Atención

In a week following widespread Internet protests against proposed legislation in the U.S., there is an effort going on internationally to protest the potential effects of ACTA. The OTW is concerned about this treaty which has potentially large implications but about which there has been very little information. "In October 2007, the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada have joined the negotiations."

"The main problem with this treaty is that all the negociations are done secretly. Leaked documents show that one of the major goals of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of three-strikes schemes and net filtering practices."

Tell your MEPs and government representatives you want more transparency before this is voted on. Here are some places where you can take action:

• Help sign the Written Declaration about ACTA
• Direct.Gov's UK petition
• Whitehouse.Gov's US petition
• E-petition (Deutsch)
• Suggested guidelines for contacting representatives

The OTW alerted fans back in October to the introduction of bills in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that threatened fair use and fan practices on online sites, and later urged fans to make their voices heard regarding this alarming legislation.

There is now information about the OPEN act, an alternative to SOPA. This draft bill not only addresses some of the problems raised by SOPA and the Protect-IP Act, but "the proponents of the Open Act (Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.) aren't afraid (and, in fact, are anxious) to hear from the many folks who care about the future of the Internet. So, they have opened up the entire law-writing process. Right now, you can go to KeepTheWebOpen.com and read the draft bill for yourself (which we encourage you to do) and make comments and suggestions to improve the draft language."

Besides contributing your input you can also learn more about the differences in the bills from a handy chart on the site, as well as their FAQ.

For those interested in continuing to express opposition to SOPA, the EFF has suggestions on activities for bloggers and artists, as well as continuing to urge people to contact their elected representatives.

December 5 is International Volunteer Day, established in 1985 by the United Nations as a day for celebrating and honoring volunteerism around the world. The OTW Board — both current and incoming members — wants to take this opportunity to say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all of the volunteers who make up the OTW.

More than 400 fans around the world currently volunteer at varying levels within the OTW; in almost every time zone, there is at least one OTW volunteer donating time, energy, and love to this organization and to fandom. We exist because of you.

Thank you to everyone involved with Accessibility, Design, & Technology (including all of the AO3 coders and testers); everyone involved with Abuse, Communications, and Content; everyone involved with Development & Membership; everyone who helps keep a eye on our Financial picture; everyone involved with Internationalization & Outreach; everyone involved with our Legal team; everyone involved with the Open Doors project; everyone involved with Support; everyone involved with Tag Wrangling and Translation; everyone involved with Transformative Works & Cultures and the Symposium blog; everyone involved with Systems and with our Wiki committee (and all of the gardeners and editors at Fanlore, too!); all of our Webmasters; everyone involved with our Vidding projects; and last but not least, our Volunteers & Recruiting team.

And hey: if you're interested in becoming one of our volunteers, please fill out our volunteer interest form — we'd love to have you join us in 2012!

In commemoration of International Volunteer Day, we tip our virtual hats to each and every one of you. Thank you so much for all of the work that you do.

All our gratitude,

The OTW Board

After the spotlight on the Translation committee, it's now time for our volunteer translators to shine.

Translators need to be highly inventive because many English fannish terms don't have a handy equivalent in their language (and that's not even counting the brand-new usages that were invented for the Archive of Our Own). Here are some examples of how OTW translators deal with this challenge:

Spanish: Inventing new words

When it comes to non-existing equivalents, the very adjective fannish is a case in point. Instead of rephrasing sentences, like the German team did, the Spanish team adopted a brand-new word coined in a section of Spanish fandom: fandomero. Neat! Here's a usage example: Lo que creemos [Spanish].

German: Incorporating feedback

When it came to translating the unique concept of “orphaning”, the German team took the feedback on the English term into account. Some Archive users had expressed their unease with the negative connotation of the word “orphan”, and because of the flexibility of German verbs compared to English ones, we could pick a less negative compound verb. Instead of our initial favourite, the vivid verb “auswildern” (“release into the wilds”) we ultimately agreed on the more positive “freisetzen” (literally: “set free”).

[alt text: Colourful word art on white background: The word “orphan” sits amid a jumble of German words in different colours and sizes, of which “auswildern” and “freisetzen” are the most prominent.]

Finnish: Staying grammatical

Even for established fannish concepts, there's frequently no existing translation.

While German and Spanish often solve this by borrowing English terms like “vidding” wholesale, Finnish grammar does not allow for this degree of integration. Because of the way Finnish words are inflected, our translators created the fresh composite “fanivideo” for “vidding”. (Here's an example: Fanivideoprojektit [Finnish].)

These are just a few examples of the kind of linguistic creativity our translators need. If this sort of language nerdery appeals you, drop us a note! We would love to have you on our team. In our experience, it's low-level, but relatively steady work. You don't need to be a professional translator, either – a native grasp of the language is enough, and we use a beta system to help smooth things out.

Our Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and Japanese teams are recruiting in particular, but we’re looking for more translators or beta readers for all our teams. We'll also gladly help you pioneer a language not mentioned!

Simplified Chinese
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Polish
Russian
Spanish
Swedish

As part of our series giving an insight into what goes on behind the scenes at the Archive of Our Own, Support staffer Sam has written up a day in the life of an AO3 Support staffer! Sam started out volunteering with the AO3 as a tag wrangler, and joined the Support team at the beginning of the July Ticket Blitz. He has degrees in journalism, English literature, and cognitive and discourse linguistics. He's taught skills-based computer classes for near a decade, so Support was a natural fit. Sam tends to jump on tickets involving CSS code and the skins; downloads, especially ePUBs; and all things Tag, as he's currently the liaison (read: troublemaker) between Support and Tag Wrangling.

By and large, Support is all about answering all the tickets that come in. To do this involves a whole lot of trying to break the Archive in new and creative ways, keeping a light eye on what the Coders are up to under the hood, and generally trying to divine what the users need and want.

There are a whole bunch of resources we use to do so (some of these resources are only accessible to staffers - we've linked the public ones):

• 16bugs - This is our main ticket tracker where we keep information on each ticket that comes in, and any communication with the user or other committees. This will soon (hopefully) be replaced with the Support Board.
• Campfire - The chat interface all AO3 committees use. Support has its own room where we'll request betas and comment on tickets, life, and fic; and we're often lurking in the Coders room, checking for surprise!bugs and fixes.
• Both the "Beta" Archive (the real one) and the Test Archive (where we test new code) - Sometimes we have to track down to see what a reported bug is doing and possibly see if it's already been fixed on the next release.
• The wiki "Knowledge Base" - One of our Support reps has been collating the answers to commonly answered questions into a massive internal reference source. This is awesome, because it helps ensure that knowledge gets passed on and we don't have to duplicate work.
• Google code otwarchive issues - The list of things-to-do for the Coders, to see if a bug is known or a feature planned (and occasionally provide all the information).
• Squee! - This internal squee page is where we keep all records that we're doing something right (700+ and counting). It helps us track what's working and also provides a nice place for people to go when they need a boost!

I pop open my email to see if anyone sent beta requests to the list or if any tickets have come in. (Most responses to users are beta-read by a second support member, for accuracy, clarity, and something resembling UK/US/CA/AU English.) I'll also log into Campfire and check the Support room, since several staff will leave their beta requests in there.

Both 16bugs and the Support form send an email to each Support staff when a ticket comes in. I tend to not read the emails themselves, but use them as a sign to go check 16bugs and see what new tickets are there.

Certain tickets we immediately assign to another committee (Legal, Abuse, Tag Wranglers) and wait for a response from that committee before contacting the user. Some committees will contact the user directly, some don't.

Since every ticket is different, I'm going to give examples of two recent tickets. (All confidential details are removed, but hi, users, if you recognize your questions!)

A ticket comes in from a user asking about a problem logging in with hir OpenID. I open the ticket in 16Bugs, and in the ticket set my name for "Assigned to" and "Status" to "Solving".

I've heard some talk about the discontinuance of OpenID, so I poke my head into the Coders chatroom in Campfire and ask if anyone has more specific information. I luck out and one of our Coders knows of two open code tickets regarding OpenID, which saves me the time. I open the tickets in GCode and skim them, seeing the current development status for OpenID (we're planning to phase it out).

To make sure the code is still working as intended, I use my own account as a guinea pig, setting up my own OpenID login, logging out and testing it. It all works, so I assume that the problem comes from improper configuration. I step back through the process involved and make detailed notes to set up OpenID. I add those to our Knowledge Base on the wiki so next time we have a question like this, the info is easy to find.

I then compose a reply to the user as a comment to the ticket in 16bugs. I also copy in the links to the GCode tickets into 16bugs for reference. After coming up with the response, I poke my head into Support chat in Campfire. Fortunately, one of the other Support staffers is on, so I ask hir to beta my response. Sie reads it over, we discuss and revise a few lines, and sie comments in the thread that it looks good. I copy the response from 16bugs.

In my email, already set to forward through the official email, I search and find the ticket email that came in and reply to it, using the copied text from 16bugs.

After sending the email, in 16bugs I set the status to "Solved". If the user responds, I can find the ticket in 16Bugs and reopen it as needed. When the user responds that sie doesn't actually have an account, I send back a betaed response on how to get an invite, either through the queue or through a friend.

Another ticket has come in regarding a tag that's misfiled - in this case, a fictional football team that has somehow been wrangled into the "Football RPF" fandom. Since this relates to wrangling policy, I'll mark the ticket to watch it and assign it to the "Tag Wranglers" and wait for a response from one of the Wrangling committee members before I send a response to the user. In this case, it's an easy fix by the wranglers, and I'm able to quickly notify the user that the tag has been re-wrangled.

There. My two tickets for the day - with the new influx of staff we've had, and a fairly slow inflow of tickets lately, sometimes I don't even get the option to do that many! (However, different times of year or new lots of code can produce a sudden uptick, so we take the rest while we can!)

Sometimes tickets aren't nearly as straightforward. Sometimes it takes time to track down the bug - while I'm doing so, I'll set the status to "Testing". If the response requests additional information from the user, I'll leave it as "Solving" until I can get a response from the user. If I find other bugs in 16Bugs or code issues in GCode, I'll leave links in the comment leading to them, as well as leave links to the active ticket elsewhere. If the ticket contains a feature request, I'll make a note on our wiki's Feature Requests page and if it continues praise, I make a note on the Squee page.

Let it be said: us Support minions are human. There are tickets that have us staring at our monitors in awe, wondering "how did they do that?" There are tickets where we realize we've answered the same thing frequently, and therefore need better documentation and/or to prioritize a bug fix. There are times that we look at a ticket and mentally draw straws about who gets to tell the Coders that the recently-fixed feature isn't so fixed.

All that said? It's all worth it. It's worth it, helping the users better interact with the Archive. It's worth it, seeing the feature requests and ideas. It's worth it, feeling like I'm contributing to the development of the Archive. It's worth it.

I've now knocked out a couple tickets, updated a page on the wiki, updated a bug on GCode, and tripped over a work I want to read. Never let it be said I can't take a sign! Off to read!

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

Even people who volunteer for the OTW can be unaware of the organization's different features and projects. There's a lot going on! I recently learned about a feature on the website that could use some more contributions, and may be getting some further development in the coming year.

The OTW website, transformativeworks.org, has a link to the Events Calendar always visible on the sidebar, right under the "Donate Now" button. You can list events by category, see the full calendar, or see events from only a single upcoming month. These events take place around the world and focus on a variety of fan-related gatherings and other happenings, including OTW events.

As an example, one category is Technology Events. That includes listings of in-person meetings and conferences as well as online events such as Ada Lovelace Day.

You're also welcome to submit an event! Submitted items are then reviewed and added to the calendar by OTW events staff. Anyone who is involved in a fan-related event, or even who knows about an event that is not yet listed, can contribute to the calendar. The form asks for a web link to the event's official contact information if possible, and includes a description field where you can add more information or a specific call to activity.

An example of how useful this can be is our listing for next year's Harry Potter convention in Orlando, Florida: Ascendio. Our calendar listings include the Ascendio Call for Papers as well as a reminder that fans should sign up for rooms if they want to hold meetups - such as gatherings of OTW members attending the con!

Another upcoming event is a drive to create programming devoted to fic, vids, podfic, zines, and fanart at Dragon*Con. A fan is asking the OTW community for help developing ideas as well as seeking OTW-related fans who might be interested in participating or in being a panelist.

The calendar is a collaboration between the OTW's Webmasters and Development & Membership committees. Web built it, and DevMem now gather, review, and post events. If this work sounds interesting to you, DevMem is looking for additional members. They would like someone who will pro-actively maintain the calendar; send materials to conferences and cons; and find OTW speakers/panels/etc. for events if requested. Please contact the Volunteers and Recruiting committee if you would be interested in volunteering!

When you fill in the AO3 support form and press 'Send feedback', your message wends its way to our trusty Support team, who answer questions from users of the Archive of Our Own. They provide help and support on all aspects of using the Archive, and provide a bridge between Archive users and our coders so that bugs get fixed and new features get coded! They are an awesome and dedicated team who love making sure that users have a good experience on the AO3.

What questions do Support answer?

All kinds of things relating to the AO3! If users discover that something is broken, or they want help figuring out how something works, or they'd like to ask for a new feature, all those questions come to Support. Sometimes users will send in broader questions about the OTW as a whole, or about fannish issues in general, and Support will also answer those or pass them on to someone who can (if you have questions that are not AO3-specific, you can also ask those via the OTW Communications webform).

What do Support do when they get a ticket?

The first thing a Support member does when a ticket arrives is to take a look and figure out what kind of question it is. Some kinds of questions are common - for example, we are often asked why they can only view 1000 works in a fandom (answer: to save our servers, but we're working on a better solution that will make it unnecessary) - and in these cases Support can quickly send out a reply. If it's not such a common question, the Support member might do a bit of testing to see if they can reproduce a bug, or consult with other teams: for example, they work with Coders and Accessibility, Design and Technology for technical bugs and feature requests, Tag Wrangling for tag questions, Content for issues about what kind of things can be posted on the Archive, and Legal for questions relating to the legality of fanworks.

This sounds like a lot! Do Support members have some kind of special skills?

They have the skill of beng awesome! But other than that, there are not too many specific qualifications for being a Support staffer. Most importantly, Support need to enjoy problem-solving and be able to communicate clearly and effectively. At present, we only do Support in English (this is something we hope to expand as the Archive grows), but you don't need to be a native English speaker, as long as you are fluent in English - one of our most longstanding and dedicated staffers, Anne-Li, is a native Swedish speaker. Support staffers also need to know the Archive pretty well, although they tend to pick up some of the nitty-gritty as they gain experience. Several Support staffers also serve on other committees, so they can contribute additional knowledge to the team, and thanks to the efforts of staffer Yshyn, Support are also building up an awesome knowledge base on our internal wiki.

What does the future hold for Support?

This is an exciting time for Support - they've just taken on some new staff members and are now working and planning for the transition to a Support Board integrated into the Archive. This will be a public-facing board where users as well as staffers can offer advice (along the lines of LJ or DW) - we think this will be great for transparency and for helping more people get involved in a more informal manner. However, it will be quite a radical change, so Support are now beginning work on some of the policies and strategies which will be needed to make that a success.

This all sounds awesome - can I join?!

Support aren't recruiting right now, as they have just taken on a bunch of new people and are readying themselves for a new model of working. However, the OTW does welcome volunteers across other projects - if you'd like to try tag wrangling or testing, or some other area of the OTW, get in touch with our Volunteers Committee. And of course, when the new Support Board becomes a reality, you'll be able to contribute more informally. Once we make this switch, there'll be more Support staffer opportunities in future, so watch this space!

Today we'd like to shine the spotlight on the Translation committee. While you have probably seen the fruits of the translator teams' work on the OTW website (and coming soon, the Archive of Our Own!), the Translation committee is the one pulling the strings in the background. Its three members hele, Tonje and Julia are responsible for organising and aiding the translator teams.

"Language nerdery" is part of the committee's everyday operations. The committee members help translator teams solve language puzzles (quick, what’s the equivalent of a “3rd District Court of Appeals” in Finnish? Wikipedia to the rescue!) and liaise with other OTW committees, such as asking Legal to clarify US-American concepts or discussing the intricacies of our multilingual website with Webmasters. We'll expand on the creative aspect of actual translation work in an upcoming spotlight — although all committee members share a fascination with language, actual translating is not part of their job description. Rather, the priority for the committee is keeping the teams up to date and organised.

The committee calls their project management style "creative improvisation". From the start they've had to fit processes and tools to a unique project that's ever-growing in both scale and scope (eleven languages on our website, and the committee has bigger plans yet). It’s definitely exciting, but it comes with a certain amount of trial and error, which the translator teams have been graciously putting up with.

A simplified graphic of the committee's modus operandi. Please note: this figure doesn’t accurately represent number or size of teams, committee relationships, etc.

If this work sounds interesting to you — in short, if you are interested in language-related project management — the committee is looking for a few additional members. Please contact either the Volunteers and Recruiting committee, or, for additional information, the Translation committee.

The International Outreach (IO) committee is a relatively young committee, founded at the beginning of the 2010 term. In a previous Spotlight post, we highlighted the basics of our work, but in light of the recent server names discussion, which directly addressed issues of diversity and representation, we wanted to take the opportunity to give people a few more details about what we do.

What do we believe?

We believe in the OTW's potential to be useful to a wide range of fannish communities, not only the one it originated from. This potential is one of the myriad motivations that inspire people to volunteer for the OTW; among them volunteers who are neither media fans, women, nor native speakers of English. By contributing their skills, experience, and opinions, they're already making the OTW's services more accessible to more diverse users, giving substance to the OTW's mission statement of "value[ing] infinite diversity in infinite combinations." IO was founded to help focus these behind-the-scenes endeavours, working to help other committees address issues from within.

Who are we serving?

We specialize in a very specific type of outreach: international outreach. We understand ourselves as a lobby both for current minority users and future users. The OTW's projects should serve fans of different languages and/or fannish cultures: Malaysian fans documenting their fannish history on Fanlore, Israeli authors uploading fic in Hebrew, French fans looking for information on vidding, or fans from any other tradition, whether they are part of the community that the OTW originally emerged from or not.

What have we achieved so far?

We're not particularly visible, because we haven't done any active "outreach" campaigns yet. We're first looking at the organization and its products internally and are acting in an advisory function for other committees, because we believe there's not much use in promoting the AO3 to non-English language fans if we don't have a translatable archive interface yet, or pointing people to our website when it implicitly assumes a US-American readership.

To give you an idea what projects we've been working on throughout our first year, here are a couple that have evolved quite far:

* we've been systematically discussing and rewriting website material
* we've been contributing to the OTW blog with more international news
* we have coordinated translations of blog posts and archive release notes, among other translation projects
* we've been meeting with Archive coders in order to discuss a host of issues, from language browsing to fic translation functionalities -- this was a big chunk of our work (more on the Archive's language functionality will be forthcoming in a separate blog post!)

Where do you come in?

If you're using one of the OTW's projects, chances are that you've run into an issue that isn't covered in any Known Issues list, or that you aren't sure how to address. And we know that sometimes, even if you make the effort to give constructive feedback, you're not sure how it will be handled and whether it will have an impact at all.

One of our reasons for writing this report is that we want to present IO as one of the venues inside the OTW that you can turn to with feedback, even (or especially) critical feedback: the committee was founded specifically to amplify and support concerns related to international accessibility. We are aware that we need to improve how we process user feedback (the Support committee and coders are developing a new solution for the AO3), but we also want to make sure you know that feedback is very welcome.

Our scenarios can only go so far in reflecting actual usage, and our collective experience can't always prevent biases or oversights. This is why feedback from our users and volunteers is so valuable. Please take this post as an invitation to contribute your experience: while we are looking for committee members, one-time advice is just as valuable. Drop us an e-mail (or, if it's about Archive functionality, a support request). Your input helps us move forward.

Signed, the International Outreach committee

Electra (USA), hele (Argentina), Helka (Finland), Ivy (USA), Julia (Germany), Natacha (France), Rodo (Germany)

Written by Franzeska Dickson

Tag wranglers are our biggest pool of volunteers, with over 100 wranglers around the world working to organise the Archive's 100,000+ tags. The wranglers put in a varying amount of work, each wrangler deciding for themselves how much time they can dedicate to wrangling. We now profile a week in the life of one of our... more dedicated wranglers...

Monday: Look at all those fandoms without wranglers. How is InuYasha still missing a wrangler?! I’d better do some emergency wrangling before it gets any more out of control. That’s funny: these character names aren’t in Japanese order. Or are they? Maybe the original manga uses names in a weird order. I’d better go look at Wikipedia...

5 hours later:

Damnit.

Tuesday: 20 minutes spent making a google docs spreadsheet of all the Japanese names. 5 minutes spent wrangling all the pairing and character tags now that I’ve decided on a standard format. 5 hours spent catching up on all the Tuesday tv shows. (What’s up with that, US networks? Why is everything on Tuesday?!)

Wednesday: Hey, I know that obscure 19thC novel! I don’t remember this character though. Maybe there’s a copy on Project Gutenberg...

Thursday: Robin Hood doesn’t have a wrangler. That should be easy to wrangle... Huh. There’s a megafandom page on the internal wiki.

...

Just how many Robin Hood adaptations are there anyway?! And they all spell the names differently! At least the megafandom team has a spreadsheet.

Friday: Characters and pairings seem pretty well under control, but my fandoms are full of freeform tags. Hey, ‘Bob’ isn’t a character in my fandom. Who’s Bob? I wonder if this is on Fanlore...

Saturday: Dreamwidth’s content search is awesome! I can search for my name, and my new fandom, and that weird word from word a day that I’m pretty sure no one has actually used in any posts. Look, someone posted about tag wrangling. And they have a question. That I know the answer to!

Sunday: This series isn’t even on Wikipedia. Maybe if I google it, I can find something. Hey, a bunch of the characters are listed on the TV Tropes page...

...
...

What do you mean it’s Monday already?!