Newsletter

  • August 2013 Newsletter, Volume 72

    By Claudia Rebaza on Tuesday, 3 September 2013 - 12:16am
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    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. PERSONNEL

    August has seen people moving in, out, and around the OTW with new recruitment efforts and chair appointments.

    The Web Strategy, Design & Development Committee is actively recruiting for Web Developers. They are also focused on creating a process to support the 2014 Board election and on refreshing a substantial number of outdated pieces of documentation.

    Communications is also recruiting for a liaison to committees working on AO3 who will write news posts and do monitoring of AO3 News accounts.

    OTW's Board recently appointed hele as the new Translation Committee Chair. The staff will be discussing organization and procedures for the next few months, as well as make sure their internal documentation is up to date. Translation will be contacting committees to set up or restablish liaising relationships as soon as they can do so.

    II. LATE SEASON PLANNING

    Development & Membership is preparing for the October fund drive. They've also been working on documentation and considering possible revisions to membership renewal reminder e-mails.

    Accessibility, Design, & Technology has been working hard on the Rails upgrade, which was successfully deployed last week (see the Release Notes for more information). Many thanks to everyone involved in the coding and testing of this update! They've also been working through a list of topics focusing on organization and documentation before moving on to the next release. So far they've discussed committee structure and procedures, talked about our place in the Open Source community, and started a collection of things that need better documentation.

    For a new Archive milestone, AO3 passed 200,000 registered users last week! \o/ The committee contributed stats and figures to a news post about the occasion.

    Meanwhile, from July 15 to August 15, Support answered almost 450 user-generated tickets. Systems has been fine-tuning the Archive as issues arrive, setting up accounts for the OTW's new recruits, and working on a more universally usable 32-bit Vagrant distribution of the AO3 for the coders. They're about to start this year's installation of new and upgraded servers!

    AO3 Documentation is whittling down our list of FAQs that need to be updated. Once they are finished, work will begin on other external help text, as well as tutorials that need updating. They'll also be checking with AD&T and updating FAQs as new code hits the Archive.

    Open Doors has been working on a more comprehensive moderator agreement with much help from Legal, sent a committee role document to Board after feedback from many other committees, and corrected our archived copy of Demeter from a hardcopy of the zine.

    Journal is hard at work doing production for the next issue of Transformative Works & Cultures, which is on track to be released September 15. The Journal editors, Karen and Nina, are also working on a fan fiction studies reprint anthology, due out in 2014 from Iowa; the book has gone into layout and they're expecting page proofs shortly. Nina gave a keynote speech at a convention, and work continues apace for the first two issues of 2014, which are guest edited.

    III. GOVERNANCE

    Board set aside 19 August - 19 September for Project Document All The Things. What this means is that they are taking a month to focus on building, updating, and reviewing some of the documentation for how the Board functions and how it interacts with the rest of the OTW. This includes things like Board position descriptions and training plans, procedures for agenda management and issue tracking, confidentiality and conflict-of-interest policies, and more. OTW staff and volunteers will have an opportunity to review and offer feedback on each document before it is formally adopted by the Board.

    Fanhackers has gotten approval from Board to become a separate committee. They will continue working very closely with Journal and look forward to welcoming some new people in the near future. More info to come!

    In addition, Legal received Board approval to take part in friend-of-the-court briefing in two lawsuits currently pending in U.S. Federal Courts regarding issues that could have important impacts on aspects of fanwork legality. At present, our participation remains confidential, but stay tuned for more news on those briefs.

    Legal had an active month working with Communications, Support, Board, Quality Assurance & Testing, Volunteers & Recruiting, Open Doors, Systems, Development & Membership, Content Policy, and Abuse! They have also responded to a couple of legal queries from fans, and requests from outside the organization to participate in policy-related projects.

    Strategic Planning is currently finishing up their report on the Wiki Committee and Fanlore, as well as surveying Support, the Survey Workgroup, and the AO3 Documentation Workgroup.

    IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting finished working on our staff training documents just in time to welcome a new staffer, bookgazing while bidding a sad farewell to co-chair, Curtis.

    New Committee Chairs: hele braunstein (Translation)
    New Committee Staff: Melannen (Tag Wrangling), dizmo (Tag Wrangling), Lenore (Internationalization & Outreach), bookgazing (Volunteers & Recruiting) 1 other Tag Wrangling staffer, and 3 other Internationalization & Outreach staffers.
    New Communications Volunteers: Robyn, caitie, Erin Sullivan, 2 additional
    New Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Firefox

    Departing Committee Chairs: Agnieszka Siemienska (Translation), Curtis Jefferson (Communications, Volunteers & Recruiting)
    Departing Committee Staff: 1 Translation staffer.
    Departing Communications Volunteers: 1 Communications volunteer.

  • July 2013 Newsletter, Volume 71

    By Claudia Rebaza on Thursday, 1 August 2013 - 10:44pm
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    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. CREATING A BIGGER HOME

    In July, Open Doors was contacted by three archive moderators and they're developing plans to get their archive contents safely onto the AO3 (in addition to touching base with mods for archives already in their queue). Open Doors is also facilitating two donations to the Fan Culture Preservation Project, one of which is a rather large collection (approximately 35 boxes) of materials that is pretty exciting. Lastly, a point for celebration: all unclaimed stories in the 852 Prospect Archive collection have now been unlocked. Woot, visibility!

    Accessibility, Design and Technology have been doing lots of work on sustainability. They’re currently in the process of upgrading to a new version of Rails (the web framework the AO3 is built on), which helps ensure good security and means we can take advantage of new developments in Rails. They recently welcomed some awesome new recruits to our Quality Assurance & Testing subcommittee and they’ve been hard at work testing ALL THE THINGS to be sure the upgrade hasn’t broken anything. The Test Archive is now in need of some love, as we use it a lot, so AD&T has been working with Systems to plan for upgraded Test servers.

    AD&T is simultaneously preparing for a period of reflection, organizing, and decision-making that will start immediately after the Rails deploy. They've assembled a master list of topics to work through, and will have discussion forums and meetings as well as get-togethers to get some of the more fiddly work done (such as evaluating our list of open bugs to check that they are all still relevant and have the right information attached). They will reflect on conceptual and procedural matters, such as our place in the world of Open Source development, and ways to support and motivate our volunteers better. AD&T will also look into cross-committee processes and touch base with relevant partners. This period of reflection is a chance for them to catch their breath and take a look at the big picture, so that they can work more efficiently going forward.

    Of particular interest to users, AD&T has been working with other committees, including Support, Abuse, Tag Wrangling, and Internationalization & Outreach, on the plan for adding different work types to the Archive. This is a much-needed piece of work which will make it easier to mark and filter works by media type (art, video, text, etc), and has been a long time coming.

    Systems valiantly tried to keep the OTW mailserver from committing suicide, then split it into separate incoming and outgoing mailservers. They've have also tried out some additional monitoring systems (alongside, not instead of, New Relic) and are in the process of upgrading their ticketing system. Systems will soon be hard at work bringing up new machines for testing, beefing up the servers that run the Archive, and bringing up new virtual servers for Fanlore and the OTW’s internal email server, among other things.

    Lastly, Category Change is finishing up discussion on the remaining items from the internal feedback round about fandom categories on AO3, and will be dedicating itself to writing the public documentation for the proposal as soon as they’re done.

    II. LOOKING FOR HELP

    Tag Wrangling briefly re-opened wrangler sign-ups for a targeted recruitment, looking for volunteers to handle fandoms in need of some TLC. This call was so successful that recruitment closed again within a couple days! They’ll be reopening again within the next couple of months after training up our new people. There is also a team of wranglers reviewing AO3's religion, mythology and folklore tags, looking for better and more consistent ways to handle these complex fandoms.

    Journal put out a call for peer reviewers for Transformative Works and Cultures, so if you work in fandom studies or are interested in fandom meta, you can add yourself to their reviewer database. Journal just sent the next issue into production, on track to be released on September 15. The editorial team is working on the first two issues of 2014. Journal's editors also worked with Comms staffer Jintian on a spotlight discussing their production process.

    Communications held recruitment for graphics volunteers and have brought in four so far to augment our news posts with images. They are also planning to celebrate the 1000th subscriber to the OTW Tumblr account on Aug 2, which will feature work from its new recruits. The milestone makes Tumblr the third most followed OTW News outlet after LiveJournal and Twitter.

    Development & Membership's The Meetup of Our Own at San Diego Comic-Con was a great success! Around 90 people attended and we collected US$365 in donations. Many thanks to Legal staffer Heidi for her leadership role in planning and hosting this event. In other news, DevMem has begun planning for the October fund drive and is developing a training plan for DevMem staffers in preparation for recruitment.

    III. GOVERNANCE

    Board announced some changes to our officer lineup at the beginning of July. The current Board officers are:

    President: Ira Gladkova
    Vice President: Cat Meier
    Secretary: Kristen Murphy
    Treasurer: Nikisha Sanders
    Elections Officer: Eylul Dogruel

    Board held an open house chat for chairs, staff and volunteers on July 13-14 and approved Phase 1 of a proposal from Systems to expand our technology infrastructure. Phase 1 includes a new server for test and infrastructure, a temporary new virtual server to build and test the configuration for a new incoming e-mail server, and provisions for upgrading our bandwidth as usage increases.

    Board also adopted and announced a reimbursement policy stipulating when and how staff members may be reimbursed for OTW-related costs they have incurred in the course of staff work and approved a proposal from Volunteers & Recruiting to purchase e-books with which they will develop a library of resources on nonprofit best practices.

    They have also begun preparing for the 2013 Board election in conjunction with the Elections Workgroup.

    Strategic Planning has been interviewing the Support co-chairs and preparing survey questions for Support staff members. They also interviewed the current Wiki chair to update information in the Wiki/Fanlore report that is being drafted. It should be finished along with the Systems report next month.

    IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting is nearing the end of the foundation stages of building a chair and lead training program. They are also actively working on finishing their committee’s training plan in preparation to recruit for their own committee.

    New Committee Staff: 1 AD&T staffer
    New Communications Volunteers: Diane Quintal, Bremo
    New Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Gnine, asa, Ruth Damaris, skieswideopen, Baranduin, Claire J. Vannette, sesanye, Ketsu, breadfuls, bscl43, Zain, Liviapenn, Temaris, KeevaCaereni, radondoran, Carrie Haase, Katy Armstrong, antrazi, Jennifer Tifft, Camilla M., jsparc, Gills, Anne R, Llwyden ferch Gyfrinach, Selenay, Lillian Bolen, slylytouchingly, bluehooloovo, Brianna Smith, Lbilover, Swamp Adder, wendymarlowe, DebetEsse, Wordwitch, ereshai, Firefly_Ca, Rav, Alix Mason, Lee H., strina, 3 additional tag wranglers.
    Departing Committee Chairs: Moose (Systems)
    Departing Committee Staff: 1 Systems staffer
    Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: 17
    Departing Tester Volunteers: artisan447

  • AO3 Newsletter - May/June/July

    By Camden on Tuesday, 16 July 2013 - 7:02pm
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    Hello AO3! This newsletter has been, um, a long time coming for which we sincerely apologize. Here's what we've been up to in the past three months.

    Cool stuff on the Archive!

    To our overwhelming delight, Time Magazine named us as one of the "50 Best Websites of 2013." Thank you to everyone -- from staffers to users -- who make this website what it is!

    852 Prospect moved in with us in May. This move was orchestrated by the hard work of the 852 Prospect archivists, Open Doors and AD&T. Please join us in welcoming the Archive to the Archive!

    Tag Wrangling has been hard at work with their new tools to help users search by original language titles as well as transliterated fandom titles. Check out more information about these tools here.

    There were two small deploys in early May and late June: Releases 0.9.6.1 and 0.9.7. 0.9.6.1 focused on code needed for the 852 Prospect move as well as a couple of fixes. 0.9.7 included more fixes as well as integrating Travis-CI into the testing process.

    Our Content Policy workgroup has been hard at work with our TOS and FAQ in anticipation of the inclusion of fannish nonfiction on the Archive. These proposed changes went up for public review at the end of June. We thank everyone who provided input!

    The OTW unveiled the Archive of Our Own Diversity Statement, a statement which has been years in the making. We encourage you all to read it and hold us to it as we continue to develop the Archive in the many years to come.

    What’s up in the world of tags?

    Several small changes to guidelines have clarified what freeform tags we canonize, including how we handle episode tags and fandom fusion AUs - check out the subtags of Alternate Universe - Fusion to find Jane Austen fusions and your fandom favorites with Pokemon! We've also changed guidelines for translated fandom tags, so you may notice Japanese, Cyrillic, and other non-Latin alphabets when browsing the fandoms lists.

    Adventures with Support

    We have new people! Annie, girlmarauders, and Katherine have all joined our merry little band. Bring on the tickets!

    AD&T Committee business of note

    AD&T has been busy with small fixes and releases as well as working on documentation and necessary groundwork to recruit new coders in the fall!

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We've inducted and trained almost 50 new volunteers in May, and are planning to re-open wrangling volunteering on a limited basis in July. The wrangling staff has also posted several more advanced tutorials for both our new wranglers and experienced wranglers, so all of us are wrangling "on the same page", so to speak. With over 12,000 canonical fandoms on the Archive, all the work of our wrangling volunteers is very appreciated!

    Questions? Comments?

    We welcome feedback from users! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments of the latest news post, or send in a Support request (if you're reporting a bug, please send that to Support, as they're super efficient - comments on our news posts sometimes get overlooked).

    Mirrored from an original post on AO3 News.

  • June 2013 Newsletter, Volume 70

    By Curtis Jefferson on Wednesday, 3 July 2013 - 2:20am
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    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. FANLORE PASSES 25,000 ENTRIES

    Communications worked with Legal and Wiki to hold a celebration for Fanlore’s 25,000th article with a trivia contest. There were three winners, whose prizes have already been sent out by Development & Membership.

    Comms, Legal and DevMem have also been working together on plans for a San Diego Comic-Con event involving both a meetup and news coverage which will kick off on July 17.

    II. DEVELOPMENTS AT THE AO3

    Accessibility, Design and Technology has been hard at work fixing things. The AO3 is breaking traffic records every week and the critical Test environment is back in working order which will allow other work to move forward. For the details people, the Test change was an upgrade to the staging server so that it better mirrors the production archive servers; this should help with deploying code more smoothly and catch more bugs.

    AD&T is also laying the foundations to recruit new coders by September.

    Structure update: Accessibility, Design, & Technology now has a Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) sub-committee led by Lady Oscar. QA&T has recruited people and run its first induction / training session. Welcome to our fabulous new recruits!

    Deploys: Two small deploys occurred in June making up Release 0.9.7, which included a few critical bug fixes, some TOS fixes, and the Diversity Statement page. Next up: Rails upgrade!

    Internationalization & Outreach was delighted to announce that the Archive of Our Own's Diversity Statement went live. This project was three years in the making, and they'd like to thank AD&T, Support, Tag Wrangling, and everyone else who contributed time, energy, and feedback to seeing it completed.

    Content Policy completed another iteration of ToS/FAQ revisions which involved changes regarding meta and were recently posted for public comment.

    Abuse has been extremely busy. They have received a tremendous number of cases of late, many of them alleging plagiarism. Also on the rise are incidents of the Archive being used as a blog or tumblr for announcements. They are considering expanding the committee soon to help with the workload.

    Tag Wrangling has posted several more advanced tutorials for both new and experienced wranglers. They also made some guideline additions, the most significant being new rules for translated fandom tags, so you may notice Japanese, Cyrillic, and other non-Latin alphabets when browsing AO3’s fandoms lists.

    III. OVER AT THE OTHER PROJECTS

    Open Doors has been working on a few potential archive imports, continuing 852 Prospect tasks (helping authors claim stories, uploading stories that imported incomplete, and updating redirects), and committee documentation.

    Journal put out a special guest-edited issue on Comics on June 15, right on time. Although TWC is listed in databases as coming out twice a year, Journal had been adding third bonus! issues. They are putting the finishing touches on the issue to be released in September, but mostly the editorial team is focusing on the first two issues of 2014. Meanwhile, Fanhackers is posting apace!

    Legal co-signed a legal brief seeking rehearing of the case of Hart v. EA, supporting people’s ability to use public figures’ identities in expressive works; successfully helped an OTW member counter-notify against a DMCA takedown of her podfic, which is now back online (yay!); and responded to a number of queries for legal help, consultation, and information from Wiki, Open Doors, Support, Tag Wrangling, FinCom, VolCom, Comms, Abuse, and others inside and outside the organization.

    IV. DOCUMENTATION

    The 2012 Annual Report was posted mid-month and provides a summary of the organization's activities during the past financial and calendar year, financial statements for 2012, and goals for 2013.

    Strategic Planning’s report on Open Doors has been released to the public. Please send them any comments or questions. Support has volunteered to be their next team for review, so they’re putting together surveys and interviews for them now.

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting put out an internal Quarterly Report for the first quarter of 2013. These reports are a new mechanism for the committee to keep the rest of the organization up-to-date on their work and on some of the numbers related to the overall volunteer program.

    New Committee Staff: Jessica C. (Systems), Hak42 (Web), Ellen Fleischer (Web), Patti Reeves (Web), Annie (Support), girlmarauders (Support), 2 other Support Staffers & 2 other Web Staffers.
    New Communications Volunteers: Natasha Rajendran
    New Tester Volunteers: Leigh Berry, Kryptaria, Runt, Etharei, Camilla M., Eve Forbes, ljunattainable, Katy Armstrong, Key Foster, Northern_Star & 4 others

    Departing Directors: Maia Bobrowicz
    Departing Committee Chairs: Jay Bee (Open Doors)
    Departing Committee Staff: Amy Wilson (Open Doors), and 2 Communications staffers.
    Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: KindKit, ar, Jessica, Stealth Noodle, spock74, Amber, and 5 others

  • May 2013 Newsletter, Volume 69

    By Claudia Rebaza on Sunday, 2 June 2013 - 6:40pm
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    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. FANS AND OTW IN THE NEWS

    May saw an important accomplishment by the OTW: the successful importation of 852 Prospect to the AO3. Open Doors has been happily tying up loose ends since then by uploading any missing content, and helping authors claim their stories, remove duplicate stories, and update redirect links.

    However other major news and activity came from other sources. The AO3 got some national kudos as one of TIME magazine's choices for the 50 Best Websites of 2013. Later on, the announcement by Amazon that it would be launching a pay-version for fanfiction through its self-publishing infrastructure got a lot of media attention and Communications has been fielding a number of media requests from around the world seeking comment.

    Legal staffers were among those who responded to press inquiries about the implications of Amazon's Kindle Worlds program, and their post on the matter was awaited by many fans. Legal also passed along a request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asking for help from fans to combat a legal challenge to podcasts.

    II. KEEPING YOU INFORMED

    The Wiki Committee will be celebrating Fanlore's 25,000th article in a few weeks. A trivia contest is in the works and fans are encouraged to stop by the site, whether they're taking part or not.

    Journal is right on track for the June 15 publication date for No. 13, a guest-edited issue about comic books. It is going through proofreading right now. Fanhackers is posting some great stuff, notably a series by Emma England on Worldcon (Emma is organizing the academic track for Worldcon/Loncon in 2014).

    Strategic Planning received great feedback on their VolCom report. Their report on Open Doors is being prepared for release in early June. Reports on the Wiki Committee and Fanlore team should be ready for review by the end of June.

    Category Change is currently gathering internal feedback about their proposal draft. After this is done, they will present this draft to the AO3 users.

    Tag Wrangling inducted another 50 wrangling volunteers; we now have over 200 wranglers! The wrangling staff posted additional tutorials to train wranglers in more advanced actions. In addition to cleaning up most of our busier fandoms, our wranglers new and old have also made inroads organizing the vast number of cross-fandom Additional Tags, with almost 300 new canonical No Fandom tags added to the database in the last month (and many times more tags canonized or synned.)

    III. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has continued working with chairs and leads on opening roles for recruiting, passing along applications, and processing inductions. They also recently approved a project plan for developing Chair & Lead Training that will be prioritized over the next few months.

    New Staffers List: C. Ryan Smith (Communications), Cynthia (Communications), 6 other Communications Staffers, and 1 Accessibility, Design & Technology: Quality Assurance & Testing Staffer.

    New Workgroup Members: Wereleopard58 (AO3 Docs), bottledyarn (AO3 Docs), Shelley (AO3 Docs), and 9 other Ao3 Documentation Workgroup members.

    New Tag Wranglers: Scheherazade, Kalle Kinnunen, maplewing, Masu Trout, Cake, TheEnabler, MightyKumquat, viennajones, ACarrao, Zoe, Titan, Love_82, antisock, cyanides, tinytransistors, Tonko, Crowley, Tylah, dafna, Milena Daniels, wolfpacklove, taliahale, lalalalalee, Mareen Fischer, Chaneen, FishieMishie, kensie, Dana Leigh Brand, birggitt, PeggyO, Faefyre, Exoplanetaryactivism, Aster Raven, Turboetana, Christina, Splashy, skyearth85, Itachi, Meninaiscrazy, AMary, Silver_kii, Katherine Sapede, CharlieBravoWhiskey, Sydni, fruitbat00, IShouldBeWriting, kyburg, and 1 other Tag Wrangler.

    Departing Chairs: Natacha Guyot (Fan Video & Multimedia)
    Departing Staffers: Natacha Guyot (Fan Video & Multimedia), Sole G. (Support, Tag Wrangling)
    Departing Tag Wranglers: Karen Burkey & 2 others

  • April 2013 Newsletter, Volume 68

    By Claudia Rebaza on Thursday, 2 May 2013 - 9:56pm
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    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. DONATIONS & VOLUNTEERS ARE COMING!

    There were two huge pieces of news for the OTW this month: the success of its membership drive and its new volunteer recruitment system. Development & Membership received more than 2,054 individual donations totaling US$53,243.99 over the 3-9 April drive period. Thank you to everyone who participated! (See the thank-you post for more about the drive.)

    We would also like to say a huge "thank you" to the mods, writers, and bidders of http://ao3auction.tumblr.com, an independently organized fan auction benefiting the OTW. The auction recently closed with an amazing pledge total of US$16,729! For tax reasons, the OTW cannot officially endorse third-party fundraisers — that's why we didn't promote the auction while it was still going on. However, we're extremely grateful when fans choose to put on such events. Aside from the money they raise, it means a lot to all the OTW staff and volunteers to see our fellow fans making such a wonderful show of support for our work. Thank you.

    Another happy event was the success of the new Volunteers & Recruiting process and the reopening of volunteer recruiting. The new system was the culmination of months of work involving people from across the organization. Many thanks are due to the Webmasters Committee for their work and support in creating the new volunteering page. VolCom will continue to work with chairs and leads to get additional roles open and projects staffed as efficiently as possible.

    VolCom's next major projects include an audit of access to organization tools, chair training and support documentation, personnel privacy and confidential information guidelines, and collecting training resources that can hopefully be used across the organization.

    A large number of applications for the AO3 Documentation Workgroup and Communications Committee are being reviewed by those groups and the positions should be filled in coming weeks. In the meantime 53 new tag wranglers have already been inducted and are going through training!

    *New Staffers List*: Matty Lynne (Abuse)
    *New Tag Wranglers*: Sumeria, Claire, KeriArentikai, dizmo, Zeggy, Eleanor, vtn, subluxate, ParkerStark, Lia Ferrari, Abbie, JanOda, Sibilant, PetuniaDreaming, Eve Forbes, Nikibee, AiedailEclipsed, BeautifullyHeeled, miss_lucy, pedanther, Erin C., Elizabeth Young, Delwyn Cole, spock74, very, thegiggleloop, jet, Terizia, Helen Ryan, Adrienne Gorney, mmmdraco, Rachel S, lkthegreat, Janejenajeny, Jess, SevenCorvus, Alisha Miller, Yuppu, KeroseneChica, Cat P., Marta Kwasniewska, readerofasaph, stasha2g, Impsy, hvalrann, llutien, wantstothrill, tealeafer, blackPlague, PatentedPineapple, Zhang, WTCelesta, mremre
    *New Testers*: Jenny Scott-Thompson

    *Departing Staffers*: Alex Jenkins (Journal), Arrow (Systems), Matty Lynne (Tag Wrangling), Jenn Calaelen (AD&T)
    *Departing Testers*: Jenn Calaelen
    *Departing Tag Wranglers*: Kim McGreal

    Tag Wrangling had such an overwhelming response that the OTW had to hit the pause button long enough to catch up! They should be re-opening recruitment as soon as the committee has finished helping the new wranglers settle in. In concert with that, the staff have been hard at work putting together a comprehensive training plan; basic tutorials are already completed and in use, and more advanced instruction is on the way. Meanwhile our new wranglers have enthusiastically begun helping all our experienced hands in cleaning up tags in fandoms across the Archive.

    II. CHANGES AT THE AO3

    Accessibility, Design and Technology's deploy early in April to the Archive of Our Own included a major revision to the Archive header and some new designs for emails and they've had lots of feedback about both. Most users are enjoying the new header, which makes it a lot easier to find things on the Archive. Reactions to the new emails have been more mixed: we’ve listened to all the feedback and will make some changes to address common concerns, although we won’t be able to implement these immediately.

    AD&T is gearing up for two more important pieces of work which have been on their (and Open Doors's) to-do list for a while. The final touches are being put on the code needed for the long-planned import of the 852 Prospect Archive: we’ve done a test run and are almost ready for the real thing. Once this code has been deployed, they’ll be doing a big revision of the site to switch it to Rails 3.2 (Ruby on Rails is the web framework the AO3 is built on). This is a really important piece of work which will help to ensure site stability and security going forward.

    Meanwhile Support will be having another Open Support Chat. On May 4th-5th, scheduled from 16:00 UTC on the 4th to 04:00 UTC on the 5th so if you're having problems with the new AO3 features or other workings of the site, stop by and chat with them!

    Internationalization & Outreach has been working with AD&T to finalize plans to put the Archive Diversity Statement up on the AO3 later this month. As part of this process, I&O is currently seeking feedback from OTW staff on the statement.

    Abuse dealt with a combination of plagiarism, spam and warnings/ratings complaints, as well as a marked increase in reports of blog-type posts and announcements being uploaded as fanworks. This could be due to a confusion of what constitutes meta or simply enthusiastic and unknowing fans assuming the Archive also works as a social media site. Content Policy is still reviewing and integrating feedback to the AO3 for a revised Terms of Service document.

    April Showers also came to a close at the AO3 and Fanlore. A quick scan of its 30 days of activities can be seen at the Fanlore twitter and through the april showers hashtag on Tumblr.

    Lastly, but never least, Systems has been working to close holes in their documentation as well as finding better ways to formalize their training procedures and better track the committee's projects. They're also testing out the latest version of Debian Linux for our servers, setting up test servers to reflect production systems, plotting upgrades, and continuing their plan to take over the world ;)

    III. THE OTW IN REVIEW

    Board and Finance have been working on the 2012 Annual Report along with Communications. And Strategic Planning released their report on Volunteers & Recruiting. They have already received excellent and useful feedback, and are looking forward to more. Their report on Open Doors is currently being reviewed by Board, and the report for the Wiki Committee and Fanlore is in progress. The Translation survey has also begun.

    IV. NEW CONTENT

    Legal has been (1) answering lots of answering internal queries from various corners of the org; (2) putting together the Canadian Law Q&A for the transformativeworks.org blog; (3) starting work with ChillingEffects to update their FAQ on fanfiction; and (4) handling a few external queries.

    Journal is working with guest editors for the first two issues of 2014. The next two issues of 2013 are in various states of undress but are mostly done. The Fanhackers blog has been building content since its launch last month, including some interesting discussions of fandom internationally.

  • March 2013 Newsletter, Volume 67

    By Claudia Rebaza on Tuesday, 2 April 2013 - 5:23pm
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    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. COMPLETING PROJECTS

    The Survey workgroup, together with Communications, compiled and released the OTW's 2012 Community Survey Report. The 183 page report contained information from all 89 survey questions and cross-tabulated results. There were 5,895 people who provided feedback about their use of our projects and awareness of our activities. The OTW wants to thank everyone who gave their time and feedback!

    Journal had a big month as well. The reboot of the Symposium blog - now called Fanhackers - launched after months of hard work. It went live on March 1 with the help of Systems, Webmasters, and Legal. On March 15, Journal released Issue 12 of Transformative Works and Culture, a guest edited issue on Boys' Love. Co-editors Karen and Kristina also represented the OTW and Journal at academic conferences in March, where they presented on panels and solicited work for future issues.

    Some important AO3-related documents have also been in the works. Cross-committee discussions took place over the last few months resulting in a new version of the AO3 Roadmap. And Content Policy hosted a two-week feedback period on the fandom nonfiction proposal, which will now be revised and submitted for Board approval.

    II. PREPARING FOR APRIL

    Wiki and Accessibility, Design and Technology have been preparing for our annual April Showers event, which highlights a different fandom each day. The challenge invites users to post their fanworks or contribute to articles on Fanlore. They will be blogging daily on Tumblr and tweeting about the event throughout the month.

    AD&T has also been documenting their staff and volunteer roles and are finishing up the required documents for Quality Assurance & Testing in preparation for recruiting. They've also been preparing for the next code deploy, which is going to be an attention-getter for AO3 users since it will involve a new front page and header bar. They are also already preparing for the following deploy, which will be an upgrade to the Rails software.

    Tag Wrangling has also worked with AD&T, testing some wrangling-related features coming out in the next Archive deploy, and dealing with bugs in the wrangling system. They've also been busy revising their training plan, policies and documents to prepare for recruiting new wranglers.

    Open Doors has mainly been working on documentation this month, setting their sights on import testing. On the Fan Culture Preservation Project front, Jeremy Brett (archivist) will be presenting his paper, Good Practices and Recommendations for Archivists Working with Fannish Materials, at the Eaton Science Fiction Conference on April 12. It's been great to have been a part of his project and the OTW hopes it will lead to more widespread understanding of fan collections in the future.

    Strategic Planning's second report, on the Volunteers & Recruiting Committee, is currently being reviewed by the Board, and they plan to send their third report (on Open Doors) to the Board for review by the middle of April. They are also working on the report for the Wiki Committee and Fanlore, and putting together the first survey for Translation.

    Finally, Development & Membership has been busy preparing for our upcoming membership drive, which will be held April 3-9.

    III. MORE TO COME

    Abuse saw the first case where they called on Translation for help with a plagiarism question. In this case, neither work was in English, so the help of Translation was vital in resolving the issue. Abuse also compiled an internal report listing cases by fandom and type of complaint. Plagiarism and content which violated our Terms of Service (such as prompt requests, placeholders, blog posts, non-meta and non-fandom material, links to contests, and spam) were the top reasons complaints were submitted.

    Systems is sad to report that their chair, Arrow, has stepped down from the group. Amanda and Moose are the new Co-Chairs for the committee. They have also been planning server upgrades and changes, which will make rolling out new servers easier.

    Webmasters is part of a team with Communications and Development & Membership to assess content on the OTW website and bring it up to date. Those involved met for the first time in March and will be reviewing content in the coming months.

    IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has been working on the last stages of recruitment revision with a goal of rolling out the new process in April. They have been working with chairs, leads, and other committee staff in preparing documentation and with Webmasters on the final updates to the new volunteer landing page.

    This month, they also welcomed a new co-chair, Curtis Jefferson, converted the Vidding Workgroup into the Fan Video & Multimedia Committee, and have partnered with Board on monthly chair/lead e-mail discussions set to start in April.

    New Chairs: Amanda Furrow (Systems Co-Chair), Curtis Jefferson (Volunteers & Recruiting Co-Chair), Moose (Systems Co-Chair), Natacha Guyot (Fan Video & Multimedia Co-Chair), Tisha Turk (Fan Video & Multimedia Co-Chair)
    Departing Chairs: arrow (Systems)
    Departing Staffers: Emma (Translation)
    Departing Volunteers: Emma (Translation)

  • February 2013 Newsletter, Volume 66

    By Claudia Rebaza on Saturday, 23 February 2013 - 9:43pm
    Message type:
    Tags:

    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. ALL THE ACTIVITIES EVERYWHERE

    Welcome to the OTW's first organization newsletter for 2013! This newsletter appears every month from February to November (omitting our term break period in December and January). Since our last check-in there have been changes to the Board, changes to the chairs and staff of various committees, new policies and procedures, and a lot of work carried over from 2012.

    II. META & MORE

    Without question one of the biggest changes occurred in the past week when the Board voted to allow the posting of meta on the Archive of Our Own. This promptly caused the formation of an internal discussion involving committees such as Accessibility Design & Technology, Abuse, Support, Communications, Tag Wrangling and others in order to inform what will become the first draft of proposed definitions, Terms of Service and FAQ changes, and documentation by our Content Policy workgroup. This process is expected to be ongoing for the next month, although Content Policy may provide an update on our progress before the first proposed draft appears. We will make proposed definitions etc. available for public comment before any changes are adopted.

    Before the meta announcement these committees had already been quite busy since the start of the year. Our Abuse team grew by two new members, Beth H. and new Board member Cat Meier. Aside from the meta discussion, Abuse has been dealing with an influx of cases which run the gamut from issues surrounding fanmixes to plagiarism to alleged hate speech to non-fanwork illegal content.

    Accessibility, Design & Technology successfully deployed v0.9.5 of the Archive while weathering some site security storms that are currently keeping the Ruby on Rails community on their toes. They're already hard at work on the AO3's next deploy, which will include a shiny new header and code for the 852 Prospect import, to name only a few highlights.

    Together with Open Doors, they welcomed new coding volunteer Stephanie who is working specifically on a tool for handling large archive imports. New staffer tuff_ghost has been doing amazing work, some of which will be seen in the upcoming deploy's greatly redesigned Archive emails. As our opening 2013 post demonstrated, there's been skyrocketing use of kudos, comments, and subscriptions on the site, so automated notifications have been growing fast too. However, one set of emails that has dropped in the last month has been our AO3 invites. With our backlog of pending requests now sent, the wait time for an automated invite is under 24 hours.

    Internationalization & Outreach have been talking with AD&T about putting the Diversity Policy up on the Archive, and are also involved in the meta discussion.

    Support has been averaging around 100 tickets a week, though the committee currently has no unclaimed tickets and very few that haven't had at least a first contact! Kudos also goes to the Translation Committee as there have been a few tickets recently in non-English languages, and their teams have jumped right in and helped get translations written to send to the users.

    Support is hosting a live chat on February 23rd-24th, from 4pm to 4am UTC. If you have questions and haven't sent in a ticket or just want to say hi, drop on in! They are planning on doing these every other-ish month and rotating the time - the current plan is to cover the other half of the clock for the next chat so that they can meet with users in Asia and Oceania as well as any European and American night owls.

    Tag Wrangling started the new term off with a bang in the form of a much-requested feature - the Fandom lists now ignore articles like "The" when sorting alphabetically, putting to rest the qualms of many users and wranglers. Since then wranglers have been busy renaming fandom titles to add missing "The"s back (an ongoing process; with over 11,000 fandoms in use on the Archive, the task is not inconsequential!) They've also been busy on revised training plans for new wranglers, working out the specifics for new features to improve and simplify wrangling, and discussing the guidelines on Additional tags. And, as ever, the diligent volunteers have busily continued wrangling. The wranglers recently got the unwrangled Characters pile down below 6,000 which had climbed to nearly double this, and have done as much or more with Relationships and Freeforms - in addition to dealing with the dozen or more new Fandom tags coming in daily!

    AO3 Documentation recently made minor improvements to several of the FAQs and are currently working on overhauling some of the others. Category Change is working on a proposal for internal discussion that should be distributed by month's end.

    III. ELSEWHERE IN THE ORG

    Development & Membership has begun planning for the first fund drive of 2013. It will take place April 3-9 with the theme "Fandom Is Love." Thet're also developing Basecamp templates for convention outreach tasks, and have sent materials to OTW representatives to hand out at two upcoming cons, Escapade and YAYcon.

    Journal is in production for two issues simultaneously, one to be released March 15 and one to be released June 15. Editorial personnel are attending academic conventions in the first half of the year and will advertise TWC and solicit papers. The newly renamed Fanhackers blog should go live next month thanks to help from Webmasters and Systems.

    Open Doors has been cleaning house: reorganizing/updating the committee's information on the internal wiki and the website, working with Legal on more detailed agreements with mods, and developing new materials for the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP). They have also been speaking with more mods on manual and auto-importing plans, and continuing to shepherd zine and other donations through FCPP.

    Wiki has been clarifying the committee's responsibilities and working on procedures and documentation with their new liaison from Volunteers & Recruiting, Alison. They've also been talking with several committees about better cooperation and exciting projects for this year, and have a new Communications liaison, Agnieszka, who can be seen and chatted with through the fanlore_news twitter account.

    IV. LEGAL AND TECHNOLOGY

    In other social media news, the OTW now has a Google+ account dedicated to our legal and technology news, and Communications held a contest for submissions to the OTW Events Calendar. Work has also begun on the OTW Annual Report.

    Systems worked with Communications to issue a report on their activities for 2012 as well as the technical setup on the AO3, which is a must-read for anyone who wants to know about the increasing tech demands being put on the organization.

    Webmasters implemented a new Release Management process for OTW's primary web properties and completed its first release of 2013! This included a new job board for Volunteers & Recruiting as well as several fixes for existing bugs. Over the next few months, some bugs remaining from the Drupal 7 migration will be fixed, and several new features will be introduced.

    Legal filed an amicus brief in U.S. federal appeals court in the case of Fox v. DISH Networks and responded to a steady stream of legal queries from both inside and outside the org.

    V. GOVERNANCE

    The Board of Directors welcomed new members Maia Bobrowicz and Cat Meier, and bid farewell to departing members Julia Beck, Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, and Jenny Scott-Thompson. The Board thanks them for their service.

    The new Board has been making efforts to clarify its purview by clearly delineating which decisions the Board is responsible for making and which should be delegated to committees. They believe this will help to reduce confusion, improve efficiency, and make workloads more manageable. Aside from the previously discussed decision about nonfiction meta, the Board has been approving expense requests, reviewing and discussing reports from Volunteers & Recruiting and Strategic Planning, and dealing with procedural issues such as quorum and tiebreaker policies and Board members' personal communication styles and preferences.

    Strategic Planning's Tag Wrangling report (the first team surveyed) has been released to the general public. Their report on Volunteers & Recruiting has been sent for the first round of fact-checking and will soon be ready for review by the Board. They are in the process of drafting the Open Doors and Systems reports, and are about to deploy the survey for retired Systems staff. The next report Strategic Planning begins to draft will be Wiki/Fanlore, and the next team they survey will be Translation.

    VI. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting continues to be hard at work with the final stages of the project to revise the organization's recruitment and will soon be working with chairs and leads on reopening intake. The results of the annual Still Willing to Serve (SWTS) survey were reported to Board, summarizing the staff feedback from that process. The Volunteers & Recruiting annual report is nearly complete and they are starting a project to audit access to organization-wide tools to make sure that internal records and account access for all personnel match and are up-to-date. The committee has also created interactive tutorials for org-wide tools that can be used as part of training for new staff, and have requested feedback from other committees and volunteers.

    As is typical during the term transition period, a number of positions have been vacated and refilled.

    *New Directors List*: Cat Meier, Maia Bobrowicz
    *New Chairs List*: Sole G. (Internationalization & Outreach Co-Chair), Highlander II (Tag Wrangling Co-Chair), Curtis Jefferson (Communications Co-Chair), Sam Johnsson (Support Co-Chair), mumble (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Betsy Rosenblatt (Legal), Tiyire (Wiki), Jay Bee (Open Doors Co-Chair)
    *New Workgroup Leads:* Franzeska Dickson (Vidding), Eylul Dogruel (Elections Officer), Lesann (Survey Co-Lead)
    *New Staffers List*: Agnieszka (Communications), Alison Watson (Open Doors), bm1893 (Translation), briar (Tag Wrangling), Claire Oberholtzer (Translation), Natalie (Strategic Planning), Priscilla Del Cima (Internationalization & Outreach), Qem (Tag Wrangling), Lady Oscar (Accessibility, Design & Technology), tuff_ghost (Accessibility, Design & Technology), bethbethbeth (Abuse)

    *New Communications volunteers*: ash48
    *New Coding Volunteers*: Nick Case, Stephanie S

    *Departing Directors*: Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, Jenny Scott-Thompson, Julia Beck
    *Departing Chairs*: aethel (Wiki), Elz (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Lucy Pearson (Communications Co-Chair), Rebecca Tushnet (Legal), Alison Watson (Tag Wrangling Co-Chair)
    *Departing Workgroup Leads:* Francesca Coppa (Vidding), Eylul Dogruel (Survey Co-Lead), Jenny Scott-Thompson (Elections Officer)
    *Departing Staffers*: aethel (Wiki), AlexElizabeth (Support), Julia Beck (Internationalization & Outreach; Translation), Francesca Coppa (Communications; Open Doors), Franzeska Dickson (Tag Wrangling), erda (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Kylie (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Lesann (Legal), Kristen Murphy (Webmasters)
    *Departing Workgroup Members*: Lucy Pearson (AO3 Documentation), Maia Bobrowicz (AO3 Documentation), Yshyn (AO3 Documentation)
    *Departing Coders*: Highlander II
    *Departing Testers*: Highlander II
    *Departing Tag Wranglers*: lunaris1013
    *Departing Open Doors Volunteers*: Hadrien Asbury

    The OTW thanks all staffers and volunteers for their time and contributions to the organization.

  • November 2012 Newsletter, Volume 65

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 30 November 2012 - 6:34pm
    Message type:
    Tags:

    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. RETURN OF THE FILTERS

    Accessibility, Design and Technology deployed new code which not only brought back tag filtering at the Archive of Our Own but a number of additional features, concluding several months of coding, testing, more coding, and more testing. Feedback has been largely positive, and further improvements are in the works. Unfortunately, wranglers and staff were affected as the new search engine is having some trouble with new wrangling connections and metatags, so wrangling is currently off-line as Tag Wrangling helps coders and testers iron out the bugs there.

    Accessibility, Design and Technology are now hard at work on the next release, which will also focus on challenge & collection bug fixes. Since site performance has been stable and the new filtering code has made the servers happier, the number of invites going out every day has been increased from 500 to 750, a huge jump compared to the 100 to 150 increase made back in July. The automated invitation queue, which has been holding steady at over 30,000 requests during our busiest months, is now on the decline, leading to shorter wait times for people wanting accounts on the Archive.

    II. GETTING FEEDBACK

    The Category Change workgroup solicited feedback from AO3 users about the current Fandom Categories in the Archive and how people find material. They spent some time this month acknowledging and gathering those responses for further review.

    Meanwhile Content Policy worked with Abuse and Support on proposed Terms of Service FAQ changes. The changes are basically housekeeping and clarifying current practice. The documents are currently open for public review and feedback until December 10.

    Support had its first Open Support Chat this month. In spite of short notice quite a few people came by with questions, and fans are still finding the announcement posts and using them for open discussion. Support found the experiment was a success and it is something they plan to do again in the future!

    Legal issued a call on behalf of the EFF, by having fans who lost content due to the Megaupload seizure contact EFF to share their stories.

    III. GEARS TURNING

    Abuse has focused on a number of tag-related complaints, mostly regarding incorrect warnings, but also concerning the new trend toward "creative" tags, as well as dealing with a slight uptick in harassment complaints. They're working with Support on complaints that bridge both committees, and with Legal on fanmix download issues.

    Strategic Planning released its first report internally focusing on Tag Wrangling. The Tag Wrangling Committee is currently reviewing the report for factual accuracy before a wider release. They’re also working on reports for Volunteers & Recruiting, the Wiki Committee and Fanlore editors and gardeners, Open Doors, and Systems, and putting together surveys for the rest of the OTW teams.

    Translation have three new staffers and are slowly working on translating content and working with other committees to get important documents accessible for non-English speaking fans. They are also exploring ways to create a better community for translators, part of which involves working with Grants and Webmasters.

    Webmasters was focused on finalizing committee roles for the next term, selecting a piece of software to help them track incoming work, and closing out our Drupal 7 upgrade. Webmasters also provided input into Volunteers & Recruiting's need for a Drupal update.

    Wiki had some great news: they completed the upgrade of their mediawiki version! They are still working on fixing some remaining bugs, and also spent time working on improving internal documentation and cooperating with Legal regarding fair use issues on Fanlore.

    IV. GOVERNANCE

    New Board members Franzeska Dickson, Eylul Dogruel, and Andrea Horbinski officially took office on November 1. Recently the Board has been working on committee chair, workgroup lead, and Board liaison appointments for 2013. The Board also elected new officers, as follows:

    • President: Kristen Murphy
    • Secretary: Ira Gladkova (interim, to be reconsidered in early 2013)
    • Treasurer: Nikisha Sanders
    • Elections Officer: Eylul Dogruel

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has been busy completing a number of projects as the end of the year approaches. Following the large-scale revision of induction and removal procedures for all personnel roles within the organization, they started on a project to revise recruitment procedures - the first step in the process to reopening external recruitment. At this point, there is no target date for that to occur as there are a number of steps and other committees involved, but things are moving in the right direction.

    They have also deployed the 'Still Willing to Serve' (SWTS) survey, which asks all current staff on OTW committees to indicate their staff plans with the organization for 2013 and provide feedback regarding their experience with the organization this year. SWTS closes on November 30th, at which time the committee will begin preparing for the removal of any departing staff and analyzing feedback solicited through the SWTS form.

    Additionally, due to the large number of inductions during the first part of the year and some updated information regarding tool access requirements for specific roles during induction/removal revision, they are planning an audit of access to all organization tools managed by the committee over the next couple of months. Along with ensuring access for all personnel is up-to-date, they will be revising how access is tracked in personnel records and building a procedure for regular periodic audits of each tool.

    New Staffers: christycorr (Translation), marina (Journal), Andrea Horbinski (Board of Directors), Eylul Dogruel (Board of Directors), Franzeska Dickson (Board of Directors), Tuulia (Internationalization & Outreach and Translation)

    New Tag Wranglers: Curtis Jefferson, Schuyler Dade, Tuulia
    New Translators: Tuulia

    Departing Workgroup Members: Copracat (AO3 Documentation)
    Departing Coders: echthroi, Schuyler Dade

  • October 2012 Newsletter, Volume 64

    By Claudia Rebaza on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 - 6:06pm
    Message type:
    Tags:

    For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.

    I. WALKING THE WALK

    This was a big month for our Legal Committee who, along with staffers from Vidding, successfully upheld and expanded the DMCA exemption for vidders! This exemption allows people to obtain high-quality copies of a source (for example by ripping a DVD) for transformative purposes. Our team faced some strong opposition this year from industry, so we’re extra pleased that all their hard work paid off. Thanks to everyone who helped the OTW with this, especially the vidders whose testimony formed a central part of our case. We’d also like to give particular thanks to Rachael Vaughn, who worked closely on this, and to Tisha Turk, Rebecca Tushnet, and Francesca Coppa, who testified.

    Development & Membership would also like to thank everyone who contributed to the October membership drive, which raised more than $18,600.

    II. TALKING THE TALK

    Journal is pushing through the last few manuscripts for the two special issues of early 2013 (comics and boys’ love). Kristina Busse gave a keynote address entitled “Fifty Shades of Fandom: Repetition and Originality in Transformative Fanworks” at the Borders and Beyond: Considering Communities conference, Oct 11-13, 2012, in Gainesville, FL.

    Open Doors has recently compiled feedback from the 852 Prospect import testing and sent it to Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) in preparation for a larger test, and if all goes well, the long-awaited import itself. They will also be working with AD&T on the import of a small German slash archive and be assisting another mod with the manual import of two memorial archives.

    Support has been maintaining a speedy turnaround for tickets. Most tickets now receive an initial response within 48 hours – they answer all tickets, so if you don’t hear back within a week then it’s worth submitting a new ticket just in case something went awry (for example, a couple of times recently Support tried to respond to a ticket and the email has been bounced). Support is also still seeing quite a few reports of invitations or activation emails not arriving. Coders recently did some work to try and improve this problem, but emails from the Archive do sometimes get flagged as spam. If you are expecting an email from the AO3 and it doesn’t arrive, please get in touch with Support!

    All of Tag Wrangling's guidelines are now publicly accessible as AO3 FAQs. Huge thanks to Sam for his hard work on that project! Wranglers have also been assisting in doing testing for the return of the filters.

    Content Policy hopes to release some proposed housekeeping (non-substantive) changes to the archive's Terms of Service and its FAQ shortly and is in the process of soliciting internal comments for that. Meanwhile the Category Change workgroup has issued a call to all users of the AO3 to tell us how you go about finding fanworks and how you use the media categories page.

    III. UPGRADES

    Webmasters are still working on upgrading the content management system used on transformativeworks.org, elections.transformativeworks.org, and opendoors.transformativeworks.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. The sites will be going offline again for further maintenance, which will be announced when dates and times have been determined.

    Accessibility, Design & Technology's major focus has been on their upcoming deploy, which will include the return of the long-awaited tag filters! Everyone has been working hard: coding, testing, revising documentation for the new filters, and generally preparing everything. They have also been really happy to see lots of new coders getting involed; the next thing they want to do is build up the testing team.

    The Wiki Committee is close to finishing the mediawiki upgrade for Fanlore. Their Twitter account was also briefly hacked to send spam messages to people. The committee apologizes for the inconvenience and thanks everyone who alerted them to the problem.

    Systems' James has been doing lots of work on the Archive of our Own, including setting up an alternative test server for use testing specific types of issues. He’s also been taking care of the main Archive servers, tweaking settings to ensure they run smoothly, and liaising with the colocation host to resolve a problem on their end.

    IV. GOVERNANCE

    Board is in its overlap period, when incoming Board members shadow the current Board to learn about their new roles. The new members will take office on November 1. Elections Workgroup is working on the final bits of documentation in preparation to shut down this year and start preparing for next year.

    Finance has been busy preparing quarterly reports - which they’re hoping to release soon - and handling the October drive, as well as buying more new computer bits for the servers. Grants took a hiatus over the summer, but is now contacting other committees to consider projects they want to do (and wish list items) that may be on the back burner for financial reasons. Their first task is working with Journal to finalize a grant proposal.

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has progressed through their project for revising and documenting Induction & Removal. They’re also gearing up for the annual Still Willing To Serve project, in which current OTW staff indicate if they will be staying on for another term and in which positions. They are also preparing to submit the Code of Conduct and Constructive Corrective Action Procedure to Board.

    New Chairs: Tara Keezer (Grants)
    New Tag Wranglers: julzbullard
    Departing Staffers: Cinco (Grants), Natacha Guyot (I&O), Hadrien Asbury (Grants), Rachel Barenblat (Open Doors), Shannon (Wiki), Tuulia (Wiki)
    Departing Testers: Cinco

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