Discussion

Over the past few months, the OTW Board has been brainstorming about how to promote diversity and inclusiveness throughout the OTW and its projects. This has meant evaluating the status of many diversity-related projects already in process to see how we may help them along, as well as exploring new ideas intended to promote the growth of diversity as our mission and aims further develop.

Diversity is an important part of the OTW's mission to "serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms." With members in 23 countries and more than 7,500 fandoms represented on the AO3, we're already serving fans from a wide variety of backgrounds; we want to make sure we are serving them well, and that we're building an organization that is welcoming and responsive to them and to others who may use our services in the future. Diversity enriches the OTW as well. A large and diverse pool of volunteers, members, and supporters is crucial to the OTW's long-term sustainability. Incorporating multiple points of view into decision-making processes helps us to more fully consider the potential impacts of our actions and create a better product, whether that product is a website or an outreach or advocacy effort.

One of the measures we have agreed upon is to work toward increased transparency, including in the early stages of projects. In that spirit, we've compiled this list of ideas — several of them inspired by earlier public feedback — that arose in our brainstorming sessions. Some of these ideas are already being implemented, while others will take planning and time to bear fruit. The list is far from an exhaustive answer to the question, "how can we make the OTW more diverse and inclusive?", but it is a beginning, and we intend to keep working on it.

A quick note on outreach. We are trying to balance between our desire to reach out, make our projects available to more fans, and actively seek input so that we can understand what more fans want and need; and the realities that our time and energy are limited, and we don’t want to be intrusive. We would like for communities which aren’t currently using the OTW’s projects to learn about them and to enjoy them, but we’re aware that presenting our projects in communities where we’re not yet known might come across as presumptuous rather than inviting. We hope to recruit more ambassadors who are willing to represent OTW projects in their own fannish communities; if this might be you, please let us know.

We welcome your feedback on these ideas and any other suggestions you may have. We cannot promise to act on all suggestions. However, we will read and consider all the feedback we receive, and we'll continue to share our progress with you as we work to make the OTW and its projects more inclusive of fans from a diverse range of backgrounds and fannish communities.

Organization-wide

• Actively prioritize and consider the potential diversity-related impact of initiatives and decisions.
• Encourage initiatives such as the forthcoming OTW community survey (discussed in this recent Symposium post) to help us plan strategically by identifying areas of need and potential resources for addressing them.
• Increase transparency about the work of the OTW Board by posting first-hand accounts by Board members in the OTW blog. (This would supplement our existing series of Spotlight posts that highlight the work of various committees and volunteer teams.)
• Offer public "open house" chats to take questions and feedback, and open training sessions to increase awareness of volunteer opportunities within the OTW. (This has recently been implemented; see, for example, this transcript from a session on AO3 coding and challenges.)
• Invite a series of fans from various communities (fandoms, countries, online platforms, etc.) to host public brainstorming sessions about how the OTW can best serve those communities.
• Related to the previous point: Publicly solicit suggestions about how/where to do outreach to fandoms where we could be of help.
• Encourage wider-ranging communication within the OTW by creating an internal discussion forum where staff and volunteers can talk about broad issues that affect the organization but aren’t necessarily part of their daily work. This could also function as a social space to encourage community-building across committees. (This has been implemented.)

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

• Redesign the "Post New Work" interface to better accommodate diverse types of fanworks: images, video, audio, text, etc. (This is currently in progress.)
• Develop fan art hosting capabilities. (This is currently in progress; we recently solicited public feedback on our draft content policies for artwork.)
• Translate the AO3 interface into multiple languages. (One of our coders is currently working with the Translation committee to build this functionality.)
• Improve the AO3's functionality for browsing works by language. (This is in progress. At present, you can find works in particular languages via the Languages page or by using the drop-down filter on works pages.)
• Redesign the display of meta information to clarify the relationship between a translated work and the work of which it is a translation. (This is in progress.)
• Improve the visual design of the AO3 to appeal to a broader range of fans, and encourage fans to submit public skins that reflect their fannish aesthetics. (This is in progress. The skins system is currently being redesigned; once that's done it will be much easier for users to submit public skins. The possibility of a skin-designing challenge is under consideration.)
• Establish an official forum where AO3 users can brainstorm about desired features and interact as a community. (This is the most tentative item on the list. We don’t yet know whether it’s feasible, but we include it here because several users have suggested it and we want to let them know their suggestion has been heard.)

Fanlore

• Recruit staff and volunteers who can help us do outreach to fan communities which are currently underrepresented on Fanlore. (This is an ongoing effort; please see the recruitment post if you are interested in volunteering.)
• Implement a Fanlore wiki forum, where users can ask questions, find answers, introduce themselves and meet one another. (This was suggested in the comments to a post on the Fanlore dreamwidth community; it's currently under discussion.)

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC)

• Publish articles on subjects drawn from a diverse range of fannish communities and practices. (TWC is doing well on this front; you can view our back issues here, and we're currently soliciting manuscripts for special issues on Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies and Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books.)

Fan Video and Multimedia

• Explicitly encourage inclusivity of a broad range of fannish traditions, such as fan art, vids, anime music videos, political remixes, fan films, fan trailers, machinima, podfic and audiobooks, and others, in our fan video and multimedia projects. To this end, we've recently revised and expanded the fan video section of our website, and the Vidding committee is working with International Outreach to invite fan creators from diverse communities and traditions to embed their works at the AO3.

If you have questions or feedback about this list, or if you have other suggestions to offer, please leave a comment. If you're interested in volunteering with the OTW, please contact Volunteers & Recruiting. Thank you!

This post is also available in Español.

In preparation for hosting fanart on the AO3 (that is, you will soon be able to upload art directly to our servers and not just link it from elsewhere), we are revising the official Terms of Service and our FAQ!

As always, we actively seek and very much appreciate feedback on all archive policies. The coding for fanart is still underway, and there is time to make changes, so if there's anything in this draft that concerns you, please let us know.

Fanlore, the OTW's fan history wiki project, is looking for help organizing the anime and manga areas of the wiki in anticipation of trying to beef up the content. In particular, they want fans familiar with the material to weigh in on the underlying category structures: anime vs. manga vs. comics vs. cartoons vs. animation. As they sum up:

We’re hoping for a system that will accommodate many needs, including those of manhua, manhwa, and a variety of animation and comics fandoms from around the world. If you have knowledge in these areas, we definitely want to hear from you! We hope to find a few fans who are excited about the prospect of chronicling and preserving anime or manga fandoms and their histories, who can help us 1) figure out how best to structure this corner of the wiki and 2) reach out to anime and manga communities for more participation once we have a good structure in place.

If you have the knowledge to help, please comment on that post or contact the Wiki Committee through their contact form.

Edited to add: a revised proposal is now up at the Fanlore dreamwidth community. Please go by and weigh in!

In our last newsletter, we mentioned that we were evaluating the policy on hosting original fic on the Archive of Our Own. This has generated a lot of awesome and passionate discussion, but also a lot of confusion, so we'd like to clarify a few things. (A personal note from Rebecca Tushnet: I phrased the inquiry badly, and I apologize. I'm 100% committed to supporting transformative works, as is everyone on the Archive.)

From the business section of the Guardian this week: Google seeks to turn a profit from YouTube copyright clashes. The article's subtitle gives you the gist: "Group is working to persuade music and video companies to cash in rather than clamp down when their content is uploaded." In short, Google wants to use their content fingerprinting system to report uses--even transformed uses--to copyright holders and then to offer them the chance to put ads on user-generated content. There's lots wrong with that, but perhaps the wrongest is the idea that the companies have the right to take things down because "because the use does not fit the original's values." C'mon, Google! Don't be evil!

In brighter news, UK Will Urge EC To Legalise Mashups, Format-Shifting, Content Sharing. This "could include legalising more outright copying, the creation of sound/image mashups, format-shifting and sharing material with family and friends."

Relatedly, folks seem to be figuring out that the DVR isn't actually the death of commercial television and that so-called "music pirates" actually buy more music. While we've heard this song before, optimistically copyright holders will eventually figure out that they shouldn't be afraid of new technologies.

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...?

You might think fighting robots only happens in video games, in which case: read the The Slow Road to Fair Use: Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video, a guest post by video remixer IKAT381 at politicalremixvideo.com. IKAT381 chronicles the three week--but ultimately successful--slog to get a vid up on YouTube, a process that included fighting the upload bot, which did an automatic takedown, lodging a dispute through YouTube's built-in online tool, and then lodging a DMCA counternotice when the dispute was denied (by another bot?) in favor of UMG, the record company that owned the Weezer song.

Persistence paid off, but as IKAT381 points out, "imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek."

IKAT381 concludes: In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots. In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

(You might also enjoy the vid. Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (Weezer Remix) is a tribute to IKAT381's favorite internet celebrities, of which you're sure to recognize more than a few!)

We're not taking any more votes. Thank you for participating!

As part of the process of building the Archive, we're not only busy adding shiny new features, we're also working on polishing up existing ones! One of the areas we're reviewing at the moment is Bookmarks. The core functionality is already in place, but we're in the process of designing the next version, and there's one issue on which we'd particularly like your feedback.

At the moment, bookmarks fall into two categories: private bookmarks and public bookmarks.

• Private bookmarks are visible only to the user who created them.
• Public bookmarks are visible to all and can be viewed on the bookmarks page (currently named "recs", but soon to be renamed in response to user feedback).

We're now considering whether it should also be possible to mark a bookmark specifically as a rec, creating a third category: recs.

• Recs could be either public or private (although we're assuming that users would mostly want them to be visible to other users!) and when public would show up on the bookmarks page. We would probably add an option to filter this page so that users could choose to view only recs.

We would probably add some kind of visual indication that a bookmark was a rec - see the image below for an example of a specific user's bookmarks and how the different types might be distinguished (click on the image to go to a larger version). Please note, this is a very rough impression. Our current redesign of bookmarks will make them look much fuller and prettier than this, and this is very much a potential concept design, not a finished thing. The red text is for labelling purposes, not a part of the proposed design.

There would be some advantages to this:

• People who feel strongly that there's a distinction between bookmarks and recs could mark theirs accordingly.
• People who are looking for recs would be able to easily identify them, and filter out those bookmarks not specifically marked as recs - for example those which are 'to read'.

On the other hand, every feature comes at a cost, and we can see some disadvantages:

• It will add another field to the bookmarks form, making another thing for people to fill in.
• Users can already tag their bookmarks as recs (or whatever else they wish), so readers can already find things which have been specifically recced.

We know from feedback that some people feel strongly about bookmarks/recs (as mentioned above, we're changing our terminology so that bookmarks aren't identified as recs unless the bookmarker wants them to be). However, we don't want to unnecessarily complicate things; if most people's needs are met by public and private bookmarks (which is, after all, how delicious.com works), there's no point in confusing the matter.

This is where you come in! We'd like to know what you think. We should note that we're not promising to follow the results of the poll - ultimately we have to go with what is technically feasible - but we will certainly take it into consideration. Please select the option you'd prefer, and feel free to say why in the comments, or suggest another option entirely!

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The OTW's Content Policy is pleased to put the following updates to the Archive's Terms of Service forward for two weeks of public discussion. The full Terms of Service can be found linked on the archive page, but for clarity, all emendations and new policy items are listed below the cut.

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.