The second of our two OTW elections chats was held at 2100 UTC 24 October, 2010. We've posted a transcript and screenshot for any OTW members or supporters who missed the event and would like to catch up.

You can read the transcript or view the screenshot here, on the OTW Elections website.

There's still time to become a member and vote in the upcoming election!

This party had it all: a glittery cake to fuel our server anthropomorfic challenge, a scavenger hunt, reccing and self-reccing fests, teamwork to help each other upload back catalogs, and a special tag just for party fic. Here's to another year of cheering each other on as we read, create, and transform.

Midnight to midnight is a long time to party but our wonderful guests have kept the energy high! Here are some details on our marvelous accomplishments:

• 1411 new works, 224 new users, 103 new fandoms!!!
• Archive Of Our Own Anthropomorfic!
• AO3 RPF!
• AO3 Party RPF featuring eye shadow and a sly reference to the OTW Brandbook!
• Collaborative AO3 Chat Party Poetry!
• Party icons!
• Our Favorite Things in the Archive. You can still add yours in the comments!
• 105K Works! A party-wide post-a-thon helped us reach our goal of 105,000 works posted to the Archive - and then we surpassed it! It was probably all that anthropomorfic...

We also compared time zones! And there were a LOT of them. During the last hour alone, the partygoers hailed from:

New Zealand — New York City, New York, USA — Buenos Aires, Argentina — Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA — Indiana, USA — Finland — Romania — Turkey — Quebec City, Quebec, Canada — Maryland, USA — Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA — Los Angeles, California, USA — New Hampshire, USA — upstate New York, USA — North Carolina, USA — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA — Niedersachsen, Germany — Dublin, Ireland — Seattle, Washington, USA — Missouri, USA — Ontario, Canada — England, United Kingdom

We even had a fandom roll call in our final hour! Check it out:

Classical music RPF — Can I call “crack” as a fandom? — Community — Disney RPF — Miami Vice — House — Doctor Who, ElfQuest, Anita Blake — Tokio Hotel — Sophie’s World — Highlander, Doctor Who, British Actor RPF — SGA — Beatles RPF — Fandom: YES. — baum’s oz books! — Sherlock (BBC), The Dresden Files (books), Doctor Who (2005), Temeraire, Hut 33, Traveler, Supernatural, Merlin (BBC), White Collar, Chuck — this one’s easy, I’m actually the ONLY ficcer in one of my fandoms! — David Eddings — Black Rock Shooter! — Power Rangers! — (monkees is the only fandom of mine where i have written poetry) — Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, DCU, Slings & Arrows, Promethean Age (oh GOD) — robotech is the only fandom that i’ve painted in! — Lord of the Rings — Vorkosigan — Man from UNCLE — \o/ Vorkosigan! — Star Trek, X-Files, Hilda Tablet and Others, McCarthyism RPF — Covert Affairs — elisabeth, tanz der vampire, mozart! — Jane Austen, Firefly, 28 Days Later, Once and Again, Breakfast Club, Naruto, Hikaru no Go, X-Files, Harry Potter — claymore, black rock shooter, pretty cure, akira (manga), belgariad/malloreon, elenium/tamuli, eureka seven, kino’s journey, gundam wing, aaaand dc comics — Hellboy II — oh also JAMES BOND — Sherlock Holmes. Book-verse. — Iron Man — Akira — Harry Potter, Star Trek, X-Men and X-Men: Evolution — Battlestar Galactica! — ooh, robin of sherwood was my very first fic-reading fandom — highlander films, historical fiction, stephen king’s rose red, raymond e. feist's riftwar saga (and everything else in those universes he wrote, jesus christ mr feist), spooks, spice world.

Gentle reminder: the OTW and AO3 are run through fan energy, commitment, and donations — and eventually we'll need more servers to slash with the existing servers. Please consider becoming an OTW member and donating to the cause!

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

We've heard some feedback that our post about the Graphics Challenge for OTW's Torrent of Our Own (TO3) was unclear. We've already received some amazing work, but we'd like to remedy any confusion. Here's what we mean:

We want images, audio, or video from you that celebrates and generates excitement about fan-made images, audio, and video! We will use your contributions to raise awareness of the TO3 and promote vidding and audio/visual transformative culture. Think of it as campaign materials -- like the images you see on posters, badges, bumper stickers and logos - we're asking you to help the TO3 to win the coolness election.

We have some examples for you! Here are a few in use to promote OTW and OTW projects:

by lim

by Laura Shapiro

Other examples are things like icons created to promote a fest (an example), graphics created to celebrate a type of format (an example), or banners created to reflect the theme of a challenge (an example).

This meta vid submission we received totally captures the passion of vidding! It's a vid made up of clips from other vids the author created - with a narrative on what vidding is and why it's important.

The Wonders I've Seen - Aruna7

By request, Aruna7 has provided a transcript of her narration:
Vidding isn't simply an easy way to fight with your computer, even if it can last for hours or day, as you struggle with ghost frames and other things of the like.

This is about expressing your views or enthusiasm, or frustration with characters.

Vidding is a work of imagination, [of] emotion.

This is about sharing what you love no matter how mainstream or obscure it can be.

Vidding can expand narrative possibilities or even rewrite the whole story.

This is about connecting with people, viewers and collaborators.

Vidding is about the love of fandom, creations made by fans for fans.

And this is an international art.

Ne l'oubliez pas. [translation: don't forget it.]

But then you will never know the wonders I've seen. [Farscape audio quote]

We want your icons, wallpapers, banners, and vids so that we can use them in our rally crying for the TO3! Your graphics will provide a visual connection that evokes the spirit and goals of the TO3, as well as why we're so damn excited about it. And of course you'll receive credit!

Submit something soon! Just email premiums@transformativeworks.org with your work in whatever format you think we can reasonably expect to be able to open and show people, and in whatever size or file dimension you desire.

Accessibility, Design and Technology would like to wish you a happy Ada Lovelace Day!

As the committee responsible for designing and building the Archive of Our Own, one of the largest female majority open source projects on the web, we're thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate women in technology.

The first code for the Archive of Our Own was committed in January 2008. Some stats for the lifetime of the project:

• 73669 lines of code
• 30 different people committing code
• 2238 code commits
• 276 people involved with the Archive in some capacity (as coders, testers, tag wranglers, or support team members) - not all of these people are active at the same time, but we think this is still pretty impressive!

We polled our volunteers to find out a little more about them before Ada Lovelace Day, and the charts below give a picture of some of their responses:

Approximately 97% of the people contributing code to the project and 93% of all Archive volunteers identify as female - this is a dramatic difference to the majority of open source projects on the web, and we think it's well-worth celebrating! Our sense of achievement doesn't arise from the fact that we're a female-dominated organisation, however, but from the fact that we've been able to share skills and enable people to become involved in things which they might otherwise have been excluded from.

Twenty-nine percent of our volunteers describe themselves as having no experience of working on technology projects before they joined us, and forty-eight percent say they only had a small amount of experience. Among our coders, a third had NO knowledge of coding before they joined, and very few people had worked extensively in Ruby on Rails, the core framework on which the Archive is built. Contributors to the project have learnt Ruby on Rails, CSS, systems administration, documentation skills, project management, quality assurance, information management skills, and much, much more. We've been able to develop a strong female-majority team because of a culture of encouraging the new and inexperienced - this benefits women, who are less likely to have experience of working on technology projects, but we hope that it also makes our project a more welcoming one for everyone.

One of the most exciting things about seeing this project from the inside is the fact that it is truly collaborative. The work of our 30 code committers takes place in the context of a massive amount of other work: designs are worked out collaboratively, documentations people help us keep track of all the things we're working on, testers ensure that the code does what it's supposed to, tag wranglers organise the content on the Archive, and the support team work incredibly hard to make sure our users have a great experience. Whereas in some open-source projects, the work of non-coders is seen as less important, we enjoy an atmosphere of shared endeavour in which everybody's contribution is celebrated. By working closely together, we also enjoy lots of cross-pollination, and we've seen many people move from testing to coding, or coding to support, developing new skills in the process. About 41% of volunteers on the project serve in more than one role - we believe that by providing space for people who want to specialise while allowing those who like diversity to branch out, the whole project is enriched.

We're proud of our enthusiastic, skillful, supportive team of volunteers, of all genders, and we believe that Ada Lovelace is a great time to celebrate a culture which welcomes everyone. In that spirit of inclusiveness, we'd like to close this post with some comments from the people from our teams:

The sense of community, inclusive of the most occasional tester and casual reader to the most dedicated coder and systems-person, is just so wonderful.

[One thing I'm excited about learning:] Learning how to test in general & regression testing in specific, and learning how to use the issues tracker for google code. It's fun! Testing has a great mentor, Eylul, it's easy to pick up and learn, and it's really satisfying when you see a fix for a bug you've discovered or tested make its way onto the archive.

[One thing I'm excited about learning:] Acquiring new skills (which I'm still doing): Ruby on Rails. It gives me great satisfaction, especially as I am out of work.

The development of the Archive of our Own is just a phenomenal thing to see. This big undergoing with every deploy, how everyone comes together to get this new release on its way. How many people with different jobs it takes to build this software and how people step up and pitch in and help out, regardless of if it is in their "job description", is really inspiring to me.

I really love that we're all working as a team (even people I don't see or know as they're on different parts of the project) to create something that's being used by thousands of people. It adds to a part of my life that until now, I've only really been an observer in, not a participant.

I'm really excited that I managed to leap in and work with a bunch of people I'd never met before, and am having a great time doing it. And I've learnt how to use a lot of tools, like google code [coders' bug management system], campfire [the OTW's chatroom] and 16bugs [AO3 Support's bug management system] that I'd never even heard of before.

Okay, and one more thing -- even though my part in the whole is tiny, I feel a great sense of accomplishment every time an update is deployed to the archive. I'm continually delighted by the fact that there can be so very many fingers in the pie, and it still ends up being a *pie* (that's tasty and delicious!)

We're happy to be sharing our pie with fandom at large! Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

This post is mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own, where you can comment with or without an Archive account.