Événement

Voting is now open in the 2011 OTW Board elections!

Voting will remain active for a full 48 hours, so you have until 12:00 UTC 18 November to cast your ballot. (What time is that where I am?)

To see the ballot and vote, you must be logged in using your voter account — that's a separate account from any other OTW-related accounts you might have, with a username consisting of randomly-generated numbers to make sure your vote is anonymous and secure. Your voter account username and instructions for how to set your password and log in are contained in your voter emails, so check your inboxes!

You can log in with your voter account here — please note that only a voter account will work there, so be sure you're using the username (string of numbers) from your voter email! If you have not received a voter email and you believe you are eligible to vote through a donation between 1 Oct 2010 and 17 Oct 2011, please contact contact the OTW Elections Officer.

Once you're logged in, the ballot can be found here, and you can read about our candidates here. Questions? Contact the Elections Officer.

You can read more about the elections process on the OTW Elections Website. A vote cannot be canceled or re-cast, so we encourage you to think carefully about your votes!

Additional text added at 15:31 UTC 16 November 2011 is bolded.

You can log in with your voter account here. Once you're logged in, the ballot can be found here, and you can read about our candidates here. Questions? Contact the OTW Elections Officer.

Our second OTW Board candidate chat is set to begin about an hour from now (find out what time that is in your location), and will be held in the OTW Public Discussion chat room, accessible at this link: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc. We're gratified by the active interest OTW members are taking in this election, and we're preparing for the chat to be a popular event. As we have so many awesome candidates and so many excellent questions, it’s going to be a challenge keeping this chat organized! Ira Gladkova, our OTW Elections officer and today's chat host, is sharing some details of how she will make this work smoothly for all.

We already have a queue of a over dozen emailed questions and expect to get a few more (Ira comments: You folks are AMAZING and it is so awesome to have this much participation!), and we also believe it's important to have time for live questions; this means that we know already that we will not get through all the questions during the live chat period. To address this conflict, we will alternate between live and email questions for as long as possible. If you are unable to attend, or would like to help us reduce "noise" in the chat room, please submit it using the OTW Elections contact form - that goes straight to Ira. The cutoff time for submitting questions is the end of the chat, at 9pm UTC/2100 UTC. Ira will announce within the chat when we are wrapping up, and remind people to submit any remaining questions they have.

All unanswered questions will be bundled together in groups of about 4, and Ira will send out a group of questions every 24 hours after the chat until we've run through them all. As before, the answers will be collected and posted along with the transcript. We’ll preview the first batch of questions at the end of the chat so the candidates will all see them at the same time.

For everyone attending who has a question to ask, we have a request! Please just say (I have a question!) in the chat at any time; Ira will keep a list and will call on you, so we can give the questions to the candidates one at a time.

And last but not least: As the chat happens, we will be posting a rough screenshot here, updated every 5-10 minutes. We hope that if we have any attendees who have trouble accessing the chatroom, this will give them the option of keeping up with what is being said, and allow them to submit questions via our contact form no matter what. That image will be linked here: click to view screencap (this will be updated on the original post on transformativeworks.org only), and an accessible text transcript will be posted within an hour following the close of the chat, along with the final screenshot.

More details about out elections candidates, as well as links to the initial chat transcript, can be found here, on the OTW Elections site.

Have you ever wondered about what it is tag wranglers do? Are you thinking about volunteering as a wrangler? Do you have a question about tags on the Archive of Our Own? Is your fandom in need of some temporary assistance? The Tag Wrangling Committee is hosting an open house! This is a drop-in session where you can ask us what's on your mind, or just have a chat about tags. We'll also have some AO3 invites to give away.

All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 15 October at 22:00 UTC (what time is that where I live?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc

The Tag Wrangling Committee maintains and administers the curated folksonomy system within the Archive of Our Own, assuring accessibility, diversity of fannish expression, descriptive practices, and a high level of user ease.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day from everyone at the Organization for Transformative Works!

Celebrating women in technology is a subject close to our hearts: when the OTW came into existence in 2007, one of our major motivations was the desire to give fans control of the tools and infrastructure which support fannish creativity. The predominately female fannish communities from which the OTW emerged have a long history of mastering new skills and sharing expertise for fannish pursuits — the vidders of the 1970s were pioneering mashup techniques decades before they became trendy! — and we want to extend that skill-sharing to the creation of a fan-owned home that welcomes all fans.

The vast majority of OTW volunteers identify as female, and the amazing things our teams have achieved demonstrate that they all deserve to be considered tech heroines! Below, we highlight the work of our tech-focused teams and the individual voices of some of our staff and volunteers.

We have now scheduled two one-hour chats with the candidates, open to all of our members and to the public. They will be held in the OTW public chatroom, accessible at this link: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc

While we strove to vary the times and days to allow better global accessibility for our membership, combining six schedules in order to allow all candidates to attend posed a challenge. If you believe you may be unable to attend but have questions for the candidates, we encourage you to submit them via our contact form to our elections officer, Ira Gladkova, who will present them on your behalf. Transcripts of elections chats will be made available as both text and as screenshots on the elections website shortly following each event.

The dates and times of the chats are as follows:

• 17 October 2011 from 7pm to 8pm UTC (What time is that where I live?)
• 26 October 2011 from 8pm to 9pm UTC (What time is that where I live?)

The candidates' personal statements will be available on the OTW Elections website beginning 17 October 2011. You may in the meantime feel free to contact our candidates unofficially to discuss the OTW and their views. They have asked the OTW to make available the following personal journal accounts:

• Jenny Scott-Thompson at Dreamwidth; at LiveJournal
• Nikisha Sanders at Dreamwidth
• Betsy Rosenblatt at Dreamwidth
• Lucy Pearson at Dreamwidth; at LiveJournal
• Naomi Novik at LiveJournal
• Julia Beck at Dreamwidth

Links are behind text to reduce random googleability and to keep fannish and legal identities separate. We ask that you please do not associate those identities publicly.

Election voting will run from noon UTC on 16 November (What time is that where I live?) to noon UTC on 18 November (What time is that where I live?). Voting is restricted to current OTW members; this includes anyone who has made a donation of US$10 or more between 1 October 2010 and 17 October 2011. To renew your membership, visit http://transformativeworks.org/how-you-can-help/support.

Further information can be found on the OTW Election website.

Do you test for the Archive of Our Own or would you like to do so? Now is the time to learn how! The OTW's Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee will host an introductory chat on testing for the OTW and the AO3. The chat is aimed at current testers, new testers, and anyone who thinks they might be interested and wants to find out what testing's all about.

The chat will be held on Saturday 30 July at 21:00 UTC (what time is it in my timezone?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc

Accessibility, Design, & Technology is the guiding body that coordinates software design and development on behalf of the Organization for Transformative Works.

The Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio, is doing an hour-long show on fan fiction today, Tuesday, July 19th, from 1 to 2 PM ET.

Guests will include Lev Grossman, who wrote a recent article about fanfiction for Time Magazine, OTW Legal chair Rebecca Tushnet, and Harry Potter fan fiction writers Beth H and Femmequixotic (both former OTW volunteers!) They'll also be taking phone calls from listeners, so if there's a point you always wanted to make about fanfiction: now's your chance!

You can hear the show on the radio if you're in Connecticut, parts of Rhode Island and New York, or you can listen live on the web or download the podcast after the show airs at the CPTV/WNPR website.

Happy April! Thanks to everyone who made our March happy with donations to the OTW! We hope we'll have an equally happy April with our April showers challenge!

Here at the Archive of Our Own we love seeing the numbers of works and fandoms grow! Since we entered Open Beta in November 2009 we've added 7567 fandoms and 148,092 works - we love being able to come to the AO3 for a quick fix of all sorts of fannish love! However, there's a whole host of fannish deliciousness which hasn't found a home here yet. There are tons of wonderful Sailor Moon fanworks out there, but only 174 Sailor Moon works on the AO3. The X-Files had a thriving fannish community on Usenet back in the day, but only 1088 X-Files works have made it over to the AO3. Figure skating RPF has a lively presence on Livejournal and elsewhere, but there are only 288 Figure Skating RPF works to be found on the AO3. We love the way fandom has found a home in all sorts of places - each fannish community has its own culture and its own hangouts - but we also want to help ensure that all that fannish awesome doesn't disappear when sites go down.

This is where our April showers promotion comes in! For the month of April, we hope you'll shower the Archive with your old works! If you have works sitting on a harddrive, buried in your old emails, tucked away in a box of zines in your basement, or filed away on your Livejournal, now is the time to upload. You can use our handy import feature to grab them easily from elsewhere on the web (many thanks to coder Rebecca who recently spiffed up the importer to make it work better), backdate them to show when you first wrote them, and use our pseuds feature to post them under your old fannish names (mulder4eva1993, anyone?).

Fandom isn't just about the fanworks, but about the awesome culture surrounding them! If you'd like to document your fandom in other ways, why not add something to our sister project Fanlore? You could create a profile of an awesome fan from your fandom, add details of the great fandom debates you have seen, give details of the major archives and challenges, or just add in a few characters' names. Record your history for fans of the future!

We'll be highlighting a different fandom for importing love every day of April! Follow our Twitter @ao3org to check out the fandom of the day! (You can also add works in fandoms not on our list - the more the merrier!) Tag your uploaded works April Showers Challenge - at the end of the month we'll round up all the works with this tag and post stats on how many were uploaded for each fandom.

We kick off today with an oldie but goodie - Star Wars! Use the force, fandom!

April showers of fannish love! Bring us your history!

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

Welcome to voting day!

We've run into a slight delay that we are currently scrambling to resolve, but with five minutes left prior to the beginning of voting, we suspect you'll encounter it! There will be voting account reminder emails coming soon, as soon as things are resolved. We'll keep you up to date -- thank you for your patience!

Yuletide Treasure, an annual fic exchange challenge hosted by Astolat and Elynross, is running on on the Archive of Our Own again this year. This is a big fannish event which has a big impact on the Archive: this post aims to give a bit more information about the relationship between Yuletide and the AO3 and to give Archive users an idea of what to expect while the challenge is running — roughly from now until the first week of January.

Yuletide is not an OTW project; rather, it's a private project created and moderated by two fans who make decisions about how it will be run. The timeline and parameters of the Yuletide challenge are set by the Yuletide moderators, and the Archive team expends significant time and effort to accommodate those needs for two compelling reasons: first, because it is part of the OTW's mission to support at-risk fannish endeavors such as Yuletide; and second, because Yuletide provides a valuable test case for the Archive, providing us with the opportunity to develop and refine our code in realistic conditions while the site is still in beta. Because of the size of the Yuletide challenge, it provides us with a level of use which would be exceedingly difficult to replicate under testing conditions. In addition, because one of the Yuletide mods is also a staffer with the OTW, we have the ability to work closely with them and get the feedback we need.

Yuletide is a very large challenge with thousands of participants, and it involves periods of heavy server traffic — particularly around the time of sign-ups, the story-uploading deadline, and the day stories are revealed to readers. Although our volunteers have been working hard to improve system performance, we know that this heavy traffic will cause the Archive to be slow, and we fully expect that some things will break. Please understand that this is the nature of beta testing. We know it's no fun to encounter a slow or buggy website when you're trying to view or post works, but by testing the Archive under the intense conditions of Yuletide now, we can learn where the problems are and how best to correct them while the code is still in beta. This is particularly important for us this year, as we're on the brink of investing lots of money in new, shiny servers, and understanding where the points of stress are in the existing servers will help us evaluate our needs going forward.

The Archive staff wish to express our gratitude to everyone who is assisting with this massive effort, including the coders, testers, tag wranglers, Support and Systems staff, Astolat and Elynross, and the many Yuletide participants who have pitched in to help with testing and tag checking. We would also like to ask all Archive beta users, including those who are not participating in Yuletide, for their patience and understanding during the next several weeks. We cannot promise that everything will run smoothly, but we can promise that this experience will help us make the Archive stronger, more resilient, and generally shinier in the future. If you'd like to participate more directly in making the Archive better, we welcome feedback and volunteers!