeform (everyone picks their own) and controlled vocabulary (everyone picks from a list of pre-existing tags). They are not being handled like any tags anywhere else in computing that I am aware of. So, just, forget what you know from del.icio.us or blogging or the library card catalogue. Start with a blank slate.

In fact, instead of calling them tags, we shall call them wuzzles. Just to make it clearer that wuzzles are different from all other tags.

Okay, first of all, you should know that all of the fields in the Story Tags Wuzzles box are wuzzles, not just the field labeled Tags Wuzzles. So fandom names are wuzzles and character names are wuzzles and warnings are wuzzles and angst (if you put it in the Tags Wuzzles field) is a wuzzle.

You can write anything you feel like down as a wuzzle. You could write dirty socks or a boy named sue or antidisestablishmentarianism. You could write wuzzle as a wuzzle.

However, behind the scenes, there are Tag Wuzzle Wranglers, who are automagically in a labor intensive, thoughtful, solomonesque process, trying to bring the wuzzles together, so that even though I write Star Trek: AOS as a fandom wuzzle, and you write Star Trek XI as a fandom wuzzle, and StarFleetAdmiral writes Star Trek Reboot as a fandom wuzzle, when ExampleTheFan clicks on the fandom wuzzle Star Trek (2009), they get shown all three of our stories.

This is (a) pretty doable for TV shows and characters (Wranglers check Wikipedia and official sources to find out the official name) and (b) highest priority for fandoms and characters, because those wuzzles are the ones that everyone uses. There are elaborate rules describing how they pick one wuzzle [Star Trek (2009)] as the canonical wuzzle (canonical here refers to the archive software and what shows up on filters and in certain URLs) and make the other wuzzles (Star Trek XI, etc.) synonym wuzzles.

But why are some of the wuzzles not in the filters or the tag wuzzle cloud? Well, the Tag Wuzzle wuzzles are a slightly lower priority for wrangling in the first place. Also, it's harder for the Wranglers to decipher exactly what you meant by a weird wuzzle like a boy named sue. Also, also, even when it's clear what something means (like cunnilingus, which is pretty unambiguous) it's not always clear what other wuzzles it should go with (should rimming, cunnilingus, and fellatio all get wrangled together as oral sex? or should they be separate?) So if nobody has yet wrangled a wuzzle (which, in addition to figuring out if it is like these other wuzzles, also includes important responsibilities like making sure the correct spelling is the official wuzzle, and making sure that even if the fandom and a character have the same name e.g. Buffy/Buffy, they are separated in the database), then you get the unwrangled wuzzle message:

This tag belongs to the Tag Category.
This tag has not been marked common and can't be filtered on (yet).

Basically, the wuzzles are not automated and depend on human volunteers to do what needs doing, and the volunteers can't do everything at once, in the first part, and have to make actual decisions in the second part.

Also, also, also, they realised that they needed to make a way for a wuzzle to be a subset of another wuzzle, like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC need to be sub-wuzzles of Popslash, so that if you click on the Popslash wuzzle you get both of those, but if you click on *NSYNC, you don't get Backstreet, but the code for this was tricksy, so that’s not built yet.

And there is yet a third sort of wuzzle that they need, the ambiguous wuzzle. This is so that if someone labels their story bandslash, the archive can stay completely agnostic as to whether this means six degrees of Pete Wentz or any professional musicians at all. Code for that has not been written either.

Which still leaves the more normally ambiguous wuzzles, to wit: is badassery the equivalent of kicksass, and other existential wuzzle wrangling musings.

If you think your wuzzle has been wrangled the wrong way, send a support request! The Wranglers are doing their best, but your story may be the first time they have ever heard of your fandom, or the first time they've ever read the word you're using as a wuzzle, or they may just have thought about what you wrote differently than how you meant it. Once upon a time, safer sex and unsafe sex were wrangled together, because they were both about sex. I pointed out that they mean the opposite of each other, and now they are separate (but, sadly, unwrangled) wuzzles. Don't forget, if you're not sure what wuzzles to use, you can add them later or change them to something else once you figure it out.

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own, which is commentable for anyone with or without an AO3 account. Comments are disabled elsewhere, as we'd like everyone to be able to share in the same discussion.

Archive Open Beta - How the party's going!

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:13:48 -0800

We're now in the second day of Open Beta for the Archive of Our Own! It's been a crazy weekend! Here are a few updates on how it's all going, below the cut.

First of all, some of you will have noticed that we did experience some site downtime between roughly 6:00 UTC and 7:45 UTC. Sorry about this! The good news is that this was not caused by excessive volume on our servers, but by a bug which caused a server process to hang. Happily this was very easy to fix - the outage only went on so long because it happened to strike at a moment when all our Systems people were unavailable. (Our Systems team are beyond awesome, but they are few in number and sometimes they have to eat and sleep!) We're working on a more permanent fix for this bug.

Our site downtime was a timely reminder that we need a better way to communicate quickly with users when the site goes down. From now on we'll be posting to AO3_Status on Twitter with any status updates. You can subscribe to us on Twitter, follow the RSS feed, or just check the Twitter page directly to stay informed about site status.

That short hiccup aside, things have been going GREAT so far. The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that invitations have been issued a bit faster than the queue estimate suggests. This is because the queue estimates the time your invitation will go out based on the number set to be issued automatically. We've been issuing batches manually to give the process a headstart, and we've actually issued them slightly faster than we planned. This is because even at peak usage times, the servers have been coping really well with the extra load. (As mentioned above, the problems they did experience were caused by a bug, not the usage volume.) We're really happy that we've been able to bring in lots of new users right away!

Depending on how things go in the next 12 hours, we will probably issue one or two more batches of invitations to addresses in the queue manually. After that, batches of invitations will be issued automatically on a daily basis, although we'll be monitoring the site carefully to be sure that everything is as it should be.

A few statistics for your interest:

Number of shareable invitation codes issued to existing account holders: 451
Number of invitations issued to addresses from the queue: 958
Total invitations issued: 1410
Total unused invitations out there: 663

Number of accounts before Open Beta: 347
Number of accounts at present: 1076
Potential number of accounts: 1707
Accounts created during Open Beta: 747
Percent invitation uptake: 62%
Percent increase in accounts: 315%

Number of works before Open Beta: 6598
Number of works at present: 9506
Works created during Open Beta: 2908
Percent increase in works: 144%

Number of fandoms represented before Open Beta: 674
Number of fandoms represented at present: 886
New fandoms created: 212
Percent increase in fandoms: 131%

You can see from the above that the site has already expanded massively! We're over the moon that it is holding up so well, and we're very excited about seeing the variety of fandom represented. Remember, we welcome fans from all corners of fandom. If you don't see your fandom represented in the Archive at the moment, then it just means you might get to be the person to add it! You don't have to wait for us to add a tag for your fandom, just enter it manually and we'll take care of it!

Since the site is still in Beta, there are still bugs floating around and many more improvements planned. We're happy to be receiving lots of feedback through our Support and Feedback form. Our amazing Support team is doing a sterling job responding to the support requests and general feedback that's come through already. So far, we've received 200 support requests and have responded to approximately 150 of them. We've also helped with a few problems in our Support Chatroom. Please feel free to drop in there and chat with us!

You can find more information about the Archive of Our Own and Open Beta under our posts Announcing Open Beta, Open Beta is here! and Archive Open Beta News and FAQs.

This Open Beta launch is the culmination of more than two years of work by a whole host of people: the coders and systems people who built the Archive itself, the host of people managing design and documentation, the dedicated testers who worked out the bugs, those who raised funding and organised volunteers, those who wrote policies and worked out the legal issues, translators, tag wranglers, support people and many many more. It's also the fruit of the amazing support of fandom. We're pleased and proud that it is going so well - thank you to everyone!

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

Why do the values and mission statements focus on female fans?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:57:13 -0700

The OTW has its roots in a fan community with a decades-long history as a community made up mostly of women. Today, due to the internet and new technology, that community and its interests are rapidly growing in various ways and intersecting with other fan communities with different histories. We are excited and hopeful about the way our community is expanding and meeting with other varieties of remix culture , and we welcome anyone who wants to do what we're doing. At the same time, it is still important to us to acknowledge that this particular creative community is a place created and shaped so strongly by the tastes of women, because that is historically a pretty rare and amazing thing.

OTW values all fans, and the contributions made by fans of all genders. As the Organization grew out of a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture, we also specifically value that history of women's involvement, and the practices of fandom shaped by women's work.

Many organizations, including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focus on issues and interests related to fandom; the OTW is specifically focusing on issues relating to transformative works of fanfiction, fanvids, and fanart.

Does the OTW represent all of fandom?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:56:20 -0700

The OTW neither wants to nor can speak for all of fandom : fandom is huge, no matter how you define it. Right now, the OTW wants to provide a useful, searchable, reliable and stable home for all fanfiction regardless of rating or fandom, and in the longer term expand to other fanworks. In order to do that, we're trying to set up a stable, defensible infrastructure—that's the OTW.

We welcome all fandoms in the OTW's projects, including the Archive of Our Own, the Transformative Works and Cultures journal, and the Fanlore wiki . All of us engaged in making transformative fannish works face a common set of legal issues; we'd like to help fellow fans fight off pointless cease & desist letters, or find legal help if they've got a good case and want to pursue it.

We are trying to find allies and make connections before there's any trouble, while also explaining to the world why there shouldn't be trouble, because fans are loyal customers.

Do the people running OTW have ties to fandom?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:16:38 -0700

We are all fans first, and that is why we are giving our time to the organization.

The OTW is run by the same people who have helped make, collectively: The Automatic Archive software, Yuletide, Buffistas.org, Polyamorous Recs, Pornish Pixies, the Exwood Archive, Vividcon, con.txt, DSX, DSA, The Snarry Reader, the "Snape After Deathly Hallows" fest, the SGA Big Bang, the Sugar Quill, the DS Seekrit Santa, the Supernatural Wiki , the Foresmutters Project, Sweet Charity, pirate_hunters, the Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive, the X-Men Movieverse Fan Fiction archive, the Audiofic Archive—among many other major fannish projects—and more stories, vids, and fannish art than you could shake the proverbial stick at.

You can find the biographies of the current Board of Directors, including their fannish affiliations, here on the website.

Who is welcome to use the OTW services and to volunteer?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:15:08 -0700

We welcome everyone who wishes to discuss sources (shows, bands, sports players, anime, etc.) and fandom ; we welcome everyone who creates or enjoys fanfiction, vids, fanart, and other kinds of transformative works.

How was the first board chosen?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:13:27 -0700

Naomi Novik put out a call for those willing to serve in the organization in June of 2007, and chose the first board from among those who responded, on the basis of putting together a team with the particular set of skills and experience needed to set up the infrastructure of a nonprofit organization, including its bylaws. These bylaws include the rules and terms under which a membership could be gathered and a future board legally elected.

A third of the board seats were up for election in 2008; two founding members gave up their seats, and two new Board members were affirmed by the membership. Within three years, the entire board will have been elected by the membership. For more information about our elections process, please visit the OTW Elections website.

How can I become a committee member?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:11:07 -0700

We are always on the lookout for great committee members! Committees are appointed annually, with occasional midseason replacements as needed. Chairs generally have a free hand in appointing their committees, and they will naturally be drawing most from those who have volunteered with their committee or have other (fannish or real-world) relevant experience. If you are interested in serving on a particular committee, please let the Volunteers committee know.

Can I volunteer to help? Do I need to be a member to volunteer?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:10:21 -0700

We welcome anyone who would like to help! There are hundreds of volunteers participating in the OTW's projects—the large majority have volunteered in response to our public recruiting posts. OTW's volunteers include people of many races, genders, cultures, sexual identities, and abilities. The OTW does not discriminate on the basis of any of the above, and we value diversity among our staff. Please contact our Volunteers committee if you would like to volunteer.

How are the committees selected?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:45:32 -0700

The Board determines which committees should be organized, then appoints chairs to those committees and approves committee members chosen by the chairs. The initial committee members were chosen from people who responded to the first public "Willing to Serve" call for volunteers.

Who chooses the Board of Directors?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:43:25 -0700

The 2007-2008 Board was appointed to get the OTW up and running. All subsequent boards are elected by OTW members. It is the Board's responsibility to organize committees, make final decisions, keep financial records, handle compliance, and so on.

Board members are asked to serve three-year terms. One-third of the Board is elected every year. The Board is elected from among members in good standing who have served at least one term on a committee. Every member of the OTW gets one vote in the election, regardless of how much they contribute. If you are interested in running for the Board, please contact the Elections committee. For more information about our elections process, please visit the OTW Elections website.

Who is behind OTW?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:41:39 -0700

OTW is an organization created by fans, for fans. It's run by a board of directors . See About Us for more information.

What do you mean by a transformative work?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:40:20 -0700

A transformative work takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression.

Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and fan art. The OTW is interested in all kinds of transformative works, but our priority will be to support and defend the types of works hosted in our archive, and the fans who create them.

Why was this terminology chosen?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:38:15 -0700

The term transformative was specifically chosen to highlight in the nonprofit organization's name one of the key legal defenses for fanworks of all kinds (including real person fiction): that they are transformative of original source materials.

A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message." A story from Voldemort's perspective is transformative, so is a story about a pop star that illustrates something about current attitudes toward celebrity or sexuality.

The courts have also analyzed "right of publicity" claims against creative works by using the transformative use test from copyright law, so this also applies to one of the main legal issues real person fiction faces. Because one of our primary goals is to defend the right of fanworks to exist, having a key defense for them in our name is important to the organization.

Why was OTW created?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:29:26 -0700

OTW was created to work toward a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative , and accepted as legitimate creative activity.

Our mission is to be proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge, and to preserve our fannish economy, values, and way of life by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity, while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans.

What is the Organization for Transformative Works?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:17:55 -0700

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.

Signal boost - learn computer science!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:11:09 -0800

One of our senior coders, the lovely Elz, recently decided that she'd like to fill a few gaps in her knowledge of programming by working through MIT's OpenCourseWare series Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. In the true spirit of fannish community learning, she’s set up a Dreamwidth community, intro-to-cs, so that anyone else who is interested can join in and support one another. If you've always wanted to learn computer programming, now is your chance – the course doesn't require any previous experience.

You can also fill that burning desire to learn coding by volunteering for OTW coders – all abilities and levels of experience very much welcome!

Concerning Fanfiction

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:58:11 -0700

Mercedes Lackey has announced the following on her blog:

News: Concerning Fanfiction:

As you folks already know, my agent, Russel Galen, has in the past been opposed to fanfiction. However, he is also Cory Doctorow's agent now, and Cory is a persuasive little gnome.

As a result of this, I am happy to announce that we are officially permitting fanfiction to be licensed as derivative fiction under the Creative Commons umbrella...

Thanks, Cory, for helping Mercedes and her agent recognize that fans' reaction to works can (and already do!) legitimately include creative responses. We don't think we need her permission, but we're always happy to have her blessing--and as fans of hers, we're happy that she's happy! :)

October, 2009 Newsletter (Vol. 33)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:50:29 -0700

Welcome to our October, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

Abuse:

Abuse has been hard at work getting ready for Open Beta. Committee members are finishing up boilerplate responses and walking through sample cases. We're also coordinating with the website Testing Procedure folks to make sure that Abuse aspects of the website are up and running optimally.

ADT/Archive:

AD&T have moved the Archive to our lovely new servers and dropped a lot of new code in as well. Go look at the new improved Bookmarks and start thinking about what fields you'd like to see in cut-down views! Read our FAQ! Marvel at our News Posts!

We're also planning for Open Beta, this is currently scheduled for mid November and is dependent on the code changes we need being ready in time :)

We want to run a competition to design the perfect AO3 logo and are looking for volunteers willing to coordinate it.

Board:

The Board has been busy keeping track of general org-wide goings-on.

Communications:

Communications is currently offering its support to the new Support team as we plan for the coming of Open Beta. Board Member Rachel Barenblat, ADT member Zooey Glass, Legal Comm member Casey Fiesler, and DevMem-ber Monica will also be offering Comm some backup assistance for the rest of this term: thank you, guys!

Content Policy:

No update at this time.

Development:

Development had a pretty busy month which included running our October donations drive. Thanks to all of you, it was our most successful drive yet: we raised a total of US$15,573, which will go into our coffers to support colocation and bandwidth costs, organizational expenses (including the occasional unpredictable ones), and the projects we hope to dive into in Year Three. Thanks to everyone for your generous support -- it means the world to us!

Documentation:

Documentation added two new members this month - welcome JJ and groovekittie! We continue to move about behind the scenes, organizing everything in our path to help keep things running smoothly. The next couple of months will be busy ones for us as we prepare for the end of the current term and get things shipshape for next year.

Elections:

The Elections committee is proud to have announced that Elizabeth Yalkut and Allison Morris will be joining the OTW board in the next term. Although we didn't get to hold a competitive election this year, we are delighted to have attracted two such marvelous new Board members. Welcome, Elizabeth and Allison!

Finance Update:

No update at this time.

Journal:

The academic journal has upgraded its software and moved to a new server. The move was a bumpy one, with a 2-week-long outage, but the shiny new results will make up for the inconvenience. TWC is on track for No. 4, a guest-edited issue about Supernatural. This issue is no longer accepting unsolicited content because we're so close to print. No. 5, a general issue, is on track as well.

Legal:

The Legal Committee continues it role of supporting other OTW Committees as needed. Over recent weeks, we have advised Communications, assisted DevMem and Translation on phrasing, and reviewed more licenses for ADT. In addition, we continue to respond to numerous and varied queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month responded to a journalist seeking comment on Fairey v. AP, and to fan -centered organization on the 501c3 process, as well as providing advice to individual fans on fandom -corporate partnerships, and suggesting options for dealing with spam farmers.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee is continuing to work with Fanlore on the Geocities Rescue project. Archivists, if you can, back up as much as you can to your own HD and we'll keep working with you to help these fan works find a stable, longterm online home with OTW.

Systems:

No update at this time.

Translations:

No update at this time.

Vidding History:

No report at this time.

Volunteers:

The Volunteers committee is keeping busy preparing for the end of this term and the beginning of the new one in January. Many committees are looking for volunteers or staffers. Do you have some bold new ideas? Want to contribute and learn new skills? Check out our Willing to Serve post and contact us. Volunteers & Recruiting is looking for people, too! Do you have a bit of a micro-manager in you? We want you! * bribes with cookies *

Webmasters:

Congratulations to our own Allison Morris, who will be joining the OTW Board next term! We're all excited for her. <3

Besides celebrating the news, we've been working hard behind the scenes with Development & Membership to support the recent donation drive. Next up, we'll be working with Open Doors to move their Special Collections index, currently a standalone HTML site, into the Drupal content management system we use for the rest of transformativeworks.org.

Wiki:

No update at this time.

September, 2009 Newsletter, Vol. 32

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:54:44 -0700

Welcome to our September, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

Abuse:

Abuse is busy preparing for open beta! We're working closely with ADT and the newly-formed Support subcommittee to refine procedures and best practices, and there is some really exciting code and design coming out of this collaboration... which no one will ever see because it is admin-only. But we're really excited anyway.

ADT/Archive:

err.. +points at News Post #4+

+falls over+

Board:

The Board has been working through some of the stickier financial, administrative and personnel parts of the move to colocation and the upcoming membership drive and electoin.

Communications:

Communications has been continuing to try to bring you all the OTW-related news you could want in these exciting times. We've also done a couple of interviews; more news of these coming soon.

Content Policy:

We're double- and triple-checking all the interactions between the Archive Terms of Service and the code that ADT is finalizing; there are some fantastic features we're excited to nail down the details on.

Development/Membership:

DevMem has been busy behind the scenes working with Webmasters and Systems on readying our donations software and introducing new features for our October donation drive. Right now we're gearing up, which means everything from collecting new lolcats to drafting our materials so that the Translation folks can work their magic. We're also working with Elections to ensure that we can provide the materials they need in the event that we have a contested board election this November. Throughout, we've been kvelling about the news that the OTW finally owns our own servers -- it's exciting to know that our fundraising work has paid off in such a tangible way!

Documentation:

No report.

Elections:

Sept. 23 was our first deadline to declare candidacy in the Board elections. We are now extending the nomination period for a week: email elections-chair@transformativeworks.org before September 30, 2009 to throw your hat in the ring, or if you have any questions.

Finance Update:

FinComm continues to pay the bills, keep the lights on—and oh, yeah, I think we bought some expensive computer equipment lately.

Journal:

TWC No. 3 appeared on September 15, and it's available here:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/current
The issue features articles, interviews, dialogues, and book reviews discussing a variety of fandoms and topics through a number of different voices. Look for our in-depth update in otw_news!

Legal:

The OTW was asked to collaborate with the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Right to Write Fund on an amicus brief in the pending Salinger/60 Years Later case. The OTW's Rebecca Tushnet and Casey Fiesler collaborated with lawyers from Stanford's Center for the Internet and Society and the UC Berkeley School of Law to produce the brief, which was served on August 3, 2009. You can download a .pdf of the amicus brief by right-clicking and saving.

We also filed two sets of answers to the Copyright Office's supplemental questions regarding a proposed exemption to the DMCA for vidders and other remix artists. These documents can be downloaded and read on the Legal Advocacy page as well as the Vid Test Suite page of the Vidding History project.

Open Doors:

GeoCities Rescue: Open Doors wishes to remind everyone that GeoCities is closing for good on October 26, 2009!!! If you have fic on a GeoCities site that you want to preserve, or if you are the moderator or site admin of a fanfiction archive there, please Contact Open Doors!

Fan Culture Preservation Project: Just a quick update! In the three months since we've been open, we've processed nine fairly significant donations, with a tenth--a large donation of well over 500 classic zines--in the works. Check out our project page for more information; we'll keep you posted as these collections are cataloged.

Systems:

Systems has been working to install us on our new servers so we can move to Open Beta as soon as possible! They’ve also been helping Webmasters gear up for the October Membership Drive.

Translations:

We are very happy to report that we’ve begun to translate news posts to those languages which have the necessary womanpower—we believe this is a vital step towards our self avowed goal: international outreach. We are continuing to move our language teams to Basecamp, the Org’s organizational platform. The teams have been busy as usual translating the website and Archive News posts to the different languages.

Vidding History:

The Vidding History committee worked with the OTW's legal team to file two sets of answers to the Copyright Office's supplemental questions regarding a proposed exemption to the DMCA for vidders and other remix artists. These documents can be downloaded and read on the Vid Test Suite page of the Vidding History project.

Volunteers:

Volunteers has been heroically continuing to help OTW connect with fabulous and talented people (and if you're a coder with IE7 skills, call us! Call us toll-free right now!)

Webmasters:

We recently launched the brand-new OTW Elections site, the product of several months of collaboration among Webmasters, Elections, Systems, and Translation. We worked with the Translation team to add two new languages -- French and Danish -- to the main website. We also launched our new site theme, Cavatica (named for our committee's heroine, Charlotte A. Cavatica), which is visually similar to the old theme but will be easier to maintain and adapt as the site evolves. Finally, we're preparing for the October membership and donations drive.

Wiki:

Fanlore is currently advertising for Documentation Specialists to help with reorganizing and rewriting policy pages and help files. If you’re interested, please do volunteer!

July, 2009 Newsletter, Volume 31

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:33:39 -0700

Welcome to OTW's July, 2009 newsletter. Get status reports and updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees right under the cut!

Abuse:

Abuse has been getting set up on our shiny new issue tracker, which we will be using to retain records of cases, and making recommendations to ADT about how to handle ambiguous feedback about content on the Archive. We're also putting together a longer blog post all about the awesomeness of us, coming soon!

ADT/Archive:

AD&T is hard at work as usual, we deployed new code to the Beta Archive over the weekend of the 4th of July, pushed various projects a little further along the path to completion and welcome an intern from Darmstadt (Germany) to the team.

We're still working on co-location and hope to be ordering our much anticipated new hardware in the very near future.

We recently launched a new series of News posts about the Archive, which aim to keep people informed about what we do and answer some frequently asked questions. If you have questions then check out the posts so far - one, two and three - and comment to one of the posts if you have a question not answered there.

Board:

The Board have been working this month with the individual committees they chair or liaison with to move some key projects along (Legal, Vidding History, Open Doors, DevMem, ADT) and/or keep the org running (Volunteers, Financial, Webmasters).

Communications:

Communications has been working closely with Open Doors on the Geocities Rescue site, and is also still developing a "for the media" page for transformativeworks.org. We have also provided PR materials for Azkatraz, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, WriterCon, and other upcoming conventions, so look for flyers and buttons!

Content Policy:

Content Policy has just released -- with most of the heavy lifting done by ADT -- an updated Terms of Service for the Archive. We're now holding a two-week public comment period, which will end July 28, 2009, when the Board will vote on the changes and additions. Most of this is relatively minor tweaks, and it's all driven by user feedback; you can see the blog post with the changes laid out at here. Let us know what you think! Content Policy committee members will be available to answer questions.

Development:

DevMem has been doing behind-the-scenes work training committee members to use CiviCRM, the database we use to keep track of members and donations. Some members have reported a new bug encountered in donating (thanks a bunch, Paypal) which we're working to fix. In happier news, we've welcomed Ivy back from maternity leave; welcome back, Ivy!

Documentation:

No report.

Elections:

Elections has been working with Web on the elections subsite, and are currently reviewing our new timeline and faq pages to submit to the board.

Finance:

The sharks of FinCom have been continuing to fill purchase requests, paying the bills, and crunching numbers.

Journal:

Issue three of the Academic journal is into the copyediting phase, and is on schedule for publication on September 15. The team is already hard at work on issues four, five and six.

Legal:

The Legal Committee continues to advise and support other OTW Committees as needed. Over recent weeks, we have reviewed license terms for ADT and privacy policy for the Web team, as well as advising the Wiki team on some revisions. We have also been working with the EFF and other organizations in providing responses to Copyright Office questions on the DCMA. In addition, we continue to respond to queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month responded to some queries asking for clarification of our policies on subtitling and dubbing by fans.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee is pleased to finally announce the GeoCities Rescue Project for fans who want to preserve fiction or resource sites currently hosted on GeoCities. Please check out the Geocites Rescue Project Page for more info, or just contact Open Doors.

We are also pleased to announce that we have several more donations to the Fan Culture Preservation Project and are currently working with 15-20 other donors! So if you have non-digital fan artifacts that need a new home, please contact Open Doors.

Systems:

Systems has been closely working with ADT to implement the Archive's latest code deployment, as well as keeping OTW's general systems running.

Translations:

This month we are very excited to welcome new members for the French team. On the administrative side, we have been working on providing better tools for our translators, with the assistance of the Volunteers&Recruiting Committee. This move to OTW’s virtual office, Basecamp, is still ongoing.

Translators have also kept tirelessly working on the website translation, both to keep translations of it up to date, and to translate the many new pages--like that of the Fan Culture Preservation Project.

Vidding History:

Vidding History has been working with Legal to provide responses to Copyright Office questions vis a vis the DMCA petition the EFF and others made on behalf of remix artists (and vidders)! We've also been in quiet, behind the scenes conversations with many video streaming sites following the demise of Imeem.

Volunteers:

Volunteers posted a job search for experienced XHTML/CSS Coders. OTW wants you! We also helped Translations setting up the first two language teams in Basecamp.

Webmasters:

We've installed a new anti-spam measure, Mollom, following the recent rash of comment spam. Mollom works behind the scenes, so it shouldn't create any hassles for legitimate visitors. We're still hard at work on the Elections subsite, and have presented an initial draft to the Elections Committee for review.

Wiki:

In addition to their usual ways of growing Fanlore, Wikicomm has also joined forced with Open Doors to work on the Geocities Rescue Project. Fanlore will be helping to preserve resource sites and the look and feel of older fanfiction sites.

June, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 30

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:34:32 -0700

Get updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees: right under the cut!

Abuse:

Abuse has been hard at work getting boilerplate texts written to efficiently handle user complaints and concerns. We are combing through drafts to ensure we are clearly communicating with users regarding areas of difficulty and the terms of service.

ADT/Archive:

AD&T are busy negotiating with a co-location facility to work out our requirements and costs - Network ports! Power consumption! We're about to spend a lot of money so we want to spend it wisely (thank you so much for supporting us in making this dream a reality).

The draft Open Beta plan is getting fleshed out and we're busy making a list of features we have to finalise. I feel a blocking Open Beta list coming on...

One of the most important features will be an Invitation Code system. We know we have to manage adding new users carefully, we don't want to open up the Archive for use then have it burst into flames! There will be codes for existing users to hand out, and a sign-up queue so you don't have to rely on knowing someone with an account. We're finalising the design now and will start coding it shortly (many thanks to Denise from Dreamwidth for letting us look at how Dreamwidth does it).

Thank you for all the suggestions for Collections & Challenges. The submissions are now closed and we are busy collating your feedback to incorporate into our proposed design - we may not be able to use every suggestion but we will try very hard!

Our next code deploy will probably be another small one with a bunch of fixes - we're currently aiming for the weekend of the 4th of July.

Board:

The Board continue to work on the upcoming colocation and open beta of the archive in terms of money, resources and personnel, as well as setting general org-wide goals.

Communications:

Communications has set up the Fan Culture Preservation Project page and will be announcing a GeoCities Outreach project in the near future. We're also putting together a "For The Media" page and planning events to celebrate our coming Server Colocation!

Content Policy:

No report.

Development:

Development and Communications are collaborating on a merchandising committee for the Fall, '09 fundraising drive; stay tuned.

Documentation:

Our AD&T liaison Amy has been hard at work supporting the move forward to the next stage of the Archive of Our Own. In addition to wrangling meeting minutes and keeping all the training and design documentation straight on the wiki , she's been collating your feedback about Collections and Challenges and putting it into a format our designers and coders can work with. \0/

Elections:

Elections is compiling instructions and information for the revised, in-house election software that OTW's Webmasters are working on, as well as draft text for their forthcoming website.

Finance Update:

The sharks of FinCom are circling slowly around bank options, evaluating the benefits of short-term investment CDs in the event of a budget surplus this year and preparing recommendations for the Board on a move to a different level of checking account. We've also been working with various committees to nail down budget projections for the remainder of the year, and supporting Systems in the move to purchase servers, as well as paying the regular bills.

In more exciting and less numerical news, we're also celebrating the engagement of our darling Cat Meier and flailing over just how we're going to manage to turn a mutual love of sharks, Excel sheets and Alec Hardison into an appropriate wedding gift.

Journal:

The TWC team is working hard to put together issue three of our academic journal , which is scheduled for September 2009.

Legal:

Legal continues to provide confidential advice and opinions within the org. We could tell you more, but then we'd have to kill you.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee is proud to announce the Fan Culture Preservation project: if you have zines or other (nondigital) fannish artifacts you don't want anymore and don't know what to do with: please call us! We are partnered with the Special Collections department of the University of Iowa, and we can help arrange for your zines to be housed and preserved. (We can also help you arrange a bequest!)

We are currently finalizing a Geocities Outreach plan; if you, or someone you know, is in danger of losing an old Geocities fan fiction or information site, and you don't have any other way to preserve it, please contact Open Doors. We can help!

Systems:

Systems is planning a 'help us with colocation' recruitment drive; watch this space!

Translations:

No report.

Vidding History:

We are currently working on a page of fair use resources for vidders. Francesca Coppa will also be presenting on a fair use panel at the Open Video Conference in NYC, June 19-20, 2009.

Volunteers:

The Volunteers committee could welcome quite a few new coders and testers to the Org. \o/ We've also been working with Translations in reviewing our management tools in order to adapt them to the needs of the language teams.

Website:

We recently worked with Open Doors to create a page for the Fan Culture Preservation Project. We're making progress on our big summer project, the Elections subsite, and we've been squishing bugs and smacking down spammers on the side.

Wiki:

The Wiki committee continues to make policy decisions and oversee the general running of Fanlore.

May, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 29

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:17:19 -0700

Join us in celebrating our unofficial 2 year anniversary: our first "fanarchive" LJ post went live on May 20, 2007. WOOT! Find out what your favorite OTW projects and committees are doing: more info right below the cut!

Abuse:

No report.

ADT/Archive:

AD&T has been researching co-location facilities and getting quotes on hardware, which is starting to look excitingly detailed. These are the first steps towards actually buying and owning our own servers! We have also started working on the features we'll need to go to Open Beta!

We're currently hard at work on a bunch of projects:

Enhancing our invitation system, we'll need this when we start taking on a lot more users
Improving our administration interface
Improvements to tag wrangling - we're working to fix the 'SGA and SG-1 in the filters' problem.
Adding a FAQ and a posting interface for Release Notes and Bug Updates - this is so we can communicate better
...and of course a bunch of smaller bug fixes

We're also still looking for suggestions on Collections and Challenges. We need as much input as possible so we can build something awesome. Head over to Collections and Challenges. It's Design Time!, the Livejournal post or the Dreamwidth post and share your ideas. Submissions close on 30th May so please, tell us what you know!

We have a small deploy planned for the weekend of the 30th - this will mostly be bugfixes - details in the next set of Release Notes that get emailed to Beta testers.

The testing team who worked on r1278 were amazing! We re-tested almost the entire Archive (which is now a mammoth task). A big thank you to the dedicated and brave people who volunteered to help right in the middle and were fabulous.

We've been training up the lovely new coders who joined us recently, who are making great progress! We've spiffed up our training materials and our reward has been lots of enthusiasm and activity - we've just seen our first archive code commit from the lovely Amelia, who joined us a few months ago. The new training materials make it even easier to learn to code with the OTW, so if you've been pondering joining us, now is a great time to jump right in!

Board:

The Board has approved funding for colocation servers and is working on structuring the OTW's finances to grow with the ongoing costs of a much bigger Archive. We hope to formally announce a timeline and a series of festivals to celebrate our colocation!

Communications:

Communications is working on several projects; a "for the media" page for the tw.org website, the Open Doors "Fan Culture Preservation Project" press releases, some outreach ideas for Fanlore.

Content Policy:

No report.

Development:

Members of Development will be forming a subcommittee with members of Communications, Web, and some specially recruited volunteers to research OTW merchandise for future drives. Stay tuned!

Documentation:

Documentation has no new news, but continues to document everything it can find.

Elections:

The Elections committee will be running the voting and tabulation for the fall election in-house. We're working closely with Webmasters now to set up the infrastructure to do just that.

Finance Update:

Fincom closed the books on 2008 with the completion of the 2008 financial statements, which were released in conjunction with the OTW annual report, which is now available on our web site. We've filed the organization's 990 return, and will post that soon to our reports page soon. We've also been paying the OTW's bills and catching up with other OTW committees to finalize the 2009 operating budget.

Journal:

May 15th marked the deadline to submit contributions for the third issue of the TWC academic journal . The TWC team is now busy going through the editorial process; issue three will be out by September 2009.

Legal:

As ever, Legal Committee continues in its role of providing advice and support to other OTW Committees. Recently, we consulted with Content regarding the application of a specific clause in the Terms of Service, and we have advised the Web team and the Board on various glossary and license issues. We also continue to respond to queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month commented on some specific speech and copyright issues referred to us by the membership.

Open Doors:

Open Doors is still working with Webmasters and Communications on our project page, and we're now workshopping a press release.

Systems:

Systems has been working with the various committee chairs to test the exportation of certain project pages to the zen server.

Tag Wranglers:

The Tag Wranglers continue to be quite busy in the Beta Archive. We’ve brought on new volunteers to help us with a wider variety of fandoms. In the next few months we look forward to the coding of the next generation of behind-the-scenes wrangling tools which will allow us greater flexibility to handle a few of the issues we’ve come against. Meanwhile, the fandoms already wrangled are working well with filters and browse.

Translations:

At the beginning of this month we waved our committee member logovo goodbye (who is probably glad to have her life back :P), and as a parting gift, she recruited her own successor, hele. We give a our gratitude for a wonderful time to logovo, and an excited welcome to hele!

We are working on standardizing the translation process to facilitate the volunteers’ work. The committee is also testing the admin side of the new translation interface, with sights on being able to include translators in the testing soon. The teams continue to work tirelessly on translating the website, and keeping the translated versions of the website up to date (no mean feat!).

Vidding History:

Members of Vidding History and Legal went to DC to on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Extended coverage of our panel is at our blog post here.

Volunteers:

Volunteers continues to work managing staffers and other personnel as well as maintaining our various corporate home systems and software.

Website:

As part of our Elections subsite project, we're currently testing software that enables multiple sites to be run from a single Drupal installation and database.

Our fabulous chairperson, Jinjur, will be handing out OTW buttons at Wiscon (May 22-25).

Wiki:

We've opened up a Fanlore community on dreamwidth for anyone who wants to get involved with editing the wiki, along with adding a news page to keep everyone updated on the latest changes.

April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 28

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:00:42 -0700

Welcome to our second April newsletter! Progress reports from all your favorite committees and OTW projects are right under the cut!

Abuse:

We're busy designing our process of receiving complaints from users and responding to them and have been putting together a way to handle the non-English-language users of the Archive with Translation -- who are deserving of SO MANY kudos -- which we're looking forward to releasing soon!

ADT/Archive:

Accessibility, Design, & Technology are in the process of preparing for another code update on the Beta Archive of Our Own and are currently poking the changes on our Test Archive. We should be deploying the new changes on the first weekend of May. Changes include:

The new Translations interface which Elz and Cal have been slaving over.
Being able to filter by Pseuds which is Enigel's baby.
Changes to the way works display by the beautiful Zooey - we're pulling 'Warnings' out and making them more visible.
We're also pulling the default Archive font we're using as not enough people's systems default load Candara as pretty as they should :(

Jennifew is heading up the MASSIVE task of regression testing the ENTIRE Archive after the Rails upgrade - every page is subtly affected. We're looking forward to inflicting all this on our faithful Beta testers so we can pick up the next round of (inevitable) bugs.

Finally, Our beautiful Amelia has been contacting people about co-location, we don't have anything firm back yet but we have three different proposals we're waiting on details for.

Board:

As a whole, the Board has continued to work on large org-wide issues of structure and personnel, as well as supporting and shepherding along forthcoming projects like server colocation, the Fan Culture Preservation Project, and our Elections subsite. Board member Rebecca Tushnet also gave the keynote speech at the Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property Symposium at American University School of Law co-sponsored by the OTW.

Communications:

The Communications team continues to strategize outreach. We recently added a Where To Find Us page to the "About The OTW" section of transformativeworks.org, so please come and join us on Facebook, MySpace and other venues. We have also been working to support the OTW at cons.

Content Policy:

Content Policy is preparing the additions to the ToS for posting on the AO3 website at the next scheduled code update in early May, at which point there will be a further two-week comment period before the ToS additions become effective.

Development:

After the March membership drive, members of DevMem took a few days off to bask in the knowledge that nearly 400 people donated during the drive and that we now have members in 17 nations around the world! (See our recent blog post for more information about that.) Since then, we've been working on generating documentation for civicrm, the open-source software we're now using to keep track of members and donations. We also sent a delegation to Muskrat Jamboree, a fan con in Boston in early April, where we hosted an informational panel about the org.

Documentation:

The Documentation committee has been working on our formatting for minutes and other internal documentation. We’ve continued to set up infrastructure and line ducks up in a row, setting up liaisons with more committees to streamline the documentation process and provide more direct support.

Elections:

Elections is considering options for vote tabulation, both entertaining bids for outsourcing and consulting with Webmasters about the logistics of running the voting ourselves.

Finance Update:

The Finance Committee has been running the numbers for our 2008 Annual Report: stay tuned!

Journal:

Karen Hellekson represented the Academic Journal group at the OTW informational panel held at Muskrat Jamboree on April 3, 2009. She spoke about the fan connection and urged fans and acafans to consider submitting, and she handed out the journal's most recent general call for papers (available here: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/8).

Catherine Tosenberger, the guest editor of forthcoming TWC No. 4, special Supernatural issue, was interviewed by Sequential Tart. The interview was published on April 6, 2009 (available here: http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1364). She spoke not only about SPN but also put in a great plug for TWC!

TWC has been accepted for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/). We will be inputting article metadata to facilitate dissemination of content.

Legal:

OTW staffers Kristina Busse, Francesca Coppa, Casey Fiesler, Karen Hellekson, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet all presented papers at the IP/Gender Conference at the American University School of Law on April 23-24, 2009. The event was co-sponsored by the Women in the Law Program, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, the Program on Information and Intellectual Property, and the Organization For Transformative Works.

The Legal Committee continues to provide advice and support to other Committees and the Board as needed, consulting recently on the issue of a possible legacy to the OTW. As always, we welcome queries from the public, and we attempt to respond to them promptly, as they arise.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee continues to work on setting up the Fan Culture Preservation Project website; we are also working on a gameplan to help preserve fan sites which will be destroyed when GeoCities goes down later this year.

Systems:

No report at this time.

Translations:

Apart from our usual translating gig we were figuring out how to restructure our teams this month, and we're also trying to streamline our translation procedure a bit. We hope this will make both our administrative work and the translators' experience a lot smoother.

We have also been staring over Elz's shoulder in fascination as she continues to code the Archive's translation interface for us; we're very excited to get to testing it soon-ish (in fact, we're in the process of setting it up! whooo!)

Last but not least a shout-out to our fabulous translators: in addition to our Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, German, Czech, Finnish and Italian teams we could also welcome Japanese and Danish to the fold this month! <3

Vidding History:

Francesca Coppa, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet will be heading to Washington DC on May 7th to testify at the Copyright Office in support of the EFF's petition for a DMCA exemption for fair use remix artists, including vidders. More information about the upcoming hearing is here: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/hearings/2009/#may7.

Vidding History members Coppa and Turk also presented vidding-related academic work at IP/Gender on April 23-24, 2009.

Volunteers:

No report at this time.

Webmasters:

We've posted the full text of OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed DMCA exemption for vidders. It's accessible in PDF or HTML format from the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids page.

More recently, we've been in discussion with Elections and Systems as we take the first steps toward setting up an Elections subsite. This will be our main project for the next few months.

Wiki:

We're still at work cleaning out policies and bugs, as well as trying to fruitfully incorporate new feedback received on the workings and content of Fanlore. Outreach is still a main goal of ours for this year, with new links forming with the RPG and filking communities recently (Francesca, thank you for the help!)

April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 27

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:55:56 -0700

Welcome to our next newsletter; get progress reports from all your favorite committees and stay on top of your favorite OTW projects--right under the cut!

Abuse:
No report.

ADT/Archive:
AD&T are trialling a new way of navigating through pseuds on the Test Archive right now. We plan to make it possible to manage your different identities better. We've also rebuilt the way the inbox works and are in the process of splitting out the 'Warning' tags from general tags when viewing story summaries.

We're researching co-location facilities and ongoing hardware costs. We need a good idea of how much it will cost us to move to hardware with enough grunt to support a lot more users. synecdochic talked about why having the right hardware and architecture is important if you're interested in knowing more.

All the excitement emanating from our team on Ada Lovelace Day seems to have proved inspirational, and we're happy to be welcoming some new coders on board. We're also sprucing up our training documentation and working to improve support and training for new coders, as part of our committment to fostering the tech heroines of the future.

Board:
The Board continues to work with Systems on co-location for the AOOO; with Financial on writing the Annual Report and making budgets; with Volunteers on various personnel issues; with Open Doors to get the Fan Culture Preservation project up and running; with Legal to support the EFF's DMCA exemption; with Webmasters and Elections on election software and installation; & with Abuse on privacy issues. Board chair Naomi Novik also took out some time to go on NPR to speak against DRM technology on audiobooks.

Communications:
The Communications team helped to promote the latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, on gaming, and we're pleased at the response across the blogosphere; we got slashdotted and we're hoping to develop additional articles in the print press. Meanwhile, we also continue to support the OTW's presence at various cons and conferences. We're also particularly proud of our Ada Lovelace Day post. Breaking news: we now also have a mirror site on Dreamwidth, a new fan-friendly social networking site.

Content Policy:
No report.

Development:
Big report on the March, 2009 drive coming soon!

Documentation:
The Documentation Committee is pleased to announce our newest addition, tree! tree brings our committee up to seven members, and we are delighted to have someone else to assign work to.

Documentation has also started our first big internal documentation push—developing “What Is It?” primer pages for each committee. These pages will help new staff and volunteers get a better feel for what the committees do, and how they operate.

Committee chairs should expect to hear from their assigned Documentation person soon, if you have not already; your Documentation person will help figure out what kind of information your “What Is It?” page should have and how to organize it. Once the skeleton of the page is there, committee members are encouraged to add information to it. (Don’t worry about organizing it—info dumps are OK!)

Staff and volunteers are also encouraged to check out the internal FAQ. It’s a work-in-progress, and we welcome any contributions.

Elections:
No report.

Finance Update:
Finance is working on our Annual Report, coming soon!

Journal:
Issue number two of the academic journal TWC, a special number about Games, is out! The communications team has made a big push to advertise it heavily to the gaming world, and we have been tracking links. We are very pleased by the response, as we've been featured on Slashdot and other prominent sites. The editorial team is embarking on a spree of solicitation for No. 3 (a general, unthemed issue), and for No.4 (a special issue on Supernatural). http://journal.transformativeworks.org We will also be represented at events such as Muskrat Jamboree, where a Journal member will sit on a panel about OTW.

Legal:
Legal is collaborating with Vidding History to support the OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's DMCA exemption; see "Vidding History" below for more info.

Open Doors:
Open Doors will soon announce its new Fan Culture Preservation Project with a press release and a webpage; currently, we have finalized the legal arrangement with our university partner and are now actively working on establishing a collection/saving some zines. Stay tuned!

Systems:
No report.

Translation:
We continue to welcome our new fabulous volunteers, which now include a Danish translation team. For now work on the OTW website goes forward as the main focus of our efforts.

Vidding History:
OTW Goes To Washington! Board members Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet, as well as TWC Review Editor Tisha Turk are going to DC in early May to testify at the Copyright Office in favor of the EFF's proposed exemption to DMCA prohibitions on DVD ripping for makers of fair use user-generated content. Tushnet and Coppa will also be presented on vidding at the Columbia Symposium on Gender and the Law on April 10th; Turk will be presenting on vidding later that month at the IP/Gender conference at American University School of Law.

Volunteers:
The Volunteers committee welcomes our newest member, avaloste! We continue to bring new staffers and volunteers into the Org, and have recently made some changes to our internal process that should not only make it easier to do, but easier for future Volunteers committee members to learn.

Webmasters:
The Webmasters are currently working to upgrade CiviCRM, the software we use to support DevMem’s fundraising efforts. We are also working closely with Translation to resolve a lingering site bug, and will work soon with the Elections committee to create a home for Elections-related content.

Wiki:
Wiki recently announced its new chatroom for fanlore participants; they also ran a "Fanlore Live" panel at Escapade.

March 2009 Newsletter, Vol 26

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:52:00 -0700

Welcome to our next newsletter; get progress reports from all your favorite committees and stay on top of your favorite OTW projects--right under the cut!

Abuse:

The Abuse Committee has hit the ground running, and we've begun creating a tracking system that adheres to OTW confidentiality requirements. Over the next few months, we'll be working to develop a set of Abuse policies and procedures that will balance transparency and confidentiality.

ADT/Archive:

AD&T spent most of the last two weeks on our recent deploy of new code to the Archive of Our Own. We're now on revision 1110!

Our coder group is working on a upgrade of Rails (the software the Archive is built on) which should give us the ability to do a lot of cool new stuff. This is very pleasing to all of us as the new version is more efficient and works better internally.

Translations 1.0 is now available to our Translators and we are developing the design for Translations 2.0. Tag Wrangling has now been active for 2 weeks, we have wrangled 4,204 tags and have another 2,292 to go. We're still working hard on this! The Archive now boasts 528 different Fandom tags and 2,300 Character tags.

Tag Wrangling marked off Version 0.5 on the public roadmap which is an important milestone. We're over half way there people! The design for Version 0.6 Browsing is almost ready for the first round of review (we already built Searching) and we're starting the design for Version 0.8 Community and Challenges. We are delaying Version 0.7 Subscriptions in order to work on 0.8 as we now see it as more important.

We also have a number of smaller projects running including improvements to how Pseuds handle and the way Warnings are displayed on stories.

Board:

The Board has been setting org-wide goals for March, and has also been working hard to support the March Membership drive. Board members Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet are currently off speaking at the Mashup/Remix 2009 conference at the Moritz College of Law.

Communications:

The Communications team, with the help of some of our volunteer graphic designers, has made some new OTW flyers; we also premiered the launch of a new OTW lapel button at Escapade. We have also been expanding the OTW's presence on various social networking systems; in addition to Livejournal & InsaneJournal, look for us on Facebook, MySpace, as a "studio" on AnimeMusicVideos.org, on iMeem, YouTube, and Deviantart. We've also renewed our Twitter and Delicious accounts.

Content Policy:

Content Policy is working on tidying up the TOS, clarifying questions that have arisen, and making sure the actual policy dovetails with the Archive code. Additionally, we're working to balance the TOS requirements with the needs of extant archives coming in through Open Doors, and creating a coherent policy that applies to all works in the Archive.

Development:

We've been working on getting a new system in place for our second annual membership drive, which is going on right now. You can read about the drive at the OTW blog. If you've donated before, you'll probably notice that the setup is very different now, and hopefully easier on everyone. We hope you'll choose to contribute again (or for the first time!) during the week-long drive.

Documentation:

Our brand-spanking new Documentation committee has been getting organized and recruiting members under the awesome leadership of the lovely Margie. So far we've added Amy, Cinco, and carpet diemon to the committee, and also worked out a deal with Communications to share Laura JV.

This new committee runs our internal wiki (not the Fanlore wiki), which is a resource for storing and sharing the pages and pages (and pages!) of documentation and reference materials our committees generate.

If you've got some free time, a knack for organizing information, and a willingness to learn how to edit a wiki (or even better--experience editing a wiki, though this is not required), we'd like to talk to you about being on Documentation! Get in touch with the Volunteers & Recruiting committee via the contact form.

Elections:

Elections is looking ahead to the election season, and thinking about new ways to document our policies and processes.

Finance Update:

FinCom has just filed the state required annual finance report with the state of Delaware, in which OTW is incorporated. We've also been working with DevMem in preparation for the upcoming membership drive, and drafting the formal annual report for OTW.

Journal:

The academic journal team is proud to present its second issue, a special number on gaming, which goes live on March 15th! Find us at: http://journal.transformativeworks.org.

As you may know, every other TWC issue is dedicated to specific topics: as a reminder, our Spring 2010 issue will focus on _Supernatural_ and our submission deadline of May 1, 2009 is drawing near! See the call for papers here: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/5

Our next special number is scheduled for Spring 2011: "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which will focus on the rich history of fans and their engagement with a variety of objects of fandom. We just issued our formal call for papers, which you can find here: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/6

Legal:

In May, the United States Copyright Office will hold hearings on proposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including an Electronic Frontier Foundation proposal that will assist vidders. The Legal Committee has filed comments in support of the exemption, and is planning to send a representative to testify at the hearings.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee is putting its final touches on our zomg amazing Zine Preservation Project - stay tuned!

Systems:

The Systems committee has been working closely with OTW's DevMem and Webmasters to get, install, and test the new software for the drive.

Translations:

We've welcomed new volunteers to our language teams (yay!) and have begun translating the interface and tools of the Archive. We've also worked on translating texts for Development and over at the OTW page we've been busy with the 2007 report and the Vidding History pages.

Vidding History:

Hey, we were on NPR! OTW Board members and a number of prominent vidders were featured on Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses, which aired on NPR's "All Things Considered." Board members Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa are also speaking this weekend at Mashup/Remix 2009 at the Moritz College of Law.

Volunteers:

We've added two new committee members, Sandi Campbell and Anne Jonas. Welcome! Since the beginning of the new term, we've been very busy adding all our new staffers and volunteers to the Org, and we're also pecking away at our documentation.

Website:

The Webmasters have been working closely with Development & Membership to prepare for the membership drive.

Wiki:

A 'Fanlore Live' panel at Escapade has allowed us to make a headstart on gathering oral histories (thank you for all the volunteers who helped us with their typing skills!); a permanently open Fanlore chatroom has been approved and should soon welcome you to come hang out with other wiki fans at any time, night or day; we're continuing to rewrite, clarify and generally clean up and adapt our policies and documents; and of course, our outreach efforts are also ongoing.

February, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 25

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:40:24 -0800

Welcome to the first newsletter of the new year! All the OTW committees have re-formed, and we've got a couple of new ones, too. Find out what the various committees have been working on. Get an update on the archive! (Find it all under the fold!)

ADT/Archive Development: AD&T hit the ground running this year. Black_samvara took over from Naomi as Chair. We welcomed new Members to the Committee, new volunteers and formed a new team. We also gained an Archivist who is working with us on our documentation. Our big news is that we are releasing new code this weekend and we are very excited. The Archive of Our Own is currently on revision 953 and the Test Archive is on revision 1077 which represents a massive amount of coding work. We have a huge list of bug fixes and 2 brand new pieces of functionality.

The Archive's translations interface has been built and we are delighted to be able to finally offer this to the Translation team who have patiently worked with us to build it.

Tag Wrangling is coming! We heard your feedback about tags and we have a very cool solution. After a lot of discussion, some nifty coding, hard work and the promise of vast chocolate bribes we are proud to launch the Wrangler interface. Tag Wrangling is a role that any Archive user can volunteer for. Wranglers can manipulate tags and create relationships between them so we can now fix all those niggling tag issues. We love this because it spreads the work out across many hands and means the tags can be updated as a fandom grows and be changed by members of the fandom itself. Please don’t feedback about tag related problems until April, we need to give our new Tag Wrangling Team a chance to do their thing!

We have been reading all your wonderful feedback and are working on compiling a Known Issues list. As a result of this feedback we are also working on a re-build of the ‘work’s and ‘fandoms’ pages into a coherent ‘browse’ design.

Board: The Board welcomes its two new members--Sheila Lane and Rachel Barenblat--and spent most of December and January putting together our fabulous new 2009 committees! We also held a live telephone/Skype/online training session for Chairs on Thursday, January 29th and recorded the audio and video for posterity. We are planning to have OTW-wide meetings during the last weekend of every month, and are working to help the individual committees set goals for 2009. Goals already discussed include: the upcoming DevMem drive, a move to colocated servers, the Zine Preservation Project, the 2008 Annual Report & deploying the next revision of the Archive.

Communications: The OTW is proud to announce the formation of a new Communications Team which combines the roles of the old "Community Relations" and "PR" teams. We're trying to run a little bit more like a newsroom, and the various team members have been assigned to "cover" various OTW committees and projects in terms of handling their internal and external communications, generating press materials, and otherwise helping to promote the work they do.

Development/Membership: We've been gearing up for our March Membership drive (March 9-16), which includes exploring new software to streamline the process of donating to or joining the OTW (or renewing an existing membership). We're excited about unveiling this new process, and we're very grateful to our webmasters for being so helpful and patient. As always, we're looking out for ways to reach out to new fan communities and people who may not have heard of us; to that end, the OTW will have a presence at both Escapade in March and Muskratjamboree in April. We also recently added some new people to our committee: welcome, Shoshanna and Monica!

Elections:This is the slow season for Elections, and we are taking full advantage of it for the moment, taking care of housekeeping and letting our new members get up to speed on last year's policy and implementation decisions.

Financial: The Financial Committee is currently working on drafting the 2008 annual report, contacting committees to set the 2009 budget, and setting goals for the remainder of the year.

Journal: Issue two of Transformative Works and Cultures has gone through copyediting and final layout as planned, and is on schedule to be published on March 15. The team is already hard at work on issues three and four. We are also proud to announce two new team members, Tisha Turk and Lorraine Dubuisson: Welcome Tisha and Lorraine! Our current editorial line-up is now including an Interview team, to better follow this successful rubric.

Legal: Over the winter break, the Legal Committee was pleased to be able to prepare and submit a Reply Comment in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's DMCA exemption proposal for noncommercial videos that do not infringe copyright. We hope that this will lay groundwork for future developments in this area. Otherwise, we continue to provide advice and support to other Committees as needed, having recently advised DevMem on acceptance of donations, and the Webmasters on licensing terms of relevant software. And as ever, we attempt to respond promptly to queries from the public as they arise.

Open Doors: Open Doors is close to announcing the very exciting terms of a Zine Preservation project: a partnership between OTW and a major university library. Stay tuned for details!

Translation: We've began the translation of the new and very cool content on the OTW site concerning vidding and vidding history. Older site content is being updated by our different language teams, as we go over each page following the cool graphs created by our fearless leader, lian.

Vidding History: Vidding History is proud to announce the Vidding History Project page, which features links to a Test Suite of Fair Use Vids, the documentary videos about Vidding OTW produced for MIT's New Media Literacy project, a link to the ongoing Oral History project, and links to other press and resources. We'd also like to thank our awesome Webmasters for their help in putting these pages together!

Webmasters: The Webmasters are working closely with Development & Membership to prepare for the upcoming membership drive. We recently worked with Vidding History to set up their new project pages, and we’ve been going through the site with a fine-toothed comb to make sure our content is up to date for 2009.

What details would you like to know? You can contact the OTW Communications team using our template at: http://transformativeworks.org/contact/communications.

December 2008 Newsletter, vol. 24

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:14:50 -0800

Welcome to the last issue of the OTW Newsletter for this year! As of December 19, the OTW committees will be taking a brief break over the holidays, then reconvening after the New Year to start back to work, so we thought we'd take a chance to do an end-of-term roundup for the various committees, focusing on what we've done over the past year and a half.

Committee Updates!

Academic Journal Update from Karen Hellekson

The academic journal had a great year! We put out our first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, a peer-reviewed online-only academic journal about fan and media studies, and we released it on time to good buzz.

But we did far more than put out an issue: we had to build it up from scratch. We recruited editorial and production staff, put together our stellar advisory board, found peer reviewers, and worked closely with many authors and their drafts all the way through copyediting and proofreading. On top of that, we had to build the journal's infrastructure: we chose open source software to house the journal and traffic manuscripts through production (OJS), obtained an ISSN number, deposited a printout of the first issue with the Library of Congress, signed up for the DOI program so we could make the URLs persist, and figured out how to get the journal into indexes so people can become aware of it.

We're currently at the tail end of obtaining content for No. 2, a special Games issue guest edited by Rebecca Carlson, which will go into production in January for release on March 15, 2009. It looks to be pretty fabulous and we are very excited about it. We recruited some new proofreaders for the production team and some new editorial staff for the Review and Symposium sections. We want to create an Interview team, so if anyone is interested, please contact us! Journalists are especially encouraged to apply.

Putting all these together with all-volunteer labor that requires some pretty serious specialties in arcane areas. We have academics, students, teachers, librarians, copyeditors, production editors, HTML wizards, and proofreaders on the team, and we're delighted to be able to provide useful on-the-job training about putting a journal out to so many people. It's amazing how many steps there are to putting out a peer- and editorially reviewed journal. We remain excited about the mission of bridging fans and academics, and providing a rigorous yet accessible forum for thought-provoking scholarship about fans and fandom .

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from black_samvra

This year AD&T launched the Beta version of the Archive of Our Own. The Archive currently has 179 users who are busy uploading stories and providing valuable feedback on what works well and what doesn't.

This is an incredible coordination effort between volunteers designing the Archive, writing the code, testing the new code and associated fixes, deploying the code to our servers (our servers!), Beta testing the Archive, coordinating the feedback and all of the tasks that make the project possible.

Thank you to all the wonderful people who have given their time, knowledge and enthusiasm! We look forward to achieving more in the New Year.

Board Update from naominovik

It's hard to even know where to begin. The summaries from the individual committees describe better than anything I can say about how much we accomplished, and how hard everyone has worked.

We on the Board have learned a whole lot, mostly about how the fannish community is even more awesome than we had realized. In the space of a year (and a piece, but who's counting!), we've seen the volunteers in this organization build an archive and a wiki and a website, put out the first issue of a spectacular new academic journal, begin the work of preserving fannish projects and history, and create relationships with other organizations and work with them towards protecting the rights of fan creators.

And together we've built this organization itself: an official nonprofit corporation, run by volunteers, accountable to its members, funded by their donations and not by advertising. An organization that will keep chugging away long after all of our founding Board members have stepped down, and that provides an infrastructure we ourselves own and control for the projects we have already begun and may add on in the future.

It's been a long hard road and an amazing one. I especially want to add our thanks to our two retiring Board members, Cathy Cupitt and Misha Tepper, and to the two new Board members stepping up in their place, Rachel Barenblat and Sheila Lane, and to all the volunteers who have seen this long first term of the organization to its end, and to all those who are signing on for another or coming on board now.

We have a lot of plans and ideas for making our next term even better, for strengthening the organization, improving our communication both within the org and with our members and the wider world, and advancing all our projects, and we can't wait to start in on our new term. After we have all slept for a week. *g*

Community Relations Update from femmequixotic

Over the past seventeen months Community Relations has been busy working with the Board and the other OTW committees to make sure you know what's been going on behind the scenes here! Through our twice-monthly newsletter and posts on the various journaling services, the OTW blog, Twitter, and emails, our goal has been to keep fandom up-to-date with the progress of our projects and to provide answers to your questions to the best of our ability. We've designed flyers and bookmarks that we've handed out at various cons attended by OTW members, run a few panels at those events to give con-goers a chance to discuss the organization in person, and even thrown an online con to celebrate the OTW and its goals. We've appreciated all the comments and debate and suggestions we've received from fandom over the course of this first year, and we hope you continue to throw ideas our way in the coming year!

Content Policy Update from Rebecca Tushnet

The Content Policy committee worked all year, with the help of volunteer focus groups and commenters, to develop human-readable and fair terms of service for the Archive of Our Own, along with a useful FAQ. We received fabulous, thoughtful suggestions, and had a lot of debates that clarified what we want the Archive to do. Now that the Archive is in beta, we are working on some of the more exotic policies, (fannish next of kin, for example). We continue to welcome feedback on the terms of service, and in the new year we anticipate developing more detailed internal policies for enforcing the terms of service.

Development and Membership Update from ignazwisdom

We're very happy with all the work we did in the last year: building the OTW's donation protocols from scratch, defining and distinguishing between members and donors, creating policies for corporate gifts and third-party fundraisers, establishing a monthly giving program and an Amazon widget, and running two major fundraising drives, which brought in over $13,000 and 500 OTW members in more than 15 different countries. It's been a great first year, and we're looking forward to Year 2!

Elections Update from cordelia_v

Elections worked hard this year to create a clear set of policies and guidelines that will result in a fair, transparent, and democratic process for choosing new Board members. We wrote an FAQ (which you can find on the organization's website) that described how the elections process would work, and identified an outside polling vendor who could ensure a technically smooth, reliable, and secret online voting process for our voters, which would allow them to cast votes while preserving their anonymity. We made sure that our proposed policies were seen and commented on by other committees who were involved in elections, as well as the staff as a whole, before revising them for Board approval. We recruited candidates for the Board elections, although in the end only two did declare a candidacy, so no contested election was necessary. We hosted two public chats for members and staff to get to know the new Board members: we're confident that they're going to provide new ideas and energy for the Board in the term to come.

Financial Update from sanders

In the past year, the sharks of FinCom have faired better than Wall Street. We know where every single penny of the generous donations from OTW members have been spent because we've paid the bills, balanced against the budget, filed tax form after tax form (and shook our fins at the IRS website in much frustration), ensured compliance with our state of incorporation and federal 501(c)3 regulations. We've also recruited a volunteer accountant to oversee the tax filing for 2008 and had one of our, Ms. Sheila Lane, elected to the OTW board. At the moment, we're working hard to survive the holiday crunch, finish those last minute gift purchases and fic exchange projects, and looking forward to 2009.

Legal Update from Rebecca Tushnet

The legal committee is generally responsible for any legal issues that come up. As we have hoped, it’s been a quiet year. The most prominent issue coming up is likely the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s request to the Copyright Office for an exemption from the DMCA for noncommercial clips from DVDs. For an explanation of the request, and why it’s important, see the EFF’s announcement. You can also read the request itself here. We plan to file reply comments in support of the request early next year. We would love to talk to any vidders who have questions or are interested in the process.

Open Doors

No update at this time.

Public Relations Update from jacquez

The Public Relations committee had a year of ups and downs! We worked hard on developing structure and content for multiple versions of the website, and then transitioned responsibility over to the Web committee. We developed and finalized the organization's key messages, trained board members in dealing with the media, fielded lots of interview requests, and created promotional materials for the OTW. On a sadder note, we had some PR volunteers who had to leave us for personal reasons, and we have missed their input. As the new year arrives, we are looking forward to closing out the PR committee and seeing what the new Communications committee will bring to the table.

Systems

No update at this time.

Translations Update from logovo

Wow, what a great first year at Translation! Our awesome volunteers translated several documents, such as the membership drive, elections FAQs, and tested out and worked with the translating interfaces of the OTW site and the Archive. In 2009 we look forward to even more languages joining those currently represented!

Volunteers and Recruiting from kellyannbessa

It's been a very long and busy term for Volunteers & Recruiting, and we are looking forward to the break! Over the last 18 months, we've put over 600 people in our volunteers database, moved nearly 200 staffers and volunteers through the Org, and searched for people to fill dozens of different positions on various committees and projects. We've also set up induction documents, created reference materials, and drafted guidelines and procedures for everything from adding a single volunteer to creating an entire committee.

We thank you all for the fabulous response to our calls for help, and your patience when serving as guinea pigs as we created and tested new procedures. See you in 2009!

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

The Webmasters committee formed in April and had a busy summer learning the ins and outs of Drupal (an open-source content management system) and building the new OTW website. We launched the site on October 1 complete with a shiny new blog, multilingual content (nine languages and counting), and improved back-end processes to help committees add and update content. Since the launch, we’ve been maintaining the site, writing documentation, and researching ways to offer new features as requests arise from our fellow committees.

Wiki Update from angstslashhope

Mid-December marks the 1 year anniversary of the Wiki Committee's formation! In a year we have achieved a lot. Much of the year was spent developing a robust set of policies to support and guide the wiki, though of course our most exciting moment was Fanlore going live in September.

Since then Fanlore has come forward in leaps and bounds - we have around 500 registered users who have created almost 2000 articles and carried out over 23,000 edits! In the past few months since we soft launched, while all this has been occuring, we've had the opportunity to test the policies in action, recruit a team of dedicated Gardeners and make more developments according to user needs.

We're very much looking forward to the steady growth of Fanlore in years to come, and would like to thank all the enthusiastic (and often quite usefully challenging!) fans for making our soft launch such a success.

Thanks for all your support this year! We hope 2009 is just as productive as the last!

--femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

December 2008 Newsletter, vol. 23

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:55:22 -0800

Welcome to the first December issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Committee Updates!

Academic Journal Update from mafaldastasi

The Academic Journal team is busily reviewing contributions received for issue two (March 2009).

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from black_samvra

AD&T are polishing the Translation interface, fixing bugs and generally nudging the Archive along the road to perfection.

Board Update from kellyannbessa

The current Board had our first meeting with the two incoming Board members, and made some headway on our plans for 2009. It's great having them with us, and can't wait to put them to work!

Community Relations Update from femmequixotic

Community Relations is preparing for the committee changeover and setting things in order for the new Communications team, in addition to keeping up with fannish inquiries and suggestions via email.

Content Policy Update from ainsley

Content Policy has on its editing hat at the moment! We're revising various bits and bobs so that the Archive continues to have the best possible ToS and assorted policies.

Development and Membership Update from ignazwisdom

We now have a draft of our fundraising plans for the next year, which will shortly be presented to the Board for their input. Meanwhile, it's not too late to donate in 2008!

Elections Update from ellen_fremedon

Elections is preparing for the committee switchover.

Financial

No update at this time.

Legal Update from killalla

The Legal Committee continues its current projects, along with advice and support to other committees. We also aim to respond as promptly as we can to queries from members and the public as they arise.

Open Doors

No update at this time.

Public Relations Update from jacquez

The Public Relations committee continues to prep for the upcoming transition, as well as handling our regular duties. We have been working with a volunteer designer and hope to have some fresh new materials soon!

Systems

No update at this time.

Translations Update from logovo

Translation is currently testing out the Archive and looking for bugs in the latest drupal update to the OTW site.

Volunteers and Recruiting from kellyannbessa

Volunteers has been adding translation and coding volunteers to the Org by the bucketful. If you are interested in any of our projects or committees, please let us know.

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

We are continuing to work on website documentation and on researching options for donation and membership processing. We are also working with the Translation Committee to implement Brazilian Portuguese content on the website.

Wiki Update from angstslashhope

The Wiki Committee is light on activity as we take a much-needed rest, so no updates at this time.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

--femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

November 2008 Newsletter, vol. 22

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:00:52 -0800

Welcome to the second November issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Academic Journal Update from mafaldastasi

The TWC academic journal has added Rebecca Lucy Busker to the Symposium team. Welcome, Lucy!

November 15th marked the deadline to submit contributions for the second issue of the TWC academic journal, on the theme of gaming. The TWC team is now busy going through the editorial process; issue two will be out by March 2009.

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from black_samvra

The war of human versus machine continues... AD&T are in the middle of a battle against spambots whose initial battering attack did not crash the Beta Archive (Yay!) We are also working our way through a bunch of bug fixes, getting the Translation interface ready and generally being busy.

Board Update from kellyannbessa

The Board continues to work on the transition to our second term. Following a break for the American Thanksgiving holiday, we will be meeting with our two new Board members to discuss 2009!

Community Relations Update from ciderpress

ComRel has been assisting Elections, fielding questions from the internets, and documenting for the transition to a second term and the upcoming merger with PR to form an all new Communications team!

Content Policy Update from ainsley

We are still soliciting feedback on the Assorted Policies and FAQ we posted two weeks ago. This portion of the ToS includes detail on fannish next-of-kin, orphaning, and Open Doors, as well as a couple of other Archive features. Go forth and inspect!

Development and Membership Update from ignazwisdom

DevMem update from Ignaz: Our last donation drive was in October, and after adding everything up, we made $2338 in donations and welcomed 31 new OTW members. We really appreciate the support we received, especially with everyone contributing to many important causes that month. (I hear there were some elections in a few different places? Who knew!) We also debuted our Amazon.com widget, as well as our new option for recurring donations, and we would like to thank everyone who signed up to give a little bit to the OTW automatically each month. If you are interested in recurring donations, please visit the How You Can Help section of the OTW website.

Elections Update from ellen_fremedon

Elections has been working to codify for next year's committee members all our plans and policies for running a contested election. Institutional memory FTW!

Financials from sandersyager

The sharks of FinCom are continuing to work on next year's budget and making sure the bills are paid.

Legal Update from killalla

The Legal Committee continues review of the organization bylaws and the related sections of the FAQ with regard to elections procedure. And as ever, we provide advice and support to other committees as needed, in addition to responding to queries from members and the public as they arise.

Open Doors Update from Francesca Coppa

Open Doors is in conversation with various university and research libraries in the hopes of finding a partner for a future zine archive.

Public Relations Update from jacquez

The PR committee continues to prepare for the new Communications committee merger. We are also helping field interview requests and working with a designer on some new materials for the organization!

Systems

No update at this time

Translations Update from logovo

One word: Archive! This week we begin poking around the translation features of the test archive.

Vidding History Project Update from Francesca Coppa

The Vidding History project is brainstorming its plans for 2009, which include not only a project page for the MIT/NML vids about vidding produced by OTW but also a home for the Oral History project and...who knows, maybe, just maybe a vid archive. Stay tuned!

Volunteers and Recruiting from kellyannbessa

Volunteers & Recruiting has added a new member, ainsley, who has been with the Org for a while now, working on the Content committee. We're happy to have her join us for the next term a little early so she can help us with the transition. Welcome, ainsley!

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

We continue to work on our website documentation project. We are also working with the Development & Membership committee to research options for improving donation and membership processing.

Wiki Update from angstslashhope

The Wiki Committee continues to work on the population of Fanlore, as well as soliciting feedback from users on developments and engaging in discussions between users on Talk pages throughout the wiki. We've also set up our Gardeners mailing list, which is trundling along happily.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

--femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

November 2008 Newsletter, vol. 21

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:41:37 -0800

Welcome to the first November issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

News: Vidding History Project

The OTW is pleased to announce the release of a series of six short documentaries on vidding made by Francesca Coppa and Laura Shapiro and produced by OTW for MIT's New Media Literacy project. These are part of a larger group of documentaries on remix culture , and the whole series is aimed at middle and high schoolers (so are very introductory to the art of vidding.) You can see these documentaries online here, and the OTW will also be hosting them as part of our new Vidding History project (you'll be hearing more about this in OTW's second year: if anyone wants to work on one of the OTW's vidding projects, please contact the Volunteers committee.)

Committee Updates

Academic Journal Update from mafaldastasi

The TWC academic journal has added Veruska Sabucco to the Review team. Welcome, Veruska!

TWC staff member Julie Levin Russo is co-hosting a HASTAC forum discussion (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). The discussion’s theme is Online Academic Publishing, Open Access and Copyright issues; the forum will remain active through November 17. You're invited to join the conversation at http://www.hastac.org, or simply to read it here.

Check out Julie’s video introduction!

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from black_samvra

AD&T are having a bit of a break right now. We have also added over half of the people who gave feedback (that we have emails for) and nothing has melted (except some Coder brains).

Board Update from kellyannbessa

The Board has been on a short, impromptu break due to so many of us being out of town or fighting off pestilence (or, in a few cases, both). Back to work this week!

Community Relations Update from femmequixotic

ComRel has been assisting Elections, helping update FAQs, fielding questions from the internets, and documenting for the transition to a second term and the upcoming merger with PR to form an all new Communications team!

Content Policy Update from ainsley

Content Policy has posted the draft version of the remaining portion of the Archive's ToS and its additional policies at here. Please read and let us know what you think!

Development and Membership Update from ignazwisdom

DevMem continues to meet weekly and is currently in the process of drafting a list of our technical requests for fundraising and donation tracking in 2009.

Elections Update from ellen_fremedon

Check your inboxes! Elections has sent members a letter about the Board changeover. We'll be inviting members to our chats with Board candidates on November 11 and 16; see the email for the chatroom URL.

Financials from sandersyager

The sharks of FinCom have been swimming along through the political waters of not one but two elections. Here in the US, our members have blogging in support of their candidates, walking door to door to talk to voters, and making calls to encourage people to get out and vote. In addition to fulfilling our civic duties, we have been quietly supporting the recent OTW membership drive and preparing for our role in the OTW elections.

Legal Update from killalla

The Legal Committee continues to provide advice and support to other Committees as needed. Currently, we are reviewing the organization bylaws and the related sections of the FAQ in the context of the OTW election. And as ever, we attempt to respond promptly to queries from the public as they arise.

Open Doors Update from Francesca Coppa

The Open Doors project is currently in the process of contacting research libraries to discuss the possibility of a zine preservation project.

Public Relations Update from jacquez

The PR team is working with a volunteer graphic designer on ads for a virtual season, among other things. We continue to prepare for the transition to the new unified Communications team.

Systems

No update at this time.

Translations Update from logovo

We've started the translation of donation forms, following the lead of our fearless leader lian, who has already tackled the task in German. We've welcomed new volunteers, although we're always on the look out for new people. On the OTW page front, we're still working on getting Portuguese language uploaded.

Volunteers and Recruiting from kellyannbessa

Volunteers has been busy sending acknowledgments to everyone who replied to our Willing to Serve post. If you volunteered for a position and did not receive a confirmation email, please contact us.

While the official recruiting period is over, we happily accept volunteers at any time. If you are interested in any of our committees or projects, send us your info via our contact form.

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

It’s been a relatively quiet two weeks. We have upgraded our website software and continue to work on our website documentation project.

Wiki Update from angstslashhope

Fanlore continues to grow, as meanwhile the Wikimittee busily monitor changes, provide assistance and nut out issues.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

--femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, and svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

October 2008 Newsletter, vol. 20

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:23:17 -0700

Welcome to the second October issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Academic Journal Update from Mafalda Stasi

The academic journal team is writing a FAQ for the OTW Web site.

Submissions are arriving for the academic journal's second issue and are going through blind peer review. The editorial team is actively soliciting content.

The academic journal wrote up job descriptions to be posted for some more production personnel to augment those currently on board, including HTML layout and proofreaders. We are also looking for three people to comprise an Interview team, to solicit interviewers and interviewees. These jobs are being posted through OTW's usual channels.

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from Black Samvara

We're all limp with relief at the reception of the Beta Archive and doing some gentle tidying up of existing code before we launch into our next round of new functionality.

We're also cautiously adding new users from the pool of fabulous people who gave feedback *adopts as Beta testers* and watching the server to see if it melts!

Board Update from KellyAnn Bessa

The Board is breathing a sigh of relief that so many things are finally out the door and launched, and making plans for the transition to our second term.

Community Relations Update from shrift

ComRel has been assisting DevMem and Elections, helping update FAQs, fielding questions from the internets (as always!), and documenting for the transition to a second term and the upcoming merger with PR to form an all new Communications team!

Content Policy Update from ainsley

Content Policy will be releasing some additional policy drafts within the week, so keep your eyes open!

Development and Membership Update from Ignaz

We recently wrapped up our second official donation/membership drive, and now we're in the process of thanking those donors and evaluating the drive so we know what to do (and what not to do) next time. We were thrilled by the number of people who were able to get employer-matching donations for us. Thank you to everyone who contributed! In other news, we just launched a widget that will allow people to easily shop on Amazon (.com, .ca, and .co.uk) using the OTW's referral code, which means the org gets a tiny donation with everything you purchase. Check it out!

Elections Update from Ellen Fremedon

The extended period to declare candidacy for the Board has now ended. Elections will be sending a letter about the outcome to all members soon.

Financials Update

No update at this time.

Legal Update

No update at this time.

Open Doors Update

No update at this time.

Public Relations Update from Laura

The Public Relations committee is very excited about the upcoming merger with ComRel, forming a new Communications team! We've been talking to ComRel and sorting through our files and documents, to make sure the new committee will have everything it needs.

Systems Update

No update at this time.

Translations Update from logovo

We're in the process of adding the Portuguese translation to the website and fine tunning all translations. After the website and election documents, our attention now turns towards the Archive itself. We're on standby, as the kinks get worked out, but totally excited about the future, where Archive Of Our Own will be going international.

Volunteers and Recruiting from KellyAnn Bessa

Volunteers is currently looking for people interested in being on a committee during our second term.

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

The Webmasters recently worked with DevMem to polish the donation and membership page in preparation for the fund drive. We are also working with Systems to set up a request tracking system for website updates. Our website documentation project is ongoing.

Wiki Update from ana

Fanlore launched with a big splash, and the site now boasts more than 1300 articles created by the active portion of over 350 users; two numbers that we hope will continue to grow. We're working to make sure the site and its policies reflect the needs of our users and visitors, and we're grateful to all those helping us refine Fanlore during this beta period.

For a look at some of the articles which are developing nicely, check out, for example, http://Fanlore.org/wiki/Stargate_Atlantis or http://fanlore.org/wiki/Popslash. While you're there, feel free to explore... And if you have not joined us already, please consider doing so! We'll be happy to welcome you.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know at our contact page!

–Femme, Beth, Ciderpress, Mira, shrift, Madelyn
Community Relations Committee

October 2008 Newsletter, vol. 19

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:06:21 -0700

Welcome to the first October issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Academic Journal Update from mafaldastasi

No. 1 of Transformative Works and Cultures, the academic journal, which came out on September 15, 2008, is being extremely well received. Here are some links where TWC gets mentioned:

- http://www.ohindustry.com/2008/09/alotr-in-journal-of-transformative.html

- Jonathan Gray’s Extratextuals Blog, September 17, 2008:
http://www.extratextual.tv/2008/09/journal-births-and-blog-birthdays/

- Henry Jenkins’s blog, September 19, 2008:
http://henryjenkins.org/2008/09/aca-fen_raise_their_banners_hi.html

- Nancy Baym’s blog, September 25, 2008:
http://www.onlinefandom.com/archives/first-issue-of-transformative-works...

No. 2, which will be released on March 15, 2009, released its call for papers. This special issue will focus on Games. The TWC editorial team is actively looking for submissions.

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from black_samvra

AD&T are working on Tag Wrangling right now: the tags like ‘Fandom,’ ‘Character,’ and ‘Pairing’ that rename themselves, merge and move around – that’s our Beta tag wranglers hard at work! We’re also planning the next wave of new functionality and working through the awesome feedback you gave us.

We're planning on putting out updates to the archive software on a weekly basis, so look for bugfixes and new features to roll out in a batch. Our first one will most likely be this Friday.

Board Update from kellyannbessa

The Board continues to focus on the newly launched projects, and also the rapidly approaching election.

Community Relations Update from femmequixotic

Community Relations continues to help Elections with the upcoming elections process, as well as get the word out about the beta version of the archive and the soft launches of both the website and Fanlore.

Content Policy Update from ainsley

Content Policy continues to do what it does best: writing policy with which we hope people will be content--more of which will be unveiled very soon!

Development and Membership Update from ignazwisdom

We're gearing up for our big donations drive, which is starting very, VERY soon! You can donate to the OTW at any time, but next week we're going to making a push for contributions, including new memberships. As a reminder, if you want to participate in the OTW Board election next month, you must have paid your annual membership dues of US $10 by October 19.

Elections Update from eponis

The first deadline for candidacy for the Board came and went, and two members declared their candidacy, as many as the number of seats opening up on the Board. As detailed in our FAQ, this means that the deadline was extended a further two weeks, and this week is the final opportunity to declare candidacy. Once we have a final count, we look forward to announcing the candidates and, if necessary, gearing up for an election. Even if we don't end up holding a contested election, we will still publicize details about the candidates and hold a public chat with them, so our membership can get to know the new Board members!

Financials from sandersyager

Due to the failing economy, FinCom is placing our campaign of shark references on hold for this newsletter. What we have instead is a brand spanking new volunteer, Sanacrow who has come on board as our official OTW accountant, taking over duties previously shared between the wonderful Susan and Celli. Sanacrow has joined us just in time to continue work on the 2009 budget and take part in last round of triumphant FinCom "dancing" over having official 501(c)3 status for OTW. By dancing we, of course, mean studying spreadsheets and discussing the season premieres, reaffirming that one can be a shark *and* a fangirl.

Legal Update from killalla

Recently, the Legal Committee has been discussing and advising on licensing options for the archive software, while continuing to support other committees with diverse matters. And as always, we try to respond promptly to queries from members of the public as they arise.

Open Doors Update from Francesca Coppa

Open Doors is continuing to work with ADT on an "import"/"hoover" feature for older stories and is also researching libraries to house fannish artifacts of various kinds.

Public Relations Update from jacquez

After prepping like mad in case the press noticed our soft launches, the Public Relations Committee took a short break. Next, we'll be back to working on our strategic direction for the upcoming year!

Systems

No update at this time.

Translations Update from logovo

We're celebrating seeing all our hard work up on the OTW page! Plus, additional languages are still pending beta and upload.

On the Elections front, we've finished up and uploaded Spanish and German translations of the Elections FAQ and timeline, and we're shooting for having other languages done this week, as volunteer time allows.

Also, other committees have work heading our way (*waves to Elections*) so we're looking forward to getting our hands on the next project.

Volunteers and Recruiting from kellyannbessa

Volunteers is doing a lot of work in preparation for the organization's upcoming second term.

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

The new website officially launched on October 1! (See our welcome post for details.) Thank you to everyone who has sent us feedback; it is greatly appreciated.

At the moment we’re getting settled into our new maintenance rotation and continuing to document technical info and procedures. Since so many OTW projects have launched recently and information about them is changing quickly, we are also reaching out to our fellow committees to encourage them to check their website content and make any necessary updates.

Wiki Update from angstslashhope

The Wiki Committee is proud to announce the soft launch of the Fanlore wiki: since last week the wiki is open for a its beta phase, which means we're still testing how everything works in practice as well as responding to queries, suggestions and general feedback. In the process, Fanlore is growing rapidly as contributors add content and their practices are formed, while we alter and develop structures and supporting material as needed. It's an exciting time and we've been thoroughly swept off our feet!

To give you an idea, here are a few fun numbers. Since the soft launch last Monday, we have seen
- About 100 new articles per day;
- Approaching 10,000 edits altogether;
- By over 300 registered editors.

Discussion pages are lively, as editors get their hands dirty on the tricky issues that come hand-in-hand with the early days of a project such as this, and the Wiki Committee is all hands on deck as we keep up with it all. We've also set up a Fanlore chat room to talk with contributors who seek assistance, inspiration or just company in real time. The room is open whenever any member of the Committee is available, and a notice on the front page of the wiki indicates whether it's open or closed at any given time. Don't hesitate to come in if you see the light!

Now let's look forward: we are compiling, prioritizing and gradually tackling issues and bugs as they occur, but obviously, there's only so much a little committee can do! So, following our grand plan, we will in the near future gather together a team of gardeners to help us keep track of all the edits and assist with wiki basics, and we will set them loose upon Fanlore to roam and help you. If you're interested in becoming a gardener, you can leave your name on the Gardeners page: we might not answer right away but we take every name under consideration, of course. In the meantime, gardener-in-waiting or not, do not hesitate to jump in and start contributing! We look forward to seeing you there.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

–femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Edited Financial blurb at committee's request to correct the accountant's name.

September 2008 Newsletter, vol. 17

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:29:46 -0700

Welcome to the first September issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Academic Journal Update from mafaldastasi

The Academic Journal is getting ready for its first issue, September 2008!

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from black_samvra

AD&T are preparing for Beta testing of the Archive and doing a lot of tweaking and beautifying (it's a word!). This is a 'house' thing and purely internal but keep your eyes open for more details in the next update!

The Archive front end (the bit people actually see) is coming together and starting to look really good. Our Design, Code, Test teams are putting in an incredible amount of work while radiating vibrant, if slightly insane, enthusiasm.

Board Update from kellyannbessa

The Board continues to work with various committees to provide guidance and keep projects on track as the new website, the wiki , the archive, and the journal move forward.

Community Relations Update from femmequixotic

Community Relations has started to help Elections with preparatory plans for the upcoming election! We're also anticipating the launches of the archive, journal, wiki, and website 2.0 and will be continuing our Spotlight On... series.

Content Policy Update from ainsley

We've finished drafting the policies for additional features the Archive will offer, and are looking forward to receiving feedback on them. They'll be posted when the new version of the website goes up, so that we can host the discussion there rather than LJ.

Development and Membership Update from ignazwisdom

We're keeping very busy over here, consulting with our merchandise researcher in hopes of opening an OTW store soon and doing what we can to support other committees as we approach our first elections, the launch of Website 2.0, and the launch of the beta versions of Fanlore and the Archive.

Elections Update from eponis

Elections is revving up for the upcoming Board election in November. We'll shortly be announcing a detailed Elections FAQ and timeline for 2008's election season. Our committee members are hard at work preparing for voter and candidate rosters, ironing out details with our external polling service, and planning our helpdesk service for the election itself. We'll soon focus on recruiting candidates and publicizing how to vote, in order to get the fullest participation possible!

Financials

No update at this time.

Legal Update from killalla

The Legal Committee continues to provide support to other committees, reviewing further Terms and Conditions and related policies, as well as advising on guidelines and other drafting matters. As ever, we attempt to respond promptly to queries from the public as they arise, as well as work to make relevant material available on the website.

Open Doors Update from Francesca Coppa

Open Doors is working closely with ADT on the Archive. We are also working on plans to reach out to current archivists and maintainers of fanfiction collections once the archive is opened. We're also beginning to think broadly about the physical and digital preservation of early fannish artifacts like print zines, slides, and videocassettes.

Public Relations Update from jacquez

PR continues to work on updating the key messages, and developing resources for our press kit (both hardcopy and electronic).

Systems

No update at this time.

Translations Update from logovo

After uploading translations of the new OTW website in five languages, we're presently coordinating with our volunteers for uploading three additional languages. Bahasa Indonesia, Nederlands and Português!

Also, other committees have work heading our way (*waves to Elections*) so we're looking forward to getting our hands on the next project.

Volunteers and Recruiting from kellyannbessa

Volunteers has been busy with several projects related to the upcoming election. Additionally, we are looking for some graphics for OTW swag, and have extended the search for Systems committee members.

Webmasters Update from juniperphoenix

The Board has reviewed the draft of Website 2.0, and we are making last-minute tweaks to prepare for launch.

Wiki Update from angstslashhope

The Wiki Committee are putting the last finishing touches to Fanlore interface and policy in preparation for imminent soft launch.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

–femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

August 2008 Newsletter, vol. 16

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:10:52 -0700

Welcome to the August issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Academic Journal Update from Mafalda Stasi

The Academic Journal has been preparing documentation for copyedit and layout. The copyediting team members have received editing assignments. The journal is on track for its first issue in September 2008.

The editorial teams are thinking about content for No. 2, which will come out in March 2009.

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from Black Samvara

AD&T are working on Browse fanworks (what's new/interesting/popular) and Subscriptions (tell me when so-and-so updates their WIP/posts a new story/updates a series/etc.). We've been working with our beautiful front end coding team to make the archive user friendly and I've been posting random Aussie bush poems to the Test Archive and then searching for them because watching the search results popping up fills me with glee.

Board Update From KellyAnn Bessa

Having survived VividCon, we've been discussing elections, internal reference materials, and the Org's schedule for next year.

Community Relations Update from Beth H

Courtesy of the HP con Terminus, 4/6 of ComRel was able to get together on our usual meeting night and pretend to be discussing committee business. No formal OTW presentation was made at the con, but Femme and I did find occasion to whisper "...I hear you're in the market for a multi-fandom archive" to numerous friends and acquaintances.

In other news, Henry Jenkins latest blog entry ("How Fan Fiction Can Teach Us a New Way to Read Moby-Dick (Part Two)") discusses the OTW in the "' Transformative Work' of Fan Culture" section

Content Policy Update from Ainsley

The Content Policy committee has been preparing the draft of the Archive's additional policies, which will soon be ready for public comment. Additionally, we've continued with the edits on the Archive's ToS based on that set of public comments.

Development and Membership Update from Ignaz

We recently welcomed a new researcher, Kahtya, to our team, and now we're moving forward with plans for our next donation/membership drive, in conjunction with producing some limited-edition OTW merchandise. We continue to meet weekly to work on these and other projects. You can still join or donate to the OTW at any time!

Elections Update from Ellen Fremedon

No update at this time.

Financial Update from sandersyager

In the wake of this summer's Shark Week, FinCom has been swimming along, slowly but surely navigating the waters of filing OTW's first 990, hunting for a volunteer accountant, and making plans toward an interim report on expenses and income so far in 2008. Cookies have been shared, cons have been visited, jobs and real life have threatened to hook each of our faithful financial sharks, but we're back together and ready to sink our teeth into the task of preparing the 2009 budget and coming up with more aquatic puns for the newsletter.

Legal Update from Killalla

The Legal Committee continues to support other committees with diverse matters, from drafting confidentiality statements to advice on potential legal issues. We also aim to respond promptly to queries from members of the public as they arise, and we are working to make relevant material available on the website.

Open Doors

No update at this time.

Public Relations Update from LauraJV

The Public Relations committee is working on updating our communications strategy for the rest of 2008 (and beyond). (*See note at the end of this LJ entry about small revision. )

Systems Update from Jade Lennox

This is going to be the last systems committee update from Jade Lennox because systems is having a personnel change: I will be stepping down as chair, and will be replaced bylongtime committee member Sidra, although I will be sticking around as a committee member for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, systems has been at the beck and call of the website and wiki teams, updating stylesheets, MediaWiki, and Drupal modules as needed.

Translations Update from Lian

Our fabulous translation teams are excited about finishing up the website translation a project we've been diligently working on for a long time now (and we <3 them madly for their dedication!) . Once the website is up and shiny, we will apply ourselves to assisting other committees in making our projects accessible to an international audience.

Volunteers and Recruiting Update from KellyAnn Bessa

We currently have an open job search for the Webmasters committee. They are looking for a PHP guru.

Webmasters Update from zvi

The Webmasters have chosen zvi as our new committee chair. Our previous chair, (Elke), stepped down in early August for personal reasons.

Work on Website 2.0 proceeds apace. We are polishing the look and feel of the site and working with the Translation team to make it truly multilingual.

We are searching for a volunteer PHP coder to work with us on an as-needed basis. Please see the job posting for details.

Wiki Update from Hope

The Wiki Committee are working busily with our beta volunteers to test run policy, hone interface and work on initial population in preparation for Fanlore's soft launch.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

-Femme, Beth H, Ciderpress, Madelyn, Mira, shrift
Community Relations Committee

July 2008 Newsletter, vol. 15

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:54:48 -0700

Welcome to the third July issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month (three times this month), Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Committee Updates!

Academic Journal Update from Mafalda Stasi

The academic journal is preparing to copyedit and lay out the first issue. In addition, paperwork has been initiated for a Digital Object Identifier (DOI, http://www.doi.org/), which will help the journal's article links to persist.

Accessibility, Design, and Technology Update from Black Samvara

AD&T have got basic search working and orphaning up. We've been refining our existing features and working on making our code and tests more efficient. The testers have been giving us a lot of great feedback, and we're looking forward to putting our new html/css coders to work.

Board Update From KellyAnn Bessa

The Board puzzled through spam protection options, and approved flyers for distribution at cons.

Community Relations Update from Beth H

Community Relations has been fielding questions from the fan community and working diligently on our ongoing "Spotlight on..." series (next committee under the spotlight...us!). Two of our number (i.e., Femme and I) will be heading to Chicago next week to attend the HP con Terminus; if you're going to be there too, come over and say hello!

Content Policy Update from ainsley

Since the last newsletter, we've posted the Archive's draft Terms of Service, received much wonderful and useful feedback, took a deep breath, and started revising the drafts (again!) to incorporate that input. Many thanks to everyone who left us comments on the draft!

Development and Membership Update from Ignaz

We've brought on a Swag Researcher to help us ... um, research swag. (Obvious cat is obvious.) We're planning a big donations drive in the (northern hemisphere) fall, so we're gearing up for that by working with other committees and poking at PayPal. As always, you can donate or become an OTW member at any time--just visit the site for details.

Elections Update from Ellen Fremedon

After a nice, relaxing summer vacation, the Elections committee is back, and ready to start putting together our first board election! We're currently getting final commentary from other committees on our FAQ and timeline-- start looking for official announcements next month.

Financial Update from Susan Gibel and Celli

The OTW has successfully filed its first 990 return!

Legal Update from Killalla

The Legal Committee has recently responded to a number of queries from members of the public, on varied matters relating to their rights and obligations. We continue to assist with drafting issues, providing clarification and support to other committees, as well as advice on potential related legal issues.

Open Doors

No update at this time.

Public Relations Update from LauraJV

PR's committee chair, Iphi Genia, has stepped down for personal reasons. For the time being, Cathy Cupitt will be functioning as the PR chair. On deck for PR: revamping our communications plans and developing the media contacts list.

Systems Update from Jade Lennox

Systems is busy coming up with exciting new ways to describe for the newsletter all the operational tasks we do every week. So far we've come up with: We're Wikitastic! Drupalicious! Now part of your completely secure breakfast!.

Translations Update from morganlefae

We're finishing up the translations for the website vocabulary! We're really looking forward to seeing the results!

Volunteers and Recruiting Update from KellyAnn Bessa

Volunteers continues to help the Org with its staffing needs.

Webmasters Update from Zvi

The Webmasters Committee is still hard at work converting the OTW website into Drupal. OTW staff members have received accounts on the test site and are learning how to create and edit content for their committees.

Wiki Update from Hope

The wiki is preparing our software & policies for the first round of closed beta-testing.

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

-Femme, Beth H, Ciderpress, Madelyn, Mira, shrift
Community Relations Committee

Cinema Journal Puts Fandom in the Spotlight

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:23:38 -0700

The Summer, 2009 issue of Cinema Journal features a section on fandom in general and vidding in particular edited by TWC's Kristina Busse and featuring a number of members of TWC's editorial board. (Yes, that's a shot from Lim's "Us" on the cover!) The issue is currently being mailed to subscribers, but eventually will be online at JStor and available through academic search engines in libraries and such.

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism
Gender and the Politics of Fan Production

"Introduction," by Kristina Busse
"A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness," by Francesca Coppa
"A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture," by Karen Hellekson
"Should Fan Fiction Be Free?" by Abigail De Kosnik
"User Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence," by Julie Levin Russo
"Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership," by Alexis Lothian

Edited to add: Not sure for how long this file will be available, but the "In Focus" section can currently be found on the SCMS website here (right-click and save).

TWC No. 3 released!

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:16:01 -0700

The OTW's Academic Journal committee is pleased to announce the release of No. 3 of Transformative Works and Cultures , an online-only open access journal geared to academics, acafans, and fans.

TWC No. 3 has essays in the following fandoms: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Law & Order: SVU, Doctor Who, Lost, and gaming. HP fans might want to read Melissa Tatum's analysis of filk versus wizard rock, complete with sound clips (Melissa L. Tatum, "Identity and Authenticity in the Filking Community") as well as Anne Collins Smith's Symposium essay about wizard rock called "Playing [with] Multiple Roles: Readers, Authors, and Characters in 'Who Is Blaise Zabini?'" Similarly, The Lord of the Rings fans might want to read Robin Anne Reid's review-analysis of the LOTR fan film, "The Hunt for Gollum: Tracking Issues of Fandom Cultures" in conjunction with Emma Dollard’s interview with the fan film's producer, Chris Bouchard. Fans of Law & Order: SVU should definitely check out Julie Levin Russo's "Sex Detectives: Law & Order: SVU's Fans, Critics, and Characters Investigate Lesbian Desire," which centers around the contested queerness of one of SVU's main characters, Olivia Benson.

TWC No. 3 also delivers on TWC's promise to consider "transformative works, broadly conceived"; in addition to fan films, wizard rock, and filk, this issue also features essays on quilting and copyright (Debora J Halbert's "The Labor of Creativity: Women's Work, Quilting, and the Uncommodified Life"), fan wikis (Jason Mittell's "Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia"), and fan fiction archives ("The Web Planet: How the Changing Internet Divided Doctor Who Fan Fiction Writers"). There is also an essay on gaming fandom by Hanna Wirman ("On Productivity and Game Fandom"), which focuses on player productivity in an effort to complicate our understanding of what constitutes fannish behavior. We also review the formation of Dreamwidth, the open-source, fan-owned and run, social network and journal service.

So swing by and browse TWC No. 3! And remember that TWC No. 4, out in Spring 2010, will be a special issue on Supernatural, guest edited by Catherine Tosenberger.

TWC Editor Kristina Busse: Special Guest At WriterCon

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:07:11 -0700

Transformative Works and Cultures editor Kristina Busse was one of the special guests at WriterCon 2009, where she gave several talks, including the keynote, Affect and the Individual Fan:The Role of Genre and Tropes in Writer Creativity and Reader Engagement, and a presentation on "Genderswap and Feminism". Kristina also gave a talk about the OTW for a panel called, "If You Build It, They Will Come: How the Internet Builds Communities Around Fanfic": the full text of this overview is now available online.

TWC Editor Karen Hellekson Talks About Research Ethics on fandomresearch.org

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:22:17 -0700

Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, has a guest post on Fandom Research, a new blog which aims to be "a clearing-house for surveys, questionnaires, theses, dissertations, and other research pertinent to the active field of fandom studies." Karen's post is called, "Fandom research methods," and deals not only with academic standards like those of university or college institutional review boards (IRB) or The Association of Internet Researchers but also about fannish community standards for personal privacy: when its appropriate to quote, whether a LiveJournal or blog post is "public" or not, etc. Aca-fans and other fandom researchers and fanthropologists should check out both the post and this site.

Writercon 2009 - A Q & A with TWC's Kristina Busse

Sat, 02 May 2009 18:17:06 -0700

Kristina Busse, co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet and one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures, was interviewed in a Q & A for the upcoming Writercon 2009, a con dedicated to fannish and original writing. Kristina is going to be one of three special guests at the con, which takes place July 31 through August 2, 2009 in Minneapolis. For more information about Writercon 2009, check out their website or their LiveJournal community. Writercon describes itself as a con "about the writing and the shared love, not shipper politics or the plots of the shows, except as related to the fic. It's about how fan fiction is literature, and it's about showing that it's as worthy as any other genre of writing."

TWC Guest Editor Catherine Tosenberger talks about Supernatural

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:44:23 -0700

Catherine Tosenberger, Guest Editor of a upcoming special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) on Supernatural, was interviewed by Suzette Chan for Sequential Tart, a feminist webzine about the comics industry. Read the interview to find out more about TWC, the OTW, and the epic love story of Sam and Dean.

Special TWC issue "Games as Transformative Works" released!

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:05:03 -0700

The second issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) has just been released! The March 15, 2009, special issue, entitled "Games as Transformative Works," is edited by Rebecca Carlson and combines TWC's general interest in fan works and fan cultures with a focus on games. Anthropology is the issue's dominant disciplinary approach, but literary and cultural studies also frame the discussion. Although several essays address the role of production, the voices of the fans and the gamers themselves remain ever important.

The Praxis articles address many of the issues that surround computer games: editor Rebecca Carlson, for example, studies the complex position of gaming journalists, who are simultaneously fans and advertisers; Casey O'Donnell looks at the ambiguous role of game producers; and Robertson Allen's study of the use of games in Army recruiting similarly complicates the social role of games and their real life effects. Three other Praxis essays focus on particular games and the communities surrounding them: World of Warcraft (Mark Chen), Kingly Quest (Anastasia Marie Salter), and tabletop role-playing game Exalted (Michael Robert Underwood). Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz focus on fan creativity in their introduction to and explanation of chiptunes.

The Symposium section looks back and forward: pieces include Will Brooker's recollection of early computer games of the 1980s and what specific effects these games had on a particular generation; Thien-bao Thuc Phi's powerful analysis and personal response to the depiction of Asians in computer games; and Braxton Soderman's meditation on fan labor and fan activities in various online computer games. Several essays focus directly on fan responses and productions, such as Rebecca Bryant's account of the way players have rejected and circumvented recent Dungeons & Dragons updates; Amanda Odom's look at the sensory experiences of live-action role playing; Joe Bisz's description of player productivity in card collecting; and Julia Beck and Frauke Herrling's provocative suggestion that reads role-playing game characters through the lens of fan fiction criticism.

The issue also features interviews with Paul Marino, cofounder and executive producer of Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS); Doris Rusch, gaming scholar and video game designer; business professor Tony Driscoll; and Diane E. Levin, professor of early childhood education.

Check out the entire Table of Contents here.

The third issue of TWC will feature more general submissions and is scheduled for release on September 15, 2009. No. 4 is slated to be a special issue on the WB television show Supernatural, "Saving People, Hunting Things," guest edited by Catherine Tosenberger, and will appear on March 15, 2010 (call for papers available here). TWC has also just issued a call for papers for a special historical issue, "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," slated for spring 2011, guest edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein (call for papers available here).

Why doesn’t the academic journal provide PDFs of its articles?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:39:21 -0800

Because Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a multimedia journal that publishes screen shots, embeds videos, and uses hyperlinks, the journal must appear online. PDFs are unable to adequately duplicate the interactive experience of the journal.

Further, because TWC copyrights under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License, fans may wish to transform the journal by creating PDFs of content and making it generally available. As long as the document provides the URLs of the original source, and as long as the poster does not charge money, this activity is perfectly acceptable under the terms of the CC license. In fact, TWC encourages such transformative fan activity.

Finally, TWC is bucking the importance the academy places on print media. If we created official PDFs, these documents, not the online versions, would be treated as authoritative merely because of the privilege print is provided in the academic publishing industry—and yet the PDF will always be a second-rate static snapshot of an interactive document.

Why does the academic journal retain copyright, not the author?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:37:20 -0800

The journal retaining copyright is standard in academic journal publishing. Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is thus in line with general practice.

Production editors at presses seeking reprint permission will automatically come to TWC, not the author. Requesting payment for reprints is one way that academic journals make money. However, TWC, because it is associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization, and because we want to retain the spirit of open access, will never ask for money to reprint articles.

Our main reason is a purely practical one: TWC retains copyright to protect its ability to grant reprint permission in case the author disappears.

Further, we are committed to open access. If we released copyright to the author, the author could choose to abrogate that by refusing to grant reprint permission. This is not in line with TWC’s mission and goals, which are focused on the free dissemination of ideas.

What copyright is the academic journal using?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:33:54 -0800

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Anyone is free to reprint or remix, with attribution, anything in TWC without obtaining specific permission, as long as the original publication information is attributed and/or hyperlinked back. This means that anybody can post full text of the articles, with attribution, as long as no money is made. Authors may therefore repost full content to their blog or Web site after TWC has been published. Likewise, random people can repost full text without restriction. As long as they attribute it properly, such duplication is fine.

If people want to make money off the text, perhaps by anthologizing the essay in an edited volume, then they must ask. This includes the author, because once an article appears in TWC, TWC owns the copyright.

TWC grants permission to anyone who requests reprint, regardless of who they are (the author or not), without asking for money. We do this in the spirit of open access. We require that the editors be asked for for-profit reprinting because we will take the responsibility of tracking down and informing the author.

What sorts of things does the academic journal print?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:30:42 -0800

Transformative Works and Cultures prints peer-reviewed academic articles about transformation, broadly conceived, about fan engagement with various sorts of texts, and about fan communities; editorially reviewed meta articles and personal essays; book reviews; and interviews.

How can I submit to the academic journal? Can I contribute even if I am not an academic?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:29:38 -0800

Detailed online submission guidelines are available at the Transformative Works and Cultures website.

We welcome submissions from everyone as long as the contribution complies with Transformative Works and Cultures's focus and scope.

How frequently does the academic journal come out?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:28:22 -0800

Transformative Works and Cultures comes out twice a year, on March 15 and September 15.

What's the purpose behind the journal?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:58:10 -0700

The journal is meant to provide a space for academic analysis of individual transformative works and the larger culture of fandom from which they come, helping to demonstrate the social, educational, and aesthetic value of fandom and fannish works.

A successful journal will also help fans who happen to be interested in engaging in fandom in a more theoretical and academic way to share their scholarship more widely, improving communication between fans and academia, as well as provide a theoretical background for OTW's mission of explaining and preserving fandom and transformative fanworks. The journal will also explain the context of particular works to help establish fanworks as creative art in their own right.

Will you connect fan identities and real life identities in the Fanlore wiki?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:14:07 -0800

No. The Fanlore wiki has an identity protection policy, and the OTW is committed to protecting the privacy of fans, whether they are users of our services or not.

Is the Fanlore wiki only about media fandom?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:11:10 -0800

The broad scope of the wiki is fandoms and transformative fanworks of all kinds, not just the media fandom community and its history. We are looking to host contributions from a diverse range of fans, as they share experiences about the history of their own fannish communities, including but not limited to anime, comics, manga/manhwa, and various RPF fan communities.

What are the Fanlore Terms of Service?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:04:36 -0800

The Fanlore Terms of Service can be found on the Fanlore website. For further information on Fanlore's policies, see its policy page.

What is Fanlore?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:02:59 -0800

Fanlore is a wiki—a multi-authored website—that any fan can contribute to. Our goal is to record both the history and current state of our fan communities—fan works, fan activities, fan terminology, individual fans and fannish-related events. For more information, see the Fanlore website.

CRSS is no longer supported

Mon, 25 May 2009 08:43:49 -0700

You are receiving this content because you are subscribed to a Comments RSS (CRSS) feed for the transformativeworks.org website. Unfortunately, CRSS had problems we were unable to resolve, and we have removed it from the site. To receive notice of comments in the future, please log in to the site and edit your preferences to receive comment notification, or check the box to receive comment notices to a particular News item when leaving a comment yourself.

Thank you from the OTW Webmasters

I created an account on the website. Does that mean I'm a member of the OTW?

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:35:34 -0800

No. Creating a user account on the website enables you to leave signed comments on news posts, upload a user icon, and set your preferred language. There is no charge for creating a website account, just as there is no charge for using any of the OTW's products or services.

Membership confers the right to vote in OTW elections and supports the organization's work financially. To become a member, please fill out our membership form and send in a donation (minimum US$10).

Why would I want to create an account on the website?

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 09:47:25 -0800

Creating an account on transformativeworks.org enables you to leave signed comments on news posts, upload a user icon, and set your preferred language. (An account is not required for commenting on news posts, but we do ask that all comments be signed.)

I created an account on the OTW website. Why can't I log into the Archive of Our Own or Fanlore?

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 09:46:04 -0800

The OTW website (transformativeworks.org), the Archive of Our Own, and the Fanlore wiki are separate projects built on different kinds of software and do not share login information. Creating an account on one of the sites does not give you access to the other two; you must create an account on each site individually. However, you may choose to use the same username on all three services.

What are the transformativeworks.org Terms of Service?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:21:33 -0800

The OTW Website Terms of Service can be found here: http://transformativeworks.org/about/tos.

Website Status Report

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:58:03 -0700

We are working to address a problem some users have experienced with getting 404 errors to pages which clearly exist (like blog links from the RSS feed, or menu items.) The temporary solution is to choose a language from the language switcher (even if it's English) and reload the page.

We are testing a solution now, but please, feel free to report any errors you experience. It is particularly helpful if you let us know

the page you were on before you got the 404 error
the page you were trying to access when you got the 404 error
whether you were logged in to the website or not
whether you had selected a language through the language switcher
whether you have set preferred languages in your browser, and, if so, which languages
your browser and operating system (including version numbers)

Welcome to the new OTW website!

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:08:46 -0700

The Webmasters are pleased to announce the launch of the new website and blog.

http://transformativeworks.org

In addition to a facelift, the website now has several spiffy new features that increase the ease-of-use of the site. The most important of these is the blog, which will be taking over from otw_news as our primary information service. It will also allow all comments to be centralized in one (non-LiveJournal) location hosted by OTW itself.

Features

We’ve been working hard to introduce a number of new features for site visitors, including multilingual options (take a look at the language switcher on the left), a new site-based OTW news blog (you’re reading it), and the ability to comment on this blog, with or without creating a site account (or you can use an OpenID).

Feeds

There are several ways to track updates to the site and blog:

An RSS feed for all blog posts is available.
The on-site Tracker is a way to find updates while using the website.
Finally, there is the Yahoo!Pipe feed, which combines both blog posts and all updates to the website.

How the blog works

The blog will post all the things you’ve seen in the past on otw_news, such as newsletters, calls for volunteers, spotlights on OTW committees, and updates on our projects. This information will be re-posted on our other news services:

You can leave comments on the blog much as you would on the journaling services, by creating your own account or using OpenID, or simply by providing a name and an email address. The blog operates under the Website Terms of Service, which includes this comment policy:

We may maintain one or more blogs on the site that accept comments. We strive for transparency and will generally post comments we receive, including critical comments. However, by submitting a blog comment, you agree that it is our decision whether or not to post it. If we decide, in our sole discretion, that a blog comment is spam or advertising; reveals the personal information of another person; or contains illegal content or hate speech, we may not post that comment, or we may remove it at any time.

What about otw_news?

Not a lot will change. The big difference is that otw_news will become a feed service for the blog – all the same content will be mirrored there, but commenting won’t be turned on. All comments will be centralized on the blog, which will allow fans from different communities who use different blogging or social networking services to engage on equal footing.

Basically, if you’re subscribed to the feed on LiveJournal or a clone, sorry, we don’t monitor any comments there! Come on over to the blog to reach us – the link to our comment page is given below.

Feedback on the new website

We are very excited to finally be sharing all these new features with you, and we hope you enjoy the added functionality the website and blog offer. We know everything may not be perfect yet – so take a look around and tell us what you think! We’d really love to know if you have ideas for improvements or can point out things that work differently than you expected.

The Webmasters.

If you have questions or feedback for the Webmasters, contact us at OTW Webmasters.

Welcome!

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:08:23 -0700

You have probably already noticed the new look of the website—we’ve moved from handwritten HTML to Drupal, an open-source content management system. We know everything may not be perfect yet—so take a look around and tell us what you think! We’d really love to know if you have ideas for improvements or can point out things that work differently than you expected. A complete introduction to the new site is coming soon!

I run an archive I'd like to import/back up to the Archive of Our Own. What do I need to do?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:02:18 -0700

Contact Open Doors for access to the archive importer. Please let us know from the outset if you have special needs — for example, if you'd like us to take over maintenance of the old domain, or if your archive contains multimedia content.

How can I stay up-to-date with the progress of the Archive?

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:20:22 -0700

We're posting regular Archive updates on the OTW blog, answering frequently asked questions and keeping users informed about how the Archive is progressing. The blog is mirrored on Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Insanejournal, and YahooGroups, and posts are linked on Twitter.

We are now also posting on the Archive itself and a link to the most recent post will appear in 'Updates' on the Archive front page.

How can I get an account on the Archive?

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:17:03 -0700

During closed beta, we need to keep user numbers very low. This is because our server capacity is limited and we're coding core features, so things may break at regular intervals! We periodically add a limited number of new users from the pool of people who have left feedback about the design and usability of the Archive: if you're interested in becoming part of our small beta-testing group leave your thoughts about the Archive via the Archive feedback form. (Exception: folks who currently have their fanworks up on GeoCities can contact the Open Doors committee and get an Archive account through the GeoCities Rescue Project.)

We hope to move to open beta in late 2009. At this time we'll be able to welcome lots more users to the Archive; we'll still need to manage the load on our servers, so we'll be using an invitations system. You'll be able to add your name to a queue, and we'll periodically send out invitations to people on that list depending on how many new users the site can take. We'll let people know more information on how this will work when it becomes available.

Is the OTW trying to replace all other archives?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:01:40 -0700

No. In fact, we hope that other fans will use our archive software, which will be open-source and free to use and modify, to build their own archives.

In the Archive of Our Own, we hope to create a multi- fandom archive with great features and fan-friendly policies, which is customizable and scalable, and will last for a very long time. We'd like to be fandom's deposit library, a place where people can back up existing work or projects and have stable links, not the only place where anyone ever posts their work. It's not either/or; it's more/more!

Why is it taking such a long time to make the archive?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:00:13 -0700

Building the kind of archive the OTW envisions is not a simple process. We're not just setting up an archive using existing software, but building new open-source archive software designed around fans' needs, that can be easily maintained and easily reused, and that can handle potentially millions of stories from hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.

This work is being done by a group of volunteers, including a group of trainees learning how to write and maintain code, to help build the fannish community of coders. This is a group of people who can help to maintain the archive software in future. In other words, we're not just building the Archive, we're building the builders.

We have also taken the time to develop comprehensive and fan-friendly policies with as much input from fans as possible; you can see our resulting Terms of Service on the Archive of Our Own.

This is taking a little while to do, but we absolutely believe it's worth the time. You can follow the progress of the Archive's development in our newsletters and our blog. To get involved, contact the Volunteers committee.

Who profits from the Archive Of Our Own? Do users have to pay?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:54:49 -0700

No one, including the OTW as an organization, makes money from the archive or its content; in fact, the opposite is true because the OTW pays to host the archive. Advertising is not shown. Instead, we hold public radio-style pledge drives to ask for support from our users. No donation will ever be required to use the archive or any of its tools.

Why another archive?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:51:58 -0700

Our first goal is to create a new, free, open-source software package to allow fans to host their own robust, full-featured archives, which can support even an archive containing hundreds of thousands of stories and which has the social networking features to enable fans to connect to one another through their work.

Our second goal is to use this software to provide a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfic and other transformative fanworks, where these can be sheltered by the advocacy of the OTW and take advantage of the OTW's work in articulating the case for the legality and social value of these works. Unlike other archives, the Archive of Our Own isn't run by individuals whose interest in fandom may wax and wane, but by a nonprofit organization run by an elected rotating board of committed fans. We hope that this will lead to more permanence and stability than some other archives or services.

Is the Archive open? Where can I find the TOS and FAQ?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:51:18 -0700

The Archive Of Our Own is in beta as of October 2008. We anticipate open beta in October 2009. For information about archive policies, please see the archive Terms of Service and FAQ.

October, 2009 Newsletter (Vol. 33)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:50:29 -0700

Welcome to our October, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

Abuse:

ADT/Archive:

We're also planning for Open Beta, this is currently scheduled for mid November and is dependent on the code changes we need being ready in time :)

We want to run a competition to design the perfect AO3 logo and are looking for volunteers willing to coordinate it.

Board:

The Board has been busy keeping track of general org-wide goings-on.

Communications:

Content Policy:

No update at this time.

Development:

Documentation:

Elections:

Finance Update:

No update at this time.

Journal:

Legal:

Open Doors:

Systems:

No update at this time.

Translations:

No update at this time.

Vidding History:

No report at this time.

Volunteers:

Webmasters:

Congratulations to our own Allison Morris, who will be joining the OTW Board next term! We're all excited for her. <3

Wiki:

No update at this time.

Concerning Fanfiction

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:58:11 -0700

Mercedes Lackey has announced the following on her blog:

News: Concerning Fanfiction:

As you folks already know, my agent, Russel Galen, has in the past been opposed to fanfiction. However, he is also Cory Doctorow's agent now, and Cory is a persuasive little gnome.

As a result of this, I am happy to announce that we are officially permitting fanfiction to be licensed as derivative fiction under the Creative Commons umbrella...

A post-drive thank you!

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:12:07 -0700

Our October donations drive has ended, and all we can say is wow: thank you so much. Bellyrubz for everyone!

We raised a grand total of US$10,573, plus that matching challenge grant of US$5000, for a total drive income of US$15,573. Thanks to you, this is our most successful fund drive yet.

We can't thank you enough for your generosity and your support. Knowing that you're behind us gives us renewed energy to dive into the projects we're working on this year -- and inspires us to aim toward even bigger and better things in Year Three.

If you weren't able to donate this week, never fear. We make a special effort to raise funds twice a year, but you're welcome to donate at any time, whether we're having a formal donations / membership drive or not. And our fabulous membership premiums will continue to be available!

We also welcome contributions of time and energy -- that's what the OTW really runs on, and we really want your skills, talents, time, brainpower, and opinions! If you'd like to get involved with the OTW in the coming year, check out the Willing to Serve post and join our community of volunteers.

Thank you for your support and for being a part of the OTW!

Love,
The Development/Membership Committee

Link Roundup

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:18:34 -0700

A few legal stories that might be of interest to followers of the OTW:

From publicknowledge.org: UGC is More Than Hamsters on a Piano is an essay by Michael Weinberg at publicknowledge.org, talking about the "assumption that the UGC is essentially commercially worthless – it is all first grade ballet recitals, dogs jumping up and down, or kids falling off of skateboards. The real action (and money) is around the "real" content. Since the money will only come from the professional content, the concerns of today’s professional content owners (usually having to do with filtering or kicking people off of networks) tend to dominate the discussion." But Weinberg points out that we are not all sitting around waiting for professionals to come and entertain us, and that today's established studios may not have "the best interests of their future competitors at heart."

From boingboing.net: Meet the 42 lucky people who got to see the secret copyright treaty: Fans should be aware that a number of parties are trying to negotiate an international, anti-copyright treaty "that contains provisions that criminalize non-commercial file-sharing; require net-wide wiretapping for copyright infringement and border-searches of hard-drives and other devices; and disconnection from the Internet for people accused of violating copyright." A lot of people, including publicknowledge.org, BoingBoing, the EFF , and others--are protesting the secretive nature of these negotiations.

From Rachel Maddow: Hey, Rachel Maddow follows BoingBoing: could we love her more? Rachel interviews BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin about the Ralph Lauren photoshop disaster--but gets that the real story was the attempted DMCA intimidation of BoingBoing after the fact, when reprinting the photoshopped image to mock it was a classic case of fair use . Because Boingboing's ISP was in Canada, they didn't have to comply with the DMCA, and Rachel immediately gets what she calls "the deeper part of this story", that "ISPs just immediately cave whenever they're confronted by anything like this, and it sort of hurts the first amendment."

Lastly, our own Rebecca Tushnet caught the story that Mattel has licensed "Barbie Girl". For those not familiar with the case, 12 years ago, Barbie sued the Danish pop band Aqua, claiming trademark and copyright infringement. The claim was dismissed and the song was ruled as protected speech. Now, Mattel has licensed and rewritten the song to promote its new line of Barbie products. If you can't beat 'em...?

Donations drive update!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:56:47 -0700

The OTW's second annual October donations drive is going strong. It's been an amazing week. We've started offering donor premiums for the first time, which has inspired some truly lovely manips. (Also some icons featuring those manips, free to any good home!)

Plus we've received our first-ever anonymous challenge grant -- an anonymous donor is going to match every dollar we raise during the second half of this donations drive, up to US$5000.

And OMG, fandom : we met our match. Thanks to your incredible generosity, we've raised just over US$5000 since we announced the challenge grant a few days ago. We are humbled and delighted by your generosity. And the drive isn't over yet, so if you haven't yet donated during this drive, there's still time to do so! This donations drive ends at midnight UTC on October 19. (What time is that where you live? Find out here: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=19&yea...)

We've raised almost US$8800 so far during this drive. Our last drive broke US$10,000 -- can you help us top that? If you haven't donated yet, please do! Funds donated during this drive will go toward our ongoing colocation and bandwidth costs (the Archive of Our Own will enter Open Beta soon), building up a safety net for the organization so that we always have funds in-hand to do the work we need to do, and funding the amazing projects we hope to add to our roster in 2010. (Plus: now you can opt to receive stickers and/or a mug!)

As a reminder: we're also always looking for volunteers to help with our various projects. Whether or not you're able to donate at this time, you can always write entries for Fanlore, help out our tag wranglers, or join one of our standing committees -- information on that is available in our recent Willing to Serve post.

Thanks for being a part of the OTW!

Willing To Serve

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:53:11 -0700

It's that time again! As the end of the OTW's second term nears, we will soon begin putting together the next round of committees for our third term, which means we are once again in search of people who are willing to serve. We did an amazing amount of work during our second term, and we have a lot of things planned for the next. Many of our current committee members will be returning for a third term, and we are looking for enthusiastic and dedicated people to join them.

In general, most committees have a chat meeting once a week (an hour or two in length), and conduct business between meetings via mailing lists and our project management software, Basecamp. (Online chat meetings are held on Campfire; the account is paid for by the OTW, and all staffers have access to it.) The number of hours a committee position demands on a weekly basis will vary greatly by committee, and also by time of year. Development, for instance, does a great deal of work gearing up for their annual drives; the Journal committee puts out two issues of TWC a year, etc.

We've provided descriptions of the committees and their jobs below. In some instances, a committee is looking for volunteers for specific jobs, in which case they've included that information in their committee description. Please note that, while we're taking volunteers now, we won't begin staffing the committees (except for a few exceptions like Volunteers & Recruiting) until we come back from our break in January.

If you are willing to serve, use our contact form to send us the following information:

Name: (fannish or real life, whichever you feel comfortable using):

Up to three committees you would be willing to serve on or specific position(s) you wish to volunteer for:

Relevant experience, fannish and/or real life:

Even after the official recruiting period for our third term is over, we happily accept volunteers for any and all committees and projects at any time. Please send us your information if you are interested in being part of the OTW!

OTW COMMITTEES

ABUSE
Dedicated to fielding the complaints that come in about content uploaded to the Archive of Our Own. We determine if complaints are about legitimate violations of the Terms of Service, and what to do about them if they are; our major goals are to adhere completely to the TOS, to make our reasoning and processes as clear and transparent as possible, and to keep every individual case that we work with completely confidential. A good Abuse staffer will be able to: regularly attend meetings, be patient in rephrasing explanations, translate from fan-speak to English, make and document decisions, and ask for help when it's needed, be it from the committee, Legal, or Content Policy.

ACCESSIBILITY, DESIGN, & TECHNOLOGY
Handles the design and creation of software and interfaces for most projects of the organization, with emphasis on accessibility to the widest possible group of users. Composed of the AD&T committee itself and several sub-committees including Coders, Testers, and Tag Wranglers.

While technical knowledge is an advantage, it is something we will cheerfully support you acquiring over time. Desired qualities include being organised (we do a lot of mini-projects), technical knowledge (we write code and interact with hardware), software design (we work out what the coders will build), software testing (we confirm if our stuff works), documentation (we document designs, projects, and decisions), communication (we talk to a lot of people), and enthusiasm -- we also take varied combinations of the above and can teach anything except the enthusiasm ;)

We oversee the following subcommittees, which recruit on a rolling basis throughout the year:

Coders: Coders do the actual technical work of building the Archive. We work in Ruby on Rails, XHTML/CSS and Javascript, and we’re always interested in recruiting more coders or people interested in learning to code -- no experience necessary!
Support: The Support Team will be responsible for responding to user questions and problems on the Archive of Our Own. Support will respond to queries filed through the support form on the Archive, and liaise with members of other teams to resolve bugs and provide users with accurate information. Support is not an OTW committee, but a volunteer team that's part of the Archive of Our Own project. We need clear and effective communicators; no technical knowledge required. If you are interested in joining Archive Support, please let us know!
Tag Wranglers: Tag Wranglers work behind the scenes of the Archive of Our Own to organise the tags and make them more usable. To read more about our work, see our News post on tags.
Testers: Testers bang on the Archive to check whether it is working as it should. No particular technical knowledge is required, just a willingness to hunt out bugs!

COMMUNICATIONS
Communications members are responsible for press releases, newsletters, blog posts, media contacts, interviews, and other tasks related to promoting our various projects.

CONTENT
Designs and implements the Terms of Service and other content policies for the Archive of Our Own.

DEVELOPMENT & MEMBERSHIP
The Development & Membership committee is in charge of fundraising and membership-building for the organisation. This committee brainstorms fundraising ideas and then implements them; it's our job to raise the funds that support all of the OTW's various projects, both the visible ones (this is how we bought our first servers!) and the invisible ones (from software to paperclips to domain registration fees). We undertake the stewardship of donors and members and keep ourselves informed about fundraising issues that affect the organisation’s activity.

A good DevMem committee member can make it to our weekly chat meetings, is flexible and focused, and has a sense of humour. We're always looking for people with experience in fundraising tasks like donor-courting and grant writing, but we also welcome those who are new to the world of development. In the coming year we may be looking to add some folks with tech skills, and also some committed grantwriters. DevMem becomes a high-pressure job twice a year when we run our membership and donations drives, but even at high-stress times, we're psyched to be the committee tasked with supporting the work of the OTW. Join us!

DOCUMENTATION
The Documentation committee works with the organisation at large and the individual committees to keep information organised and available on an internal wiki, so that as the organisation's staff changes, things keep moving smoothly ahead. Docs committee members are the sort of people who can't help organising things, and who can see how information fits together in different ways. We're not actively recruiting at the moment, but if grouping things by subject makes as much sense to you as putting them in alphabetical order, and if cross-indexing makes you happy, you may be a good fit for us in the future.

FINANCIAL
The Financial committee keeps track of spending, writes checks, maintains financial records, and develops a budget for the organisation.

JOURNAL
This committee administers Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), an international peer-reviewed twice-yearly academic online journal in the field of media studies. This involves maintaining TWC's open-source journal software (OJS), considering submissions, and working with authors and content as necessary. We also shepherd documents through OJS for peer review, revision, copyedit, and layout.

The committee is currently not recruiting staffers, but we’d love to find volunteers for the following positions:

Layout editor: We currently need two HTML layout editors. They will need to transfer Word documents into an HTML template and upload them via the journal software, OJS. Time commitment is 8-10 hours a week leading up to publication (September 15 and March 15). This adds up to two weeks of work per year in total. The amount of work is variable and we will divide work up according to schedule, but layout artists will probably not tag more than 5 or 8 documents per issue. Working knowledge of HTML/XML and ability to work with code directly in an HTML editor are required. Sensitivity to deadlines and ability to follow up are crucial. [edit 7 Nov. 2009: this position has been filled]
Production editor: The production editor will take over production after the peer review and revision phases, assigning copyeditors, layout editors, and proofreaders and in general shepherding the documents through production. The production editor will consult with the OTW Webmasters on journal software-related tasks, reporting bugs and helping to review and confirm fixes. Time commitment is several hours a week, with extra time needed during the publication push in the month before September 15 and the month before March 15 (the publication dates of the journal). Length of commitment is 1 year. Working knowledge of HTML/XML and prior knowledge or willingness to learn the journal software OJS required. Experience with the publication process or a background in publishing is preferred. Sensitivity to deadlines and ability to follow up are crucial. [edit 11 Nov. 2009: this description has been amended]

LEGAL
This committee advises the Board and various committees on legal matters and liaises with outside legal counsel. Mostly consists of legal professionals.

OPEN DOORS
Open Doors works to preserve at-risk fanworks of all kinds. We will be expanding radically next year once the Archive of Our Own is open for beta: we will be responsible for helping extant archives and other large projects back up or integrate. We will also continue to try to preserve other kinds of projects, either through Special Collections (for online works we can't currently integrate) or the Fan Culture Preservation Project (for non-digital fanworks.) If you're interested in working with us next year, please indicate Open Doors as an interest!

SYSTEMS
Systems manages servers and infrastructure for the organization and its projects, which involves specific skills. We are currently using Debian, but if you are otherwise competent with Unix, knowing Debian specifically isn't a requirement. The software packages we administer are: Mailman, Apache2, Mongrel, Rails, Drupal, Mediawiki, Postfix, mySQL, Awstats, Nagios, Request Tracker, rsnapshot, S3Sync, and Logwatch. Experience installing, configuring, and troubleshooting any of these would be good-you need not know them all. Apache would be a huge bonus.

We are also looking for a systems architect. If you have experience in this area, please contact us!

TRANSLATION
We are currently seeking both Translation committee members and translation volunteers.

The Translation committee coordinates the translation volunteers (translators) and liaises with other committees. Translators help other committees by making their projects and documents available to an international audience, and may also provide feedback on a range of related issues, like testing translation interfaces. The OTW website, Elections material, and Membership drives are examples of such projects, or, as our next big thing, the interface of the Archive of Our Own.

A translation volunteer can either be a main translator or help out as a beta reader, depending on their experience and time. Translation volunteers should be able to work in small teams, be able to set up and work towards finishing assignments within a given timeframe, and be detail-oriented.

The language teams can vary in size and consist of volunteers who are either native speakers of, or fluent in, a language other than English.

Our specific needs at the moment are:

for translators, we are looking for a Japanese beta and/or translator, Italian, Czech, Dutch and Portuguese speakers.
for committee members, we'd be especially grateful for someone who is from a non-European language background, since all current committee members speak European-based languages.

If you feel more comfortable joining an already existing team, our active teams are:

Czech
Dutch
Danish
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Spanish

Or you can be a pioneer for a language not yet represented -- welcome! We're looking forward to working with you.

VOLUNTEERS & RECRUITING
The Volunteers & Recruiting committee is the Human Resources of the OTW. This committee recruits and manages volunteers and staffers for all committees and projects, sets them up in the Org, and tracks their service. Volunteers also maintains a large database of volunteer records, posts job notices on the OTW website, and manages the end-of-term committee staffing drives and change-overs.

A good Volunteers committee member is online a lot, can work well under pressure, is extremely accurate in their work, can follow detailed written instructions, and is comfortable with short deadlines. Being on the Volunteers committee is a demanding job, but also a very interesting and fulfilling one that puts members directly in the heart of the Org. And it's the perfect place for people who have a bit of micro-manager in them!

Volunteers will be adding people immediately, as our work requires that our new members be up and running before the new term begins.

WEBMASTERS
The Webmasters committee manages the OTW's informational websites, transformativeworks.org and elections.transformativeworks.org, as well as assisting with web-oriented tasks for various OTW projects. We're busily active year-round, and we rotate "on call" responsibilities weekly. We also work on a variety of long-term projects to enhance usability and to add features to the organization's web presence. We meet weekly in chat, have ongoing conversations via e-mail, and work closely with committees throughout the organization.

Our website uses Drupal, an open-source content management system, and CiviCRM, an open-source constituent management system. Previous experience with these systems is not required -- we are happy to teach you what we know, and are constantly learning new things about these evolving systems ourselves. We do ask that you have XHTML skills and at least some exposure to CSS. A little PHP would also be useful, but isn't required.

WIKI
In its second term, the Wiki committee built on the policies, guidelines and help documents that were created to support Fanlore wiki editors, as well as working to establish a flexible infrastructure to define and organise the wiki's content.

The Wiki committee is responsible for monitoring how the policies, guidelines and infrastructure of Fanlore are used. This includes:

Watching the recent changes on the wiki and keeping abreast of major changes/discussions that are underway;
Participating in discussions (both on and off the wiki) with other editors with regard to how the existing guidelines work, and how they might be improved;
Working on improvements to the guidelines in a timely manner, through both discussions within the Wiki committee and implementation on the wiki;
Supporting and managing wiki Gardeners -- making sure they are trained to assist editors, answering any queries;
Making major structural or formatting decisions and subsequent edits on the wiki -- designing and creating new templates/infoboxes, expanding the sitemap, etc; and
Responding to queries made directly to the committee (that Gardeners can't handle) in a timely manner.

As part of the Wiki committee you will also be responsible for deciding on and developing future activities around major plans for the wiki. This may include:

Outreach campaigns and procedures to invite and encourage other fan communities to contribute;
Expanding the scope of the wiki to include content such as practical guides for fan activities; and
Developing and providing multilingual spaces on the wiki.

We are specifically looking for a documentation specialist and/or an archival historian.

VIDDING HISTORY
Vidding History has thus far been only a chair and a group of ad hoc volunteers; however, the board may decide to constitute Vidding History more formally as a committee next year to begin working on a Vidding Archive of Our Own. We would also like to build a resource site for vidders which contains legal and technical information, as well as to continue documenting vidding history through projects like the Oral History. If you are interested in working on any of these areas -- technical, historical, etc -- please list Vidding History as a potential interest in your WTS.

If you have questions regarding serving on a committee, you can contact Volunteers & Recruiting via our contact form.

[7 November 2009: edited to mark Journal - Layout editor job as filled; 11 November 2009: edited to update Journal - Production editor job description]

Announcing an anonymous challenge grant!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:58:17 -0700

This post brings you a mid-week Hello! from the Development and Membership committee of the OTW and some exciting news!

An anonymous donor has come forward to offer a matching challenge grant of up to US$5000. That means that when you donate now, a contribution of equal value comes from a secret source and effectively doubles the impact of your giving. If you give US$10, it's matched by another US$10 and the OTW receives a total of US$20. If you give US$50, you can opt to get an OTW sticker & iron-on pack AND your donation is still matched by another US$50, making the total impact of your donation US$100 for the OTW and a premium for you. Matching will continue cumulatively up to US$5000 of donations – US$5000 from you and other donors plus US$5000 in matches equals US$10000 in funds raised for the OTW, for hosting costs for the AOOO and Open Doors, and for future fannish projects not even imagined yet.

We’ll be posting regularly to our twitter account over the next few days to let y'all know how much of the challenge amount we've raised. You can subscribe to our twitter feed, or just check in to see the news, here: http://twitter.com/otw_news

Now is a great time to give if you haven't done so yet, and a great time to give a little bit more if you can. We'd really like to raise all US$5000 needed to max out our challenge grant, and every donation helps!

Thanks,
The Development and Membership Committee of the OTW

Election 2009 News!

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:49:43 -0700

And now for (some of) the news you've all been waiting for: the details of the OTW's 2009 Election Season! We have great news for you: two fabulous people are joining the OTW Board! Because only two candidates came forward, we won't be holding a contested election this year. However, they are both awesome and eminently qualified for Board service. Without further ado, let's introduce them!

Elizabeth Yalkut is a student at Columbia University in New York City. She has worked in development, marketing, and strategy for nonprofit legal and theater organizations, is a long-time American Civil Liberties Union volunteer, and currently works for the Educational Technology department at Barnard College. Elizabeth has been a staffer with the OTW since 2007 and has been particularly instrumental on our Content Policy committee, where she helped to research, write, and publicly workshop our complex, fan -friendly, and highly-readable AO3 Terms of Service as well as general policy documents across the OTW. She also serves as a member of our Development committee, and was asked, as someone intimately familiar with Archive policy, to chair our Abuse committee at the beginning of 2009. Food is one of her fandoms: Elizabeth blogs about food at A Very Uncommon Cook, serves as treasurer of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society, and currently enjoys the hell out of Merlin, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Elizabeth plans to work on outreach (organizational, fannish, international), accessibility, and education during her term on the Board.

Allison Morris works in a public library as a public services supervisor and has a BA in Japanese Literature from the University of Michigan. An OTW staffer for two years, Allison currently chairs the OTW Webmasters committee, which is responsible for building and maintaining all of transformativeworks.org, including the OTW blog, donations software, Open Doors subsite, and elections subsite; this requires her to work closely with the Drupal and CiviCRM open source software communities, as well as with people involved in a broad selection of OTW projects. This year, Allison also serves as co-lead with the Tag Wranglers subcommittee and heads the cross-committee Merchandizing workgroup which organized and is carrying out the OTW's new donation premiums. A lifelong fan, Allison is particularly interested in not only works that transform canon but also fanworks that honor the work of other fans and transform other fanworks, like remixes, podfic, recs, and meta, among other fan arts. She has been a devoted creator and advocate of podfic; she built and maintains the Audiofic archive, providing a stable, permanent home for a constantly growing collection of podfic -- currently ~3700 recordings covering ~290 fandoms, including readings in five languages -- and she has conducted several podfic workshops at cons. She has many theories concerning robots, clones, and John Sheppard, and has presented on those and related subjects at WisCon and Writercon, as well as informally to whomever will listen.

Allison plans to work on increasing the OTW's profile among technical women's organizations as well as on creating a grantwriting team.

We would like for all of you to get to experience their awesomeness yourselves (or bask in it again, if you've already met them) and to ask questions about the details of the experience and ambition they bring to the table. They are your Board members - come say "Hi!" To this end, we'll be hosting a chat at 1400 UTC on 24 October 2009.

Time clock for this event is here:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=24&yea...

The chat will take place in our Public Discussion room on Campfire, which can be accessed via this URL:

https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/28473

Alas, the tea and coffee we can provide will be only virtual, but you are welcome to bring your own mug to the computer.

Although we didn't get to hold a competitive election this year, we are delighted to have attracted two such marvelous new Board members. Welcome, Elizabeth and Allison!

If there's anything we didn’t cover here that you're concerned about, or if you want any more information, please respond to this with any questions, comments, or objections you may have. You can reach Elections by leaving a comment on this blog post or any of its mirrors, or by using the Elections contact form; you can reach the Board by leaving a comment on this post or its mirrors, or by using the Board contact form.

Visit the OTW Elections website.

Gay Geekery: The Organization for Transformative Works

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:48:07 -0700

Fans looking for reasons to become a member of OTW during our current drive might check out Jack's latest article over at The New Gay: Gay Geekery: The Organization for Transformative Works. In this column, Jack explains how his support of the OTW is connected to his own politics around queer liberation and sexual freedom. "But even beyond that," Jack adds, "I want people to know that what we [fans] do is truly meaningful artistic work."

Read the rest of the article, and then join the OTW! (And thanks for the shout-out, Jack!)

Support the OTW this October!

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:49:18 -0700

As the rash of new OTW lolcats might suggest, it's time for our annual October donations drive! If you're on our mailing list, you've hopefully already received an email about this. (Let us know if you haven't!)

In the last few months, we have:

purchased servers of our very own and moved them into a colocation facility, which means that soon we plan to move the Archive of Our Own from closed beta into open beta! (What does this mean? Learn more at Archive News post #4: Colocation & Open Beta);
launched several new projects, among them the Fan Culture Preservation Project and the GeoCities Rescue Project;
represented vidders and other remix artists at DMCA anticircumvention hearings;
filed an amicus brief in the Salinger/60 Years Later case to influence the courts' legal definition of "transformative" use;
put out a new issue (our third, and right on time: most universities haven’t ever managed to put three issues of a journal out on time!) of Transformative Works and Cultures;

and much more!

Thanks to your awesome response to our March membership drive, we had the funds in-hand to purchase our shiny new servers outright. This is incredibly exciting. \o/!

But we still have costs: colocation, bandwidth, saving up for our second set of servers when the first set get worn-out, and all kinds of exciting new projects we hope to dive into once the AO3 is out of beta, including a Vidding Archive of Our Own. So we hope you'll choose to donate to the OTW this week!

If you have trouble donating, you can contact DevMem by leaving a comment on this post (at the blog or its livejournal or dreamwidth mirrors) or by using the contact form at our website. Thanks for your support!

October drive lolcats!

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:24:03 -0700

The OTW's October donation drive is right around the corner (begins 11 October!), so we've created some new lolcats to share with you. Please help yourself! You can post them by copying the text below each image and pasting it into your journal or website.

September, 2009 Newsletter, Vol. 32

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:54:44 -0700

Welcome to our September, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

Abuse:

ADT/Archive:

err.. +points at News Post #4+

+falls over+

Board:

The Board has been working through some of the stickier financial, administrative and personnel parts of the move to colocation and the upcoming membership drive and electoin.

Communications:

Communications has been continuing to try to bring you all the OTW-related news you could want in these exciting times. We've also done a couple of interviews; more news of these coming soon.

Content Policy:

Development/Membership:

Documentation:

No report.

Elections:

Finance Update:

FinComm continues to pay the bills, keep the lights on—and oh, yeah, I think we bought some expensive computer equipment lately.

Journal:

Legal:

Open Doors:

Systems:

Systems has been working to install us on our new servers so we can move to Open Beta as soon as possible! They’ve also been helping Webmasters gear up for the October Membership Drive.

Translations:

Vidding History:

Volunteers:

Volunteers has been heroically continuing to help OTW connect with fabulous and talented people (and if you're a coder with IE7 skills, call us! Call us toll-free right now!)

Webmasters:

Wiki:

Fanlore is currently advertising for Documentation Specialists to help with reorganizing and rewriting policy pages and help files. If you’re interested, please do volunteer!

Upcoming OTW Events: Membership Drive (October) and Election (November)

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:12:08 -0700

The OTW will be holding its next membership drive from October 11 to October 18, 2009. This is important for many reasons (not least of which is our continued need for your support!) but please note that should we happen to have a contested OTW Board election this November (i.e. more declared candidates than open seats), you must be a member of the OTW in good standing by October 18, 2009. That means you need to have made a membership donation of at least US$10 in the last year, or since October 19, 2008.

You can, of course, become an OTW member at any time, and we will always accept your donations! But if you’re not a member and want the option to vote in a potential election, please be sure to join the OTW before the end of our October drive.

Visit the OTW Elections website.

Election Season Begins

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:41:06 -0700

Election season is upon us! Two seats are opening on the Board at the end of this term, and the polls are scheduled to open November 18.

If you want to vote: You'll need to be a paid member of the OTW by October 18, one month before the election.

If you want to run: You'll need to have served a full term of committee service in the two terms prior to the election. Current and former staffers considering running should contact elections via our web form by September 23.

If you want to know more: Thanks to the Webmasters committee, our Elections site is live. Here you'll find the complete Elections FAQ, information on our tabulation system, and the timelines for candidacy, campaigning, election, and Board turnover.

Visit the OTW Elections website.

Job Search: ADT Archivist

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:07:51 -0700

Job: ADT Archivist

Description: Our wonderful Documentation committee needs a volunteer to assist with the Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee meeting minutes. ADT is so prolific, it’s getting hard to keep up! No technical knowledge is required--all you need is the ability to summarize the meetings. Volunteers will get a beta account at the Archive of Our Own.

Estimated Time Involved: A few hours a week.

How to Volunteer: Use our contact form to send us the following information:

Your name (you may provide your real name or your fannish name--please consider what you feel comfortable using both inside and outside the organization):

Your email address:

Please put "ADT Archivist" in the subject line.

All volunteers will receive an email confirming their information has been received; please give us up to five days to reply.

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by using our contact form.

July, 2009 Newsletter, Volume 31

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:33:39 -0700

Welcome to OTW's July, 2009 newsletter. Get status reports and updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees right under the cut!

Abuse:

ADT/Archive:

We're still working on co-location and hope to be ordering our much anticipated new hardware in the very near future.

Board:

Communications:

Content Policy:

Development:

Documentation:

No report.

Elections:

Elections has been working with Web on the elections subsite, and are currently reviewing our new timeline and faq pages to submit to the board.

Finance:

The sharks of FinCom have been continuing to fill purchase requests, paying the bills, and crunching numbers.

Journal:

Issue three of the Academic journal is into the copyediting phase, and is on schedule for publication on September 15. The team is already hard at work on issues four, five and six.

Legal:

Open Doors:

Systems:

Systems has been closely working with ADT to implement the Archive's latest code deployment, as well as keeping OTW's general systems running.

Translations:

Vidding History:

Volunteers:

Volunteers posted a job search for experienced XHTML/CSS Coders. OTW wants you! We also helped Translations setting up the first two language teams in Basecamp.

Webmasters:

Wiki:

June, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 30

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:34:32 -0700

Get updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees: right under the cut!

Abuse:

ADT/Archive:

The draft Open Beta plan is getting fleshed out and we're busy making a list of features we have to finalise. I feel a blocking Open Beta list coming on...

Our next code deploy will probably be another small one with a bunch of fixes - we're currently aiming for the weekend of the 4th of July.

Board:

The Board continue to work on the upcoming colocation and open beta of the archive in terms of money, resources and personnel, as well as setting general org-wide goals.

Communications:

Content Policy:

No report.

Development:

Development and Communications are collaborating on a merchandising committee for the Fall, '09 fundraising drive; stay tuned.

Documentation:

Elections:

Elections is compiling instructions and information for the revised, in-house election software that OTW's Webmasters are working on, as well as draft text for their forthcoming website.

Finance Update:

Journal:

The TWC team is working hard to put together issue three of our academic journal , which is scheduled for September 2009.

Legal:

Legal continues to provide confidential advice and opinions within the org. We could tell you more, but then we'd have to kill you.

Open Doors:

Systems:

Systems is planning a 'help us with colocation' recruitment drive; watch this space!

Translations:

No report.

Vidding History:

We are currently working on a page of fair use resources for vidders. Francesca Coppa will also be presenting on a fair use panel at the Open Video Conference in NYC, June 19-20, 2009.

Volunteers:

Website:

Wiki:

The Wiki committee continues to make policy decisions and oversee the general running of Fanlore.

'Coming Through the Rye': Lawsuit Over 'Catcher In The Rye' Sequel

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:32:05 -0700

Fanfiction writers and other makers of transformative works might be interested in the lawsuit brought by the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger and his lawyers against writer J.D. California, who has written a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," which tells the story of Holden Caufield as an old man. Unlike fanfiction, "Coming Through The Rye" is a commercial work, but it'll still be an interesting case to keep an eye on. Read more about the case at CNN, with a more thorough legal overview courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

May, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 29

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:17:19 -0700

Abuse:

No report.

ADT/Archive:

We're currently hard at work on a bunch of projects:

Enhancing our invitation system, we'll need this when we start taking on a lot more users
Improving our administration interface
Improvements to tag wrangling - we're working to fix the 'SGA and SG-1 in the filters' problem.
Adding a FAQ and a posting interface for Release Notes and Bug Updates - this is so we can communicate better
...and of course a bunch of smaller bug fixes

We have a small deploy planned for the weekend of the 30th - this will mostly be bugfixes - details in the next set of Release Notes that get emailed to Beta testers.

Board:

Communications:

Communications is working on several projects; a "for the media" page for the tw.org website, the Open Doors "Fan Culture Preservation Project" press releases, some outreach ideas for Fanlore.

Content Policy:

No report.

Development:

Members of Development will be forming a subcommittee with members of Communications, Web, and some specially recruited volunteers to research OTW merchandise for future drives. Stay tuned!

Documentation:

Documentation has no new news, but continues to document everything it can find.

Elections:

The Elections committee will be running the voting and tabulation for the fall election in-house. We're working closely with Webmasters now to set up the infrastructure to do just that.

Finance Update:

Journal:

Legal:

Open Doors:

Open Doors is still working with Webmasters and Communications on our project page, and we're now workshopping a press release.

Systems:

Systems has been working with the various committee chairs to test the exportation of certain project pages to the zen server.

Tag Wranglers:

Translations:

Vidding History:

Members of Vidding History and Legal went to DC to on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Extended coverage of our panel is at our blog post here.

Volunteers:

Volunteers continues to work managing staffers and other personnel as well as maintaining our various corporate home systems and software.

Website:

As part of our Elections subsite project, we're currently testing software that enables multiple sites to be run from a single Drupal installation and database.

Our fabulous chairperson, Jinjur, will be handing out OTW buttons at Wiscon (May 22-25).

Wiki:

We've opened up a Fanlore community on dreamwidth for anyone who wants to get involved with editing the wiki, along with adding a news page to keep everyone updated on the latest changes.

Extra! Your Political Speech is now a "Viacom Property"

Sat, 02 May 2009 19:41:21 -0700

Earlier this week, fan artist Glockgal discovered that all but one of the designs at her Zazzle store had been removed "because they "contained content in violation of Viacom's intellectual property rights." But the shirts contained not only original graphic designs, but political speech, protesting the casting of Asian or Inuit characters in the film of Avatar: The Last Airbender by white actors.

Apparently, you need permission from Viacom to say: "Aang can stay Asian and still save the world" or "The Last Airbender: Putting the Cauc back in Asian" or "The Last Airbender: Brown/Asian/Colored Actors NEED NOT APPLY". These design were entirely textual, and obviously political: Glockgal called her store Racebending.com and contextualized its products as a form of political activism: "Stop Hollywood White-Washing of the upcoming movie The Last Airbender!" Glockgal is now selling some of the designs with "CENSORED BY VIACOM" plastered across them--but since when does Viacom own political speech about its products?

OTW Annual Report, 2008

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:08:29 -0700

The Board of the OTW is pleased to announce the release of our 2008 Annual Report, which went live on our Reports page yesterday. The 2008 Annual Report is available both as a downloadable .pdf and as .html. A big thank you to all our staffers, volunteers, and members for another successful year!

Annual Report 2008

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:28:10 -0700

ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS

ANNUAL REPORT 2008

2008 in review
- "Spreading our wings; making our voices heard"
Finances
- Statement of Financial Position
- Statement of Activities
- Statement of Functional Expenses
- Notes to Financial Statements
About the OTW
- Mission
- Who we are

ANNUAL REPORT FROM THE BOARD

Welcome to the Organization for Transformative Works' second annual report. We are pleased to report to you that we ended another year with our projects flourishing and - through the generosity of our members - financially secure as we head into the new year.

Last year was a year of tremendous growth and activity for the organization. We discovered that the more we opened our imagination to new ideas, the more we could achieve, and the more we opened our doors to members, volunteers, and allies, the stronger our organization became.

We made significant progress on our starship project - the Archive of Our Own - which we hope to make available for open beta by the end of 2009. In the meantime, we also launched a journal, a wiki, a blog, an updated and multi-lingual web site, helped capture the history of vidding in collaboration with MIT's New Media Literacy project, and strengthened our alliances with other organizations challenging the restrictions that have a chilling effect on transformative works. On the following pages you will find more information about our activities over the past year, as well as a copy of our financial statements for 2008.

It has been an exciting and productive year for the organization, and we hope you will join us in our excitement. We congratulate all of you - our members, staff, and volunteers - who helped make all of this possible.

Rachel Barenblat
Kellyann Bessa
Francesca Coppa
Susan Gibel
Sheila Lane
Naomi Novik
Rebecca Tushnet

2008 YEAR IN REVIEW / SPREADING OUR WINGS; MAKING OUR VOICES HEARD

We are pleased to report that the OTW met all of the goals we set in our previous annual report.

Our journal, Transformative Works and Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.org) launched on schedule. We held two membership drives in 2008, one in March and one in October, and raised over $19,000 in the course of the year. Preliminary testing of the Archive of Our Own (currently in closed beta) commenced in 2008, and work began and was completed on series of short documentaries on fan vidding (available at our Vidding History page at transformativeworks.org). Our wiki, Fanlore (www.fanlore.org) was launched in the summer of 2008. In November 2008, after an uncontested election, we welcomed two new board members, Rachel Barenblat (also Chair of the Development and Membership Committee) and Sheila Lane, and said farewell to two of our "original seven" – Cathy Cupitt and Michelle Tepper.

None of these achievements would have been possible without the active support of our committees and volunteers.
As of December 31, 2008, we had over seventy-five committee members working on seventeen different committees, and over one hundred active volunteers.

TIMELINE

January
Community Relations launched the OTW Newsletter, providing twice-monthly updates on all ongoing OTW projects via LiveJournal, Insane Journal, Journal Fen, and Greatest Journal. Later, the newsletter was expanded to include our web site blog, del.icio.us, and Twitter, with various feeds available.

February
The OTW-sponsored academic journal project, Transformative Works and Cultures, launched right on schedule, issuing their first call for papers on February 1st.

March
Development launched our first OTW membership drive, offering one-year memberships for $10. During the first week of the membership drive, OTW gained 423 members hailing from fifteen countries, and by May 2008 had surpassed $12,000 in fundraising. Those funds, and funds raised throughout the year, provided the OTW with the resources it needed to continue development work on the archive and the journal, and support the administrative costs of the organization.

To help communicate with and welcome our diverse membership, the Translation Committee was formed and immediately began translating OTW materials into German, French, Italian and Spanish, with additional languages being added throughout the year.

The eagerly-awaited Archive of Our Own got underway in March, with the Accessibility, Design and Technology Committee developing the
first road map for building the software. Coding on the archive software officially began in April.

May
We celebrated our first birthday by hosting our first online convention! Events included "Blast from your Fannish Past," icons, personal fannish history stories, and Drunken Bar Conversation Topics. Fans just want to have fun!

June
The website for the Open Doors Committee premiered. The Open Doors project seeks to preserve the rich history of fandom by protecting and hosting endangered fanworks. More information about Open Doors is available at http://opendoors.transformativeworks.org.

July
Board Member Rebecca Tushnet worked on the Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, released in July by the Center for Social Media.

August
The vidding documentary produced in collaboration with Henry Jenkins and MIT's New Media Literacy project was unveiled at Vividcon.

September
The first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures was published to great acclaim! The OTW was officially granted 501(c)(3) non-profit status!

October
October was a busy month for the organization, featuring the highly-anticipated announcement that the read-only beta version of the Archive of Our Own was open to the public as of October 3rd. October also featured the launch of the new OTW website (www.transformativeworks.org) , as well as the premiere of the Fanlore wiki (www.fanlore.org), which was soon populated by hundreds of articles on a wide range of fannish topics.

November
Our first election was held, with the two candidates elected by acclamation for the two available board seats. Welcome Rachel and Sheila!

December
We ended the year by filing a comment in support of the EFF's proposed DMCA exemption for video creators (like vidders) who rip DVDs in order to use clips in fair use remixes, and working on our co-sponsorship of the 6th Annual IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections Symposium held at the American University Washington College of Law on April 24, 2009.

Throughout the year, OTW Board and commitee members represented the OTW at a wide range of events:

Board member Francesca Coppa and vidder Laura Shapiro participated in the 27/7 DIY Summit at USC.
Board member Rebecca Tushnet represented OTW at the Columbia Fair Use Conference.
Francesca Coppa and members of the TWC editorial team represented OTW at Slashday at De Montfort University, England.
OTW staffers bethbethbeth and the_shoshanna moderated a panel on the OTW at Escapade, the longest running slash convention.
OTW staffers represented the OTW at Wiscon, the World's Leading Feminist Science Fiction Convention (May) and con_text (June).
Rebecca Tushnet appeared on National Public Radio in an interview about fanfiction and the OTW.

ANTICIPATED MILESTONES IN 2009

2008 was an exciting and busy year for the OTW, and we look forward to continuing to grow and change, finishing current projects and
undertaking new ones throughout 2009. Some of our anticipated milestones for 2009 are:

Commencing open beta of the Archive of Our Own
Completing translation efforts on the OTW web site and the archive
Transitioning the archive to a new server at a colocation facility
Creating a Fan Culture Preservation Project in partnership with a major research university
Bringing the Fanlore wiki out of beta
Releasing two more issues of our academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures

FINANCES / STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION

Organization for Transformative Works
STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION: December 31, 2008

Assets		2007	2008
CURRENT ASSETS:
	Cash and cash equivalents	6,636	18,890
	Total current assets	6,636	18,890

OTHER ASSETS		-	-

	Total Assets	6,636	18,890

Liabilities and Net Assets
CURRENT LIABILITIES
	Accounts payable and accrued expenses	-	-
NET ASSETS
	Unrestricted net assets
	Total unrestricted net assets	6,637	18,890

	Temporarily restricted net assets
	Total net assets	-	-

	Total Liabilities and Net Assets	6,637	18,890

FINANCES / STATEMENT OF ACTIVITIES

Organization for Transformative Works
STATEMENT OF ACTIVITIES
For the Year Ended December 31, 2008
		Unrestricted	Temporarily Restricted	Total

Support and Revenue
	Contributions and membership dues	19,135	-	19,135
	Foundation grants	-	-	-
	Special events	-	-	-
	In-kind donations	279		279
	Total Support and Revenue	19,414	-	19,414

Expenses
	Program services	2,865	-	2,865
	Administrative and general	3,352	-	3,352
	Fundraising	943	-	943
	Total Expenses	7,160	-	7,160

Change in Net Assets		12,254	-	12,254
Net Assets, beginning of year		6,636	-	6,636
Net Assets, end of year		18,890	-	18,890

FINANCES / STATEMENT OF FUNCTIONAL EXPENSES

Organization for Transformative Works
STATEMENT OF FUNCTIONAL EXPENSES
For the Year Ended December 31, 2008
		Program	Administrative and General	Fundraising	Total
Expenses
	Paypal fees	-	-	700	700
	Project management	-	1,235	-	1,235
	Accounting	-	117	-	117
	Archive development/Web site	2,545	-	-	2,545
	Journal	435	-	-	435
	Fundraising expenses	-	-	128	128
	Insurance	-	2,000	-	2,000
					-

	Total expenses	2,980	3,352	828	7,160

FINANCES / NOTES TO FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

Organization for Transformative Works
NOTES TO FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
December 31, 2008

1. Organization and Summary of Significant Accounting Policies
Organization: The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in Delaware. The OTW was established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. The OTW is a collaborative effort initiated and driven by fans for fans.

Basis of Presentation: The accompanying financial statements are presented using the cash method of accounting.

Financial Statement Presentation: Information regarding the financial position and activities are classified into the applicable classes of net assets: unrestricted net assets, temporarily restricted net assets, and permanently restricted net assets. Currently, all assets are categorized as unrestricted. Furthermore, expenses are classified into program service expenses (currently, the creation of the fanworks archive, maintenance of the organization's Web sie, publication of the on-line journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and maintenance of the organizations's wiki, Fanlore) and support expenses. Support expenses are administrative and general, and fundraising expenses.

Cash and cash equivalents: The OTW maintains cash balances within federally insured limits. No cash equivalents are held by the organization.

Use of Estimates: The preparation of financial statements in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets and liabilities and disclosure of contingent assets and liabilities at the date of the financial statements and the reported amounts of revenues and expenses during the reporting period. Actual results could differ from those estimates.

Contributions: The OTW recognizes all unconditional contributions received as income in the period received. Contributions received are recorded as unrestricted, temporarily restricted, or permanently restricted support depending on the existence and/or nature of any donor restrictions. All contributions are considered to be available for unrestricted use unless specifically restricted by the donor.

Donated Services: The OTW does not assign a value to volunteer activities in the statement of activities. The in-kind donations included here included the payment of program and support costs.

Membership Dues — Membership dues are recognized as revenue based on the membership period covered by the member dues.

Functional Allocation of Expenses — The costs of providing the various programs and other activities have been summarized on a functional basis in the statement of activities. Accordingly, certain costs have been allocated among the programs and supporting services benefited.

Income Taxes — The OTW is a 501(c)(3) organization exempt from Federal income and State franchise taxes under provisions of Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and Section 1902(b)(6), Title 30 of the Delaware State Taxation Code respectively. As such, no provision for income taxes has been provided in these financial statements.

Concentration of Credit Risk — The OTW maintains its cash balances at one bank. Accounts at the bank are insured by Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) for up to $100,000.

ABOUT THE OTW / MISSION

MISSION

The OTW represents a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture. The OTW will preserve the record of that history as we pursue our mission while encouraging new and non-mainstream expressions of cultural identity within fandom.

We have met all of our milestone goals for the first two years: establishing the OTW as an IRS-recognized nonprofit; creating infrastructure through board, committees, volunteers, and membership; beta-launching the Archive of Our Own; establishing a legal defense project and forming alliances; launching a refereed academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, and creating a fan wiki, Fanlore.

As we enter our third year, we will concentrate on developing long-term plans for the organization.

ABOUT THE OTW / WHO WE ARE

The Organization for Transformative Works is run for fans by fans. The directors of OTW's board are all active in fandom, as are the more than 75 other people serving on seventeen committees.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

NAOMI NOVIK, Board chair, is the New York Times-bestselling author of the award-winning Temeraire historical fantasy series, which has been translated into twenty-three languages and optioned as a film by director Peter Jackson. She has been active in online fandom since 1994, publishing stories and vids in more than forty-two fandoms and founding several fan-run institutions including a vidding convention and a cross-fandom story exchange. She created the open-source Automated Archive software.

RACHEL BARENBLAT is co-founder of Inkberry, a literary arts nonprfit organization whose mission is to help every writer find his or her own voice. She has also served on the boards of two other nonprofit organizatons. The six years she spent running Inkberry gave her expertise in nonprofit management, grantwriting, and building membership - skills she's psyched to bring to the OTW board. A poet who blogs about issues of faith as "The Velveteen Rabbi" as well as an enthusiastic participant in online fandom since 1999, Rachel has a long commitment both to transformative works and to writing as a mode of personal transformation.

KELLYANN BESSA has a BS in Management from Cardinal Stritch University, and currently works as a human resources consultant for an investment firm. She has been in fandom for nearly ten years as a writer, mailing list owner, community moderator, and webmaster. In addition to running several archives, she hosts and maintains websites for a number of fanfiction writers. She also works several hours a week at her local comic book store, and participates in the online feminist comic fan community.

FRANCESCA COPPA, PhD is director of film studies and associate professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, popular fiction, and mass media storytelling. Her writings on media fandom have been included in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and presented at MIT's Media in Transition conference. Coppa has been involved in online fandom since the mid-1990s as a writer, list administrator, vidder, archivist, and community moderator.

SUSAN GIBEL, JD is a senior manager with the nonprofit Center for Effective Public Policy, Inc., where she focuses on national training and technical assistance initiatives related to domestic violence and offender reentry. She has worked with antiviolence organizations on issues of domestic violence and queer rights and holds a law degree from the University of Minnesota. Gibel has been involved in fandom since the mid-1970s,and currently writes in a handful of fandoms, primarily Due South.

SHEILA LANE has a master's degree in business management and is a licensed certified public accountant. She works as a corporate accountant for a worldwide brokerage company and has expertise in both individual and small business taxation. She has been involved in online fandom since 1994, going from a telnet BBS and 'zines to mailing lists and Livejournal. She has written in more than thirty fandoms, from Alias to Witchblade, and has moderated multiple mailing lists, communities, and challenges.

REBECCA TUSHNET, JD is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. A graduate of Yale Law School, she clerked for Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and Associate Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court. She practiced intellectual property law at Debevoise & Plimpton before joining the NYU faculty, then moving to Georgetown. She has advised and represented several fanfiction sites in disputes with copyright and trademark owners and maintains a blog on intellectual property law at tushnet.blogspot.com. Tushnet has been active in online fandom since 1996.

EMERITUS BOARD MEMBERS

CATHY CUPITT, DCA (2007-2008) teaches writing and Shakespeare at the University of Western Australia and has a doctorate in creative arts from Curtin University of Technology. Her fiction has appeared in Australian magazines such as Westerly and Borderlands, and in 1997 she won the US$20,000 first prize in Hyundai’s 20th Anniversary World-wide Essay Contest. Since discovering fandom in 1988, Cupitt has written in nine fandoms, and she runs an active recommendations site. She has served on numerous fannish committees, including Australia’s 2001 national SF convention, for which she was a co-convenor.

MICHELLE TEPPER, PhD (2007-2008) is an interaction designer and usability expert who helps companies create memorable and successful software, Web sites, and digital devices. She has published influential essays about online community and social software, and she is the former Web producer for Lingua Franca magazine. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. Tepper was one of the creators and designers of buffistas.org, a fan-built, fan-maintained site centered on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The site has more than a thousand members and has been active for five years.

COMMITTEES

Abuse
Accessibility, Design and Technology
Communications
Content
Development and Membership
Documentation
Elections
Financial
Journal
Legal
Open Doors
Systems
Translation
Vidding History
Volunteers
Webmasters
Wiki

April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 28

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:00:42 -0700

Welcome to our second April newsletter! Progress reports from all your favorite committees and OTW projects are right under the cut!

Abuse:

ADT/Archive:

The new Translations interface which Elz and Cal have been slaving over.
Being able to filter by Pseuds which is Enigel's baby.
Changes to the way works display by the beautiful Zooey - we're pulling 'Warnings' out and making them more visible.
We're also pulling the default Archive font we're using as not enough people's systems default load Candara as pretty as they should :(

Finally, Our beautiful Amelia has been contacting people about co-location, we don't have anything firm back yet but we have three different proposals we're waiting on details for.

Board:

Communications:

Content Policy:

Development:

Documentation:

Elections:

Elections is considering options for vote tabulation, both entertaining bids for outsourcing and consulting with Webmasters about the logistics of running the voting ourselves.

Finance Update:

The Finance Committee has been running the numbers for our 2008 Annual Report: stay tuned!

Journal:

TWC has been accepted for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/). We will be inputting article metadata to facilitate dissemination of content.

Legal:

Open Doors:

Systems:

No report at this time.

Translations:

Vidding History:

Vidding History members Coppa and Turk also presented vidding-related academic work at IP/Gender on April 23-24, 2009.

Volunteers:

No report at this time.

Webmasters:

We've posted the full text of OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed DMCA exemption for vidders. It's accessible in PDF or HTML format from the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids page.

More recently, we've been in discussion with Elections and Systems as we take the first steps toward setting up an Elections subsite. This will be our main project for the next few months.

Wiki:

Where To Find Us

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:08:57 -0700

Did you know you can easily follow what's happening with the Organization for Transformative Works on the same major networking sites you and your friends already use?

The OTW tags on delicious, posts links on Twitter and mirrors our newsletters and blog entries on the following journaling sites:

Follow AO3_Status on Twitter for status alerts about the Archive of Our Own, and join in Fanlore conversations at the Fanlore Dreamwidth community.

You can also support the OTW on Facebook and MySpace:

We also maintain profiles and groups at the following sites:

You can affiliate with us as a "studio" at animemusicvideos.org:

Organization For Transformative Works Studio

And lastly, for those of you kicking it old school, we maintain a mailing list:

Join our Yahoogroup!

Retiring Our Amazon Widget

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:07:38 -0700

The OTW is retiring our Amazon widget; we ask you to please disable your "I heart OTW" Firefox extension if you installed it. Amazon no longer supports widgets or other Amazon Associate / nonprofit fundraising devices that don't have banners or ads attached, and the OTW prefers not to have any corporate advertising on its site. We will not be receiving any donations from the use of this widget: however, please feel free to donate to us early and often through the usual channels.

April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 27

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:55:56 -0700

Welcome to our next newsletter; get progress reports from all your favorite committees and stay on top of your favorite OTW projects--right under the cut!

Abuse:
No report.

Content Policy:
No report.

Development:
Big report on the March, 2009 drive coming soon!

Staff and volunteers are also encouraged to check out the internal FAQ. It’s a work-in-progress, and we welcome any contributions.

Elections:
No report.

Finance Update:
Finance is working on our Annual Report, coming soon!

Legal:
Legal is collaborating with Vidding History to support the OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's DMCA exemption; see "Vidding History" below for more info.

Systems:
No report.

Translation:
We continue to welcome our new fabulous volunteers, which now include a Danish translation team. For now work on the OTW website goes forward as the main focus of our efforts.

Wiki:
Wiki recently announced its new chatroom for fanlore participants; they also ran a "Fanlore Live" panel at Escapade.

OTW board chair Naomi Novik on NPR

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:46:24 -0700

March 25, 2009 - Our own Naomi Novik appears on today's broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered, in a a story called Will E-Book Anti-Piracy Technology Hurt Readers? The aired program, as well as a shorter print version, is now available at the NPR website. Naomi is speaking against the DRM [Digital Rights Management] protection on e-books that mean that they can't easily be transferred from Kindle to Laptop to iPhone. Naomi notes that: "The biggest danger to most authors, to most storytellers, is not that somebody is going to steal your work and pass it along — it is that nobody is ever going to see your work."

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:51:01 -0700

Please join the OTW in celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. The OTW is an overwhelmingly female organization whose major projects include open source software development & design, as well as the administration and technological maintenance of our production servers, content management systems, and other software packages, including MediaWiki, the software that runs Fanlore, OJS, the open source journal software we use to run Transformative Works and Cultures, CiviCRM, the constituent relationship management system we use to manage our Development and Membership drives, Request Tracker (RT), our current ticketing system, and our Drupal-based website. Our staff is made up largely of female coders, sysadmins, webmasters, designers, and others of considerable technical skill.

We at OTW would like to give a particular shout out to:

ADT, or the Accessibility, Design, and Technology Committee, is the team responsible for the Archive of Our Own. If you've ever wondered What On Earth ADT does, you can get a graphical representation of the answer here. The Archive of Our Own may be the largest woman run and staffed open source software project on the web. 1134 revisions have been deployed to the Beta Archive to date, and we have had five major releases and innumerable small ones. 150 volunteers have worked on AD&T/Code/Test, many of whom we have trained ourselves in Ruby and other languages; we aim to teach and mentor all, women especially, who want to learn. You can see our code here.

Systems: Four out of five of the active sysadmins for OTW are women. Our servers were built (mostly) by women, for women, and maintained (mostly) by women to create amazing things upon. Xen’s current uptime: up 132 days, load average: 0.44, 0.31, 0.22 AOOO: up 30 days, load average: 0.03, 0.06, 0.0100. Xen came alive in November of 2007, which means approximately 1.5 years that no one has done a cd / ; rm -rf * That's something to brag about, because let's face it: usually the only time folks notice the Systems team is when something has stopped working. (tongue>cheek)

Webmasters: Since the OTW Webmasters (our friends call us Charlottes) were established as a committee, we have had seven members and all have been women. When we started, we had no experience with Drupal, the open-source content management system we use for the main OTW website, or with PHP, the primary scripting language used to create dynamic web pages. So we learned collaboratively, together, on the job, supporting and teaching each other as we went along. We picked up a number of new skills, including how to work with an open source community, how to find and interpret available documentation, and how to contribute back to that community with proper bug reports and bug fixes. We even found, to our surprise, that we were attempting things with both internationalization (content translation) and localization (interface translation) that appear to be unique in both the scope of languages we have implemented and the complexity of the website to which it has been applied. We continue to develop, just as our website does. We value accessibility, broadly defined, and towards that end, we are working to make transformativeworks.org truly multilingual and international, pushing our boundaries as well as that of the software. We're proud of our accomplishments, and we admire each other and the OTW for valuing the technological work of women.

Our Tech Heroines are the Technical Women Of the OTW: the women of ADT: black_samvara, Naomi Novik, Elz, Cal, Lim, Zooey, Sidra, Beate, Highlander_II, Julieann, shrift, Caitlin Shaw, Amelia, Betsey, Isis, Jennifew; our magnificent Webmasters: jinjur, Kristen Murphy, Sharon, & Blue_meridian; the women of Systems: Sidra, Arrow, Merry & ChrisJay, as well as JadeLennox, former Systems chair; Coders Enigel, Flamebyrd, Amanda B, thedeadparrot, Afuna, Velocitygrass, gwumpybear, KendappaOu, Bingeling, Krytella, Sica, Betty, Rustler, & garlicbug; Karen Hellekson, who wrangles OJS, for Transformative Works and Cultures; Vera from Dev/Mem, who was the lead on the CiviCRM customization for our recent membership drive; Hope, Melina, Rache, and the wiki committee, who wrangle the MediaWiki software; all our members and users; you.

Links to posts by OTW staffers: (more to come!)

Job Search: Fanlore Graphics

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:11:40 -0700

Job: Fanlore Graphics

Description: Fanlore is looking for someone to design some small buttons suitable for sidebar display, in 100x100, 64x64, and 128x128 sizes, as well as various "badges." (Badges are about 210 px wide, and vary in height, but are generally rectangular.)

You can see the Fanlore wiki here. You are not tied to our color scheme, but we do want all the graphics to have a unified look, and be easily recognizable as part of Fanlore.

How to Volunteer: Email your designs to wiki@transformativeworks.org. Please submit one square and one rectangular sample of your proposed design.

Graphics cannot include any images under copyright, so no Batman or Fox Mulder, etc. Public domain images that you think are appropriate (books, computers, etc) are acceptable, but please make sure they are not under copyright. Of course, any work you would create on your own and allow us to use would be welcomed, as well.

Send us samples information by: March 24th, 2009.

March 2009 Newsletter, Vol 26

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:52:00 -0700

Welcome to our next newsletter; get progress reports from all your favorite committees and stay on top of your favorite OTW projects--right under the cut!

Abuse:

ADT/Archive:

AD&T spent most of the last two weeks on our recent deploy of new code to the Archive of Our Own. We're now on revision 1110!

We also have a number of smaller projects running including improvements to how Pseuds handle and the way Warnings are displayed on stories.

Board:

Communications:

Content Policy:

Development:

Documentation:

Elections:

Elections is looking ahead to the election season, and thinking about new ways to document our policies and processes.

Finance Update:

Journal:

The academic journal team is proud to present its second issue, a special number on gaming, which goes live on March 15th! Find us at: http://journal.transformativeworks.org.

Legal:

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee is putting its final touches on our zomg amazing Zine Preservation Project - stay tuned!

Systems:

The Systems committee has been working closely with OTW's DevMem and Webmasters to get, install, and test the new software for the drive.

Translations:

Vidding History:

Volunteers:

Website:

The Webmasters have been working closely with Development & Membership to prepare for the membership drive.

Wiki:

OTW Annual Report, 2008

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:08:29 -0700

OTW Responds to Questions from the Copyright Office Regarding Proposed DMCA Exemptions for Remix Artists/Vidders

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:47:45 -0700

The Copyright Office requested further information from the OTW and other groups that testified during the DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings on May 6-8. These hearings were designed to entertain testimony in favor of and against DMCA exemptions for media educators (including K-12 teachers), documentary filmmakers, vidders, and other noncommercial remix artists.

For those who are interested, our answers are linked here.

The first is a joint answer, collaboratively written, submitted, and signed by the OTW, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a number of library associations (ALA, AALA, ARL, ACRL), film and media studies professors, and documentary filmmakers and their organizations. (Joint Supporters Response To Supplemental Questions On Proposed DVD-Related DMCA Exemptions (PDF).)

The second is a separate response co-written specifically by the OTW and the EFF to address the particular needs of vidders and other remix artists. (OTW & EFF Response To Supplemental Questions, Specific To Noncommercial Video Remix Creators (PDF).)

OTW Files Amicus Brief in the Salinger Case

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:37:10 -0700

The OTW is proud to have been asked to collaborate with the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Right to Write Fund on an amicus brief in the pending Salinger/60 Years Later case. The OTW's Rebecca Tushnet and Casey Fiesler collaborated with lawyers from Stanford's Center for the Internet and Society and the UC Berkeley School of Law to produce the brief, which was served on August 3, 2009. The appeal is scheduled to be heard in New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeals in early September.

While the OTW isn't typically interested in defending commercial uses, we obviously do have a stake in the way courts define transformative use. We participated to support the position that the really restrictive definition adopted by the district court (seeing transformativeness very narrowly as parody and nothing else) be reversed on appeal. The New York Times and Public Citizen also filed amicus briefs.

For more information:

Download a .pdf of the amicus brief (right-click and save).
Read attorney of record Anthony Falzone's blog post about the brief, Confusion Over Copyright Injunctions And Other Restraints Of Speech.

United We Stand: Glockgal's Avatar Zazzle Site Restored

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:58:31 -0700

The OTW belatedly joins in celebrating the restoration of Glockgal's Avatar site on Zazzle. As you may remember, Glockgal's store was TOSed ostensibly for violating Viacom's intellectual property rights, even though Glockgal's items were mostly textual expressions of her critique of the all-white casting of the new live-action Avatar film. Viacom was quick to assert that they support fair use and only take things down when they aren't creative or political; they also invited Glockgal to submit a DMCA counternotice. The OTW was happy to help Glockgal formulate and direct that counternotice, and we have been so delighted to see people from all around the internet banding together to take a stand against unfair takedowns. This (relatively speedy!) victory is a victory for all of us and proof that banding together and defending our rights works.

The takeaway? If someone is infringing YOUR free speech or fair use rights, SAY SOMETHING. TELL SOMEONE!

OTW Represents Vidders And Other Remix Artists at DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings

Sat, 09 May 2009 16:09:41 -0700

OTW board members Rebecca Tushnet (chair of Legal) and Francesca Coppa (chair of Communications and Vidding History) and TWC review editor Tisha Turk went down to Washington DC on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Rule 1201 of Copyright Law prevents the circumvention of copyright protection systems (e.g. makes it illegal to rip DVDs or to hack your cellphone) but also requires the copyright office to hold hearings every three years to find out of this prohibition is adversely affecting anyone. In 2006, the copyright office granted an exemption to film studies professors, because the case was made that these professors need to rip DVDs to make high quality clip compilations to teach their classes. This year, there were a number of new proposed exemptions, including: educators beyond film studies professors (including K-12 teachers), documentary filmmakers, and vidders and other noncommercial remix artists.

The OTW previously submitted a reply comment in support of the EFF 's proposed exemption for vidders and other remix artists. Tushnet, Coppa, and Turk went down to support this comment with live testimony. As you might have seen across the internet, the other side--MPAA, studios, the people who make encryption technology, etc--suggested that instead of ripping, professors, remixers, documentary filmmakers and others make clips by filming a flat screen with a camcorder.

For more information:

* Audio files/podcasts of the hearings are available at the U.S. Copyright Office's website and mirrored by the EFF on iDisk. (Our statements are part 2, the Q&A is part 3.)

* Rebecca Tushnet liveblogged the hearings: read the part about noncommercial remix.

* Wendy Selzer of Chillingeffects.org posted about the hearings and also livetweeted them.

* Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University also blogged the hearings.

* Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has made a YouTube video summarizing the issues and focusing on the OTW and Rebecca Tushnet ("She's Awesome"). He also blogged his legal analysis.

* Rashmi Rangnath weighs in at publicknowledge.org.