Newsletter

  • September 2012 Newsletter, Volume 63

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 5 October 2012 - 5:39pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

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

    I. MOVING ON TO YEAR SIX

    September marked the OTW's fifth anniversary, and while Communications held events on our various news outlets to celebrate, other parts of the organization forged ahead with plans that will lead to continued accomplishments in year six. Development & Membership is preparing for the upcoming membership drive, which will take place 13-17 October on the theme of "Five Transformative Years." The Journal Committee published the latest issue, number 11 of Transformative Works and Cultures and have already been at work on two special issues that will be released in the first half of 2013, a Boys' Love special issue and a Comics special issue. After some staff changes, Translation's language teams are steadily making progress in translating the org website and other projects are starting to move forward.

    II. GOVERNANCE

    The Elections Workgroup announced three candidates for the three-year Board term beginning in 2013. Due to the same number of candidates stepping forward as there were empty seats available, an election will not be held in November. Instead the new candidates will begin taking their places on the Board and have been holding public chats to introduce themselves to the organization and its members.

    Meanwhile, board member Julia Beck offered the following message to OTW staff, volunteers and members.

    "My name’s Julia Beck, and I’m a member of the OTW Board of Directors. I wanted to let you know I need to take a hiatus from my OTW work, including my Board duties, effective immediately. Because of my current situation outside of the organization, I’m not able to fulfill my Board duties as well as the organization needs and deserves. The Board discussed several options, but agreed that my going on leave until the start of the new term would be preferable to my stepping back altogether. As the mid-January start of the 2013 term coincides with the deadline for an important personal project, I’m confident that I’ll be able to make a full return at that time. I apologize for the additional work this is causing, and want to thank my fellow Board members for their trust. I’m also grateful to the candidates stepping up to this year’s Board election, and am looking forward to working with the newly formed Board in January. Thank you for your understanding."

    Board meeting minutes for the remainder of August and 8th and 14th of September are now available. They've been discussing meta options for the AO3, succession planning, and adding new servers and computer bits to support our coders. Finance has been helping Systems and Accessibility, Design & Technology with sorting out new hosting for the new servers.

    Strategic Planning has begun following up with survey respondents who wanted to talk further to the committee, and has deployed a survey and email interview to Open Doors. They also provided another monthly update on their activities.

    III. FANLORE

    The Wiki Committee started a new challenge, Stub September, and invited people to work on unfinished pages on Fanlore. As a result of discussions about the definition of a stub they created a new template, ExpandArticle, and in the process went through existing templates and deleted some that are no longer in use. Wiki also held an editing chat on September 22 for editors to talk about Fanlore editing that was fun for everyone involved; they've resolved to hold them more often.

    An animated discussion also arose around the question of how best to distinguish pages about podfic from pages about fanfic leading to a productive discussion at the Fanlore Dreamwidth community. The Wiki committee already implemented some of the suggestions such as modifying fanwork infoboxes (for example Template:Podfic), and they are continuing to consider the various points raised. You are welcome to add your voice to the discussion!

    IV. AO3

    Accessibility, Design and Technology has successfully deployed Releases 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 and are looking forward to the next deploy which should mark The Return of Tag Filters. They've also brought back podfic embeds and discontinued support for IE6 and 7 much to the delight of our coders, and are continuing work on an improved AO3 roadmap and a redesigned header. The past month has also seen a return of the AO3 newsletter.

    This has been an extremely busy month for the Abuse Committee due to an ongoing plagiarism case affecting several authors. They have been working with both Support and Legal on a tricky case that came up earlier this month. Support has seen three significant influxes of tickets this year and have decided to start refreshing some of their internal documentation and procedure guidelines for the inevitable, tragic day when Support has a complete staff turnover. This will also make the workflow clear to new ticket pirahnas (Support Staffers). Open Doors is in the testing phase of the 852 Prospect import, and has been working with members of Accessibility, Design & Technolgoy and Support to make that go smoothly.

    Tag Wrangling has been working on making their documentation public, starting with a basic introduction. They've also been re-categorizing bookmark tags and have decided on guidelines for certain types of additional tags. Content Policy is reviewing draft Terms of Service and FAQ changes. The major proposal of substance (not including the separate issue of meta) is to change the "underage" warning tag to "character under 18 in sexual situations" for greater clarity and they are seeking comments at this time from other parts of the OTW.

    V. ON THE TECHNICAL FRONT

    Systems closed 82 tickets since last month and aided in the successful migration of Drupal (which the transformativeworks.org website is built on) to a 3rd party vendor. They also resolved problems with spamblocking of messages we were receiving from Twitter; deployed anti-spam improvements to Fanlore; installed a firewall for the Archive; upgraded stage's disk and the dev server; researched a U.K.-based colo; installed raid batteries for otw1&2; added elasticsearch to otw5, and are still working on a bunch of other stuff!

    Webmasters meanwhile successfully migrated the transformativeworks.org, elections and opendoors domains to a new managed hosting provider. Most functionality has been tested, but please notify Webmasters if anything appears to be broken! With that step complete, they will be coordinating an upgrade to Drupal 7 with other committees in the near future. They are also working towards finalizing a development roadmap for the transformativeworks.org site and look forward to sharing it very soon.

    VI. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting is continuing to work on the process of revising and updating documentation related to induction and removal for all staff and volunteer roles within the organization. In the meantime, these are this month's arrivals and departures. As always, thank you to all our volunteers for their efforts on behalf of the OTW.

    *New Staffers List*: Amy Wilson (Open Doors), christycorr (Development & Membership), Joanne (Abuse), Reena (Translation)

    *New Coding Volunteers*: Sweet, look_closer, Captain Pollux
    *New Front End Volunteers*: Amelie Swire, Amy D, Kae, Delaney, Emily E., Meaghan
    *New Testers*: Molly Kaze, Roberta_M

    *Departing Staffers*: Franzeska Dickson (Abuse), AnnaK (Development & Membership), Alexandra Edwards (Development & Membership), Reena (Support)
    *Departing Workgroup Members*: Curtis Jefferson (Survey)
    *Departing Testers*: SapphireNight, Vel
    *Departing Tag Wranglers*: dodificus

    Read more

  • August 2012 Newsletter, Volume 62

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 31 August 2012 - 3:15pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    I. BEHIND THE SCENES

    August has been a month of largely non-public work, as technical and documentation preparations have been going on across various committees for things to be launched next month, including a new code push at the AO3, the release of a Code of Conduct draft for staff and volunteers across the org, and celebrations of the OTW's fifth anniversary.

    A look at some of the debates and difficulties that are part of running the OTW can be seen in the series of Board posts about topics such as goals for the organization and changes in elections processes in response to issues that arose in 2011. Another document released that took a look at events of that year was the 2011 Annual Report (in PDF here). A more recent look at project development focused on the launch of the OTW's Pinboard account.

    II. A MONTH OF UPGRADES

    The Wiki Committee has been testing a mediawiki upgrade and their gardeners have been testing the forthcoming forums with positive feedback so far. After a few hundred hours of hand-entry and research Volunteers & Recruiting completed moving all of the information from the old eFiction database into their shiny new Drupal-based database. The new database is top of the line and makes managing our volunteer information much easier. Databases may not sound exciting, but the new system allows us to keep track of all the hard work our volunteers do for us, develop new workgroups and projects more easily, and develop accurate records for all of the OTW's great projects.

    Open Doors has been continuing preparations for the 852Prospect import, getting things ready for a test import and for its new collection on AO3. They have also been drafting guidelines for the Fan Culture Preservation Project and digital archive imports, so that fans can have a better understanding of how and when we can help them preserve their fannish materials or works.

    Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) has been working on code for the next deploy at the AO3, which should be coming within the next few weeks. Unfortunately, the new tag filters are not completed yet, though this continues to be a central concern for the committee. More information about the delay was discussed in mid-August.

    During some upgrades to our AO3 firewall a small error caused a DNS problem so that some people were redirected to a spam site when trying to access the Archive. Although this error was fixed promptly after users alerted us to the problem, some issues relating to the firewall work have lingered, forcing AD&T to temporarily disable https on the site. Users are reminded to contact Support via their form if they experience any unusual problems in utilizing the Archive.

    Speaking of the Support Committee, the team has answered over 350 tickets this month. They’ve also been busy helping with various cross-committee projects/issues -- there’s lots of shiny stuff coming up soon and they want to make sure they’re prepared to help users once things go live.

    Tag Wrangling will be among the committees most affected as the upcoming code deploy will make AO3 tag structures visible on the archive to all users, so they have been working on moving wrangling guidelines to a public display. This has involved discussions with tag wranglers about terminology and guideline clarity for non-wranglers. The staff has also made some changes to several canonical tags, based on requests from users who contacted us via the Support form and the tag wrangling Twitter account.

    III. PAPERWORK

    Finance finished the “990” state forms and paid our taxes. They’re still working on documenting things and processing the rest of the April membership drive, which readers may remember was the Org's largest yet.

    Journal is busy with production for its next issue, which comes out on September 15. Editorial staffers are already making plans for the first two issues of 2013 and Journal is also working on a soft reboot of the Symposium Blog.

    Board has approved various expenses, including some server upgrades, given various committees the go-ahead on planned projects, and has been discussing a few strategic topics. They’re working on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our organizational structure, and laying out some guidelines for the minimum work levels expected of a board member. This will also help our candidates in the upcoming election know what to expect. Minutes for all July meetings as well as the first two August ones are now available.

    Strategic Planning is now an official committee and they are currently in the process of drafting their first report, which is about the Tag Wrangling team. They are also gathering responses from a second set of surveys for retired Tag Wrangling volunteers and the Volunteers & Recruiting staff, and are revising two more sets of surveys for deployment to Fanlore/Wiki and Open Doors.

    IV. UPDATES

    Abuse has found its cases have been growing exponentially and they are working with a new model of everyone on the committee weighing in on a case, rather than assigning a case to an individual. Cases continue to center on plagiarism and disallowed content –- the latter being the ongoing issue of meta, which we hope will be resolved soon. One of the stickier issues is how we determine what is meta. Abuse has been looking for fannish content in each non-fiction piece that comes through, with those that are random and non-fannish categorized as non-meta. For now all meta is being left in place as discussion continues within the Board as to what steps should be taken.

    AO3 Documentation's staffer Scott has been working on re-designing the back-end of the AO3 FAQs while the rest of the the team has been updating the FAQ content so that everything will be ready to post once the technical work is complete.

    The Elections Workgroup has continued posting about this year’s changes to the elections process, and a couple of people have already been chatting with the Board about possibly becoming candidates. They’ll be sending an official invitation to all eligible Board candidates in early September.

    Survey Workgroup's lead Julia Beck has resigned although she remains the group's board liaison and member. Aja and Eylul are now leading the group and have put posting on break during this transition, while also revising their work process with help from new stats expert Ruth. They expect to resume posts in September.

    Legal has continued to offer assistance to fans with legal questions, though these come primarily through direct emails to the OTW. And Communications recently highlighted some of the many interviews and media appearances of OTW staffers discussing OTW projects or fandom issues.

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    As usual for this year, Volunteers & Recruiting has had a lot of people they have been processing in and out of areas, and the OTW is grateful to all its staffers and volunteers for their work.

    New Committee Chair: Sherry Nehmer for Abuse

    New Staffers List: Ariana (AD&T), Curtis Jefferson (Volunteers & Recruiting), Emufarmers (Wiki), FishieMishie (Volunteers & Recruiting), Jeremy Wells (Communications), Phoenix (Wiki), Scott S (AD&T).

    New Workgroup Members: Ruth Collings (Survey), Tuulia (Survey)
    New Tag Wranglers: Tuulia
    New Front End Volunteers: Becky Mezz, Ira Gladkova, Issa, Nicholas de Leon, Kasimir Star, shantismurf, Violet, poplex
    New Coding Volunteers: fairywearsbootz, Shay Guy,
    New Testers: Brithna, Cate N., Julibean19, SapphireNight, Seralvanova, insomniac_amy

    Departing Staffers: Amelia (AD&T, Support), Christy Fish (Open Doors), Kath Gee (Translation)
    Departing Workgroup Members: Jenny Scott-Thompson (Survey)
    Departing Tag Wranglers: starlady
    Departing Journal Volunteers: Heather Whitney

    Read more

  • July 2012 Newsletter, Volume 61

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 3 August 2012 - 4:34pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    I. IMPLEMENTING THE FIXES

    This month has had another strong focus on technology across the board with a number of committees collaborating on different issues. The Wiki Committee is still working together with Systems to install new anti-spam solutions. Fanlore is now using ReCaptcha to reduce the number of spambots. The transformativeworks.org website was also hit by a deluge of spam in the past weeks, prompting the Webmasters to temporarily suspend comment tracking to these blog posts until subscribers stopped being hammered with emails.

    Another forthcoming project for Wiki will be their forum, which is still under construction. If you are familiar with mediawiki and/or CSS and would be willing to help them out, Wiki would love to hear from you!

    The AO3 was running much more smoothly this month than last, with the 502 errors banished. Behind the scenes Support kept up with the ever-growing number of tickets as more users joined the site, and Tag Wranglers caught up on wrangling the tags created by those new users (and the backlog created when the performance errors slowed down their work). Support staffer Yshyn provided a discussion of Support ticket stats for our users which provided a great insight into what questions are asked about the Archive!

    Systems performed a RAM upgrade and some software upgrades to help our servers cope with all the new users and are still at work on new code for the filters. With the hard work that Systems have put into improving AO3 performance, we were pleased to have an apposite moment to thank them publicly on SysAdmin Day. Aside from the afore mentioned work, Systems also ameliorated the leap-year issue, collected stats for webmasters and the Archive, fixed failing discs on the Archive, and closed 35 tickets in July!

    II. REPORTING ON PROGRESS

    While something working or not working on one of our sites tends to be fairly noticeable, other progress isn't always as obvious. However July saw a variety of updates from different workgroups being shared in news posts. Among these was news from the Survey Workgroup, the Strategic Planning Workgroup, and the Elections Workgroup.

    Board meeting minutes were posted for the June and July meetings, and board member Julia Beck wrote the first of several forthcoming posts from the group regarding work done by board members. Perhaps the most notable item for OTW members was Board's decision to add two members to the current group of seven, thus opening the way for an election this fall.

    And Development & Membership has been collaborating with Open Doors on convention outreach. In mid-July they hosted an information table at Ascendio, a Harry Potter con held in Orlando, Florida.

    III. DISCUSSING CHANGES

    Those groups not posting about their work were nonetheless still at it. Content Policy was part of a well-attended cross-committee meeting on the question of where nonfiction meta fits into the OTW's various activities, and hopes to have an updated FAQ and clear answer as soon as possible. Abuse has also been part of that discussion, but has also been dealing with cases concerning plagiarism, mis-labeling works, or incorrectly warning/rating them. Several of those plagiarism complaints turned out to be Archive users mistakenly posting favorites under their own name to "warehouse" them, because they did not understand the AO3's bookmarking feature.

    Open Doors has been working on internal documentation, updating the FAQ on their website, and creating a tutorial screencast to walk fans through the process of claiming their stories after a mass-import. Webmasters were also occupied in laying the groundwork for upgrading the transformativeworks.org website to Drupal 7, and Journal's Symposium Blog team has been meeting to consider ways to widen readership.

    Legal worked with the EFF on responses to questions the Copyright Office had after the DMCA hearings. There will be an additional round of responses in the coming weeks. They also looked over the participant agreement for a fanfic reading contest and alerted fans to potential problems with its terms.

    IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting continued to bring people into the org, and as can be seen from this list a lot of people have been taking on new tasks!

    New Staffers List: Amplify (Systems), Reena (Support), Sole G. (Support)

    New Workgroup Members: Aja (Survey), Betsy Rosenblatt (Survey), Bingeling (Category Change), Blue (Elections), Crowa (Category Change), Elz (Category Change), Eylul (Category Change), Franzeska Dickson (Category Change), Hele (Category Change, Survey), Highlander II (Category Change), Jenny Scott-Thompson (Survey), Lady Oscar (Category Change, Survey), Lesann (Survey), Sole G. (Category Change Lead, Survey), Vera (Survey)

    New Tag Wranglers: Abydosorphan, Age, JLR, Morgan, Silverr
    New Front End Volunteers: malandanta, Mermels, Nathan J Xaxson, strongfemalecharacter
    New Communications volunteers: Rachel G.
    New Coding Volunteers: Aria, larissa, MistressParamore, Scott S.
    New Testers: Fighter Chi, Lady Oscar, On Pluto, ses, Yuugaijin
    New Translators: gabsy, Gabriel, Melisa Bruckner
    New Wiki gardeners: Sparcicle and Espresso Addict

    Departing Staffers: Age (Volunteers & Recruiting), Anne Kustritz (Journal), Julia A (Communications), Lena (Webmasters), Anne Kustritz (Journal)
    Departing Tag Wranglers: Jenny Scott-Thompson

    Read more

  • June 2012 Newsletter, Volume 60

    By Claudia Rebaza on Wednesday, 4 July 2012 - 2:35pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    I. THE FANDOM IS COMING! THE FANDOM IS COMING!

    Our top OTW story for June has to be the growing crush of users and user hopefuls at the AO3 and the resulting groans from our favorite fanworks ship. It was all hands on deck, primarily for those on the Accessibility, Design and Technology and Systems committees, but also from Support and Communications, who posted and tweeted about the problems to keep users in the loop, handled user questions and fed reported issues to our team of coders.

    AD&T worked closely with Systems to make adjustments to our servers and to increase the amount and kind of caching we do of the site content, as well as improving performance monitoring and looking into options for hardware and software upgrades. We've had 7 separate code releases so far in June, some big and some small, and we're grateful to all of the coders and testers for their hard work! Our next big project is finishing the rewrite of the filtering code and the upgrade to our search engine so that we can restore that functionality to the site in new and improved shape. We're also thinking about ways to handle the backlog of people in our invite queue and scheduling Open Doors import projects for a time when site performance has stabilized. Thanks to all of our users for their patience!

    Tag Wrangling was affected by the outages and slowdowns as many of our volunteers were also blocked from using the site. Since the AO3 stabilized, their crack team of wrangling volunteers has made great progress in getting caught up. A special shout-out to the epic individual(s) who sorted through 900 characters in a couple of days!

    Similarly, Support caught up on tickets and put together a From FF.N to AO3 FAQ to help new users from that site. They've also created a new FAQ page documenting our publicly accessible tools, including Trello, GCode, and Github, in order to increase accessibility. Translation has been working with them on a process for answering AO3 support requests in languages other than English.

    II. FANLORE and TWC

    In the meantime Wiki has been waging its own site battle against a wave of spam. The Wiki Committee is working with Systems to research and test better spam protection options. In the meantime, this filter hides the sea of red. They also welcomed new staffer Tuulia to the committee, and proposed some more fanworks categories (check out the Dreamwidth discussion post here).

    Journal had a neat achievement, publishing TWC No. 10, a special issue about fan activism guest edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, right on time on June 15. TWC's next issue, to be released on September 15, will go into production shortly, and they are already at work soliciting for the first two issues of 2013. The Symposium Blog has posted new meta-ish posts from its editorial team members and the committee encourages others to share their thinky thoughts by writing for them.

    III. MAKING YOUR VOICES HEARD

    Tisha Turk and Francesca Coppa of Vidding joined Rebecca Tushnet of Legal and Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington D.C. on June 4, 2012 to testify at the DMCA. Turk in particular was able to explain in fairly small words why the screencapture software that opponents were suggesting we use instead of having an exemption wouldn't work for vidders. You can see our Revised Test Suite and Image Gallery for some of their exhibits and Turk and Tushnet both posted about the day's testimony

    We are now awaiting a decision about whether the DMCA exemption that allows US vidders to rip small clips from DVDs will be continued.

    IV. THERE ARE OTHER COMMITTEES?

    Internationalization & Outreach wrote a heavily revised draft of the Archive Diversity Statement and circulated it to other committees for final comments. They had the Category Change workgroup officially approved by the Board: this group will revise the categories displayed on the fandoms page of the AO3 to ensure they reflect the diversity of international fandom. The workgroup is already at work so more news should be forthcoming in July.

    Communications has been working closely with the Survey workgroup on its Survey Sunday posts. The workgroup is also preparing preliminary reports for specific committees to augment the data analysis with discussion and interpretation which can later be shared through future Survey Sunday posts.

    Speaking of the survey posts, Development & Membership have been reflecting on feedback received through the OTW Community Survey and are planning improvements to the donation page. We expect this same process to take place across committees as the survey data is shared. They have also been working with Open Doors about con outreach, and will have an information table at Ascendio on July 13.

    Comms extended some outreach to Tumblr with the launch of its First Friday event to raise some awareness of our newest OTW news outlet. Several hundred people have started following the account!

    V. GOVERNANCE

    Board minutes have not yet been posted for June but you can look for them here in the coming weeks. They’ve set up a new elections workgroup to revise the FAQs and prepare for next year, and Jenny Scott-Thompson has been appointed as elections officer.

    Finance has been continuing to work on documenting procedures so that newer staff can then get more involved. They're also negotiating new non-profit discounts with suppliers.

    Strategic Planning received some quality feedback on their first survey questions from the Tag Wrangler cochairs, team founder, and the AD&T liaisons. They plan to begin formally analyzing that this week. They have also finalized survey questions for the Tag Wrangler staff & volunteer groups and are in the process of working out the confidentiality issues involved in implementing these and future surveys. A new update post is in the works.

    VI. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has completed a revision of their internal wiki categories which will allow them to better sort current documentation and provide more intuitive subcategories for future documentation. To improve the process of tracking volunteer commitment and inter-committee roles, they've researched liaison roles, from the Board liaisons to liaisons between individual committees. They're also on the last steps of moving volunteer records from our old database to our new, more secure database, championed by staffer tekla over the last few months. The new database is run with CiviCRM and allows multiple layers of security for our volunteers and their data. The move has been a long, complicated project, but the end is in sight! They have also been drafting an organizational Code of Conduct with the help of a volunteer consultant.

    Recruiting-wise, they are continuing work to place and contact the people who volunteered during the April membership drive run by Development & Membership. Because of this, recruitment is still closed, as the surge highlighted severe deficiencies in how we process volunteers. However, to help our technical committees, VolCom has developed a technical recruitment form and created a temporary system that will allow us to effectively bring in additional experienced help. We hope to debut the form soon!

    *New Staffers List* AlexElizabeth (Support), Amanda Furrow (Systems), Angylinni (Webmasters), Emma (Translation), Eva Bolinder (Translation), Feng (Translation)

    *New Workgroup Members:* wingedamber (Content Policy)

    *New Coding Volunteers*: ecuoln

    *New Translators*: aladdin, basang, blurryyou, fiammanda, fishshell, Kate, Margo, Myriam Levy, rocksoundc, Shimi, slashkit, yoghurt

    *Departing Staffers*: Amanda G. Michaels (Communications), baerga69 (Webmasters), Sara K. Howe (Journal), Sheila Lane (Finance)

    *Departing Tag Wranglers*: anenko

    Read more

  • May 2012 Newsletter, Volume 59

    By .Amy Luo on Friday, 25 May 2012 - 4:38pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    I. OTW OUTREACH: US AND OUR USERS

    Development & Membership has been busy debriefing after the incredibly successful April membership drive: discussing what worked well and what to improve, shipping premiums to donors, and working with Finance to record donations sent via physical mail. They’re also forming small teams within the committee to work on projects such as convention outreach, merchandise research, social media strategy, and improving our external and internal documentation.

    After a year of development, the I&O committee launched and supervised the OTW Community Survey, which garnered nearly 6000 responses. A survey work group has been formed to evaluate those responses and Survey Sundays have been launched to share data with users and enable their input on results they'd like to see. I&O are also starting to look at search engine optimization (SEO) for the OTW and its various projects as a way to broaden contact with currently underserved areas of fandom.

    II. FANLORE and TWC

    Fanlore editors are working hard to document the fannish websites that will soon be lost because FortuneCity, a website provider, has taken down its free accounts. Any help is welcome, and the sooner the better! More information can be found at the Fanlore post about FortuneCity rescue.

    Exciting things have been happening over at the Journal committee. Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is about to release issue No. 10 on Transformative Works and Fan Activism, co-edited by Henry Jenkins (June 15, 2012). The issue is going through the last stages of production and thanks to its online only status and tight production schedule they've have been able to include up to the minute updates on such recent topics as Kony 2012. It will be the largest issue ever with fourteen peer-reviewed essays out of more than two dozen initial submissions, and expands the scope of TWC yet again as it focuses on international political and social phenomena.

    Journal is in the last stages of reviewing for No. 11, a general issue. If you’re interested in contributing to Transformative Works and Cultures, the next two special issues will be on Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies and Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books. They are still accepting Symposium submissions on both, so if you have things to say about either, just drop the committee a note or submit your 1500-2500 word essay directly through the web site.

    Finally, the Symposium blog team welcomes new member Nele Noppe, who had previously helped informally with our Zotero Index. The committee is excited to have her join us officially and look forward to her posts on Japan, doujinshi, Avatar, and legal and cultural differences in publishing and copyright policies. Also, if anyone would like to write Symposium pieces or have experience in writing them, we would love to hear from you!

    III. HAPPENINGS AT THE AO3

    The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee is preparing for a May deploy which will include new user stats pages and some new tools for Open Doors to use in managing archive imports to AO3. Dedicated members have been working on improving our testing documentation, and they’re thrilled to have a number of new coding volunteers, some of whom have jumped right in already! Monthly training sessions for coders are starting, the first of which will be on May 19th.

    Several committees are also providing input into a proposed AO3 Diversity Statement, and a category change workgroup is being developed. That workgroup will review the existing media categories on the Archive of our Own in order to come up with a more inclusive approach. Tag Wrangling is also engaged in plans to update the Tag FAQs on the AO3. Support reported that their ticket count for this month is at roughly 100 tickets. Meanwhile, they’ve been hard at work redesigning the Support form and are working on a FAQ to better explain the tools used internally to register and manage bugs, feature requests, and code to make them more accessible and transparent to the users.

    Open Doors committee is continuing outreach to Sentinel fan communities and mailing lists about the 852 Prospect import. Two public chats will be held in the coming week. Expect upcoming outreach for the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP). In the meantime, take a look at the committee’s post on the MediaWestCon blog.

    IV. PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

    Vidding has been working closely with Legal on their upcoming DMCA testimony in DC or June 4, and working with the new Grants team to try to raise funds to speed up hosting of multimedia fanworks of all kinds. Grants has been working on a large National Endowment for the Humanities grant proposal. More material has been added and the team plans to eventually put together an application to submit next year. If anyone with experience in Grants would like to contribute or join the Grants team, please let us know!

    Strategic Planning has also drafted and approved an internal member and board liaison agreement during the meeting on May 12. They’re preparing the first committee-specific survey, and are drafting their first update post.

    V. GOVERNANCE

    Board minutes for 28th April and 12th of May are now available online. We’ve set up a new elections workgroup to revise the FAQs and prepare for next year, and Jenny Scott-Thompson has been appointed as elections officer. The OTW's IRC channel is also live now.

    Finance has been researching Paypal alternatives and are looking into which options can be integrated with our site to give people more choices when donating.

    VI. OUR TECH WIZARDS

    As mentioned in our April newsletter, Webmasters have now launched an internal survey to gather feedback from committees about how transformativeworks.org can better meet their needs. This feedback will be used to help us plan the redesign of the site.

    Similarly, Systems has been hard at work developing several projects, including the mail, wiki and new development test system.

    VII. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has continued to work hard to engage with and process a swell of new volunteers! Some additional changes since last month:

    New Staffers List: Age (Volunteers & Recruiting), Anurag (Volunteers & Recruiting), Alexis Latshaw (Open Doors), Amy Luo (Communications), arrow (Open Doors), Charlotte (Translation), Christa Shishino (Communications), Freya (Communications), little_ruby (Translation), Nele Noppe (Journal), queerlyobscure (Open Doors), Shawnda (Volunteers & Recruiting), Stiney (Open Doors), Tuulia (Wiki)

    New Workgroup Members: Cathtice (AO3 Docs), Claire Oberholtzer (Strategic Planning), copracat (AO3 Docs), Jessica Steiner (Strategic Planning), Maia Bobrowicz (AO3 Docs), MollyC (AO3 Docs)

    New Tag Wranglers: Amaranth, Amber, ariadne83, Avery, Cassandra Chan, dlb42694, Eccles enchantersnight, lalejandra, MarcDelani, markey, MelanieW, Naghtielus, pawheart, Shannon Black, Spockside, theleaveswant, untitled102
    New Coding Volunteers: Andreja, Ariana, caithnard
    New Testers: Lena
    New Translators: Aliya Agaeva, Ellie, Jessica A.
    Departing Staffers: Lisa Schmidt (Journal)

    Read more

  • April 2012 Newsletter, Volume 58

    By Claudia Rebaza on Tuesday, 8 May 2012 - 3:01pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    I. OTW EVENTAPALOOZA



    April saw numerous activities taking place throughout the OTW which required coordinated activity from various committees and workgroups. The most notable was our incredibly successful membership drive under the leadership of our Development & Membership committee. The drive broke records in terms of funds raised -- 1,256 individual donations totaling over US$35,744. This support is both welcomed and necessary to sustain the OTW's projects and help the organization continue developing resources for fans.

    The OTW also launched a survey intended to gather information from members, interested fans, and anyone with awareness of the OTW or its projects. This online survey ran from April 19 to May 2, and we heard from just shy of 6000 respondents! Our I&O committee who organized the survey is a little overwhelmed at the task ahead but they're extremely happy at how successfully fans spread the word to get this volume of response. Needless to say, full results of the survey will take some time to collate as it contained many places in which fans could express themselves in their own words. Expect to see updates on the results as the year goes on with the first results out later this week.

    One surprising effect of the survey was reported by our Abuse committee: the AO3 has been receiving an increase in Fannish Next of Kin requests and they invite everyone to designate someone for their account.

    And yet another event of note was the April Showers event at Fanlore and the Archive of Our Own! ADT estimates that there was an increase of about 3,000-4,000 new works in April but due to the SSA import in March which brought many new works to the AO3, April numbers need to be compared to February. Using those figures, 19,822 works were posted in April in 1,959 different fandoms, compared to 15,863 new works in February. Traffic numbers have also exceeded what the system could handle only a month or two into this year!

    Particularly significant is that there were 1,888 new fandom tags created in April, up from only 429 in March! There were also 82,116 new bookmarks created in April, up from 69,041 in March. So there are clearly many new works for readers to dig into!

    II. FANLORE and TWC



    The Wiki committeewas busy promoting April Showers as they invited everyone to add their fandom memories to Fanlore via Twitter. They also held two Fanlore editing chats to answer questions about wiki editing. Summaries of those chats were posted on the Fanlore community at dreamwidth. They also posted about the Fanlore forums and received some awesome feedback! These forums are still at the early planning stage and Wiki would welcome any input from users, particularly from people with experience modding forums.

    In the meantime the Journal committee is talking to various parties at the University of Iowa to plan an academic conference for 2014; stay tuned for more information!

    III. HAPPENINGS AT THE AO3



    2012 has so far brought an unbroken streak of monthly deploys, adding series subscriptions and better page titles as well as several bugfixes -- see the Release Notes on the AO3 for more details ! The ADT committee has also been running training for Open Doors on the archive import process, and is soliciting feedback on the new email-batching and user stats features that will be coming up. Fun with stats!

    In the meantime Tag Wrangling recently hosted their first Open House of the term. Questions were asked and answered, and there was a lively discussion about guidelines and procedures. The staff hopes to host several more before the end of the term at varied days and times to accommodate users across the globe.

    The Support committee reported that their ticket count is holding steady at about 200 new tickets coming in each month. Most tickets are resolved within 48 hours. Certain tickets, however, may take a bit longer as they need more in-depth research. Support recently met with the Tester Leads who will be helping Support investigate some of those trickier bugs. \o/

    Open Doors is getting the ball rolling on an import for 852Prospect.org. They've been collecting feedback on the SSA import to revise and properly document the archive import process; training with Support to prepare for answering 852Prospect tickets post-import; training with AD&T on more technical aspects of importing to improve future troubleshooting abilities; and moving toward bringing importing directly under Open Doors.

    IV. SEEING AND SPEAKING



    Vidding members Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk are, along with members of the Legal committee, preparing for DMCA testimony in early June. They are also continuing pre-planning work on a Dark Archive for multimedia fanworks. Last but not least, April saw them unveiling a Showcase of Fan Videos at the A03. Check it out if you haven't already seen it!

    V. GOVERNANCE



    The Board has been busy as usual - you can see the full details in their minutes for 31st March, 7th April and 14th April. Planning has started for next year's election. The Strategic Planning Workgroup presented a roadmap for creating a plan, which was announced as part of the spring drive. Board members also helped Devmem co-ordinate things for the April drive, and the new Grants committee has also been launched.

    Meanwhile Finance prepared financial statements for the annual report, and supported DevMem by monitoring income during the drive and answering questions from members.

    VI. OUR TECH WIZARDS



    Systems resolved 73 tickets; deployed Errbit to production; aided in TW.org's recovery from the overwhelming response to the membership drive/survey mailing (\0/); tightened security on otw5; and underwent other security maintenance procedures as outlined in our documentation.

    Webmasters took an early step toward redesigning transformativeworks.org, by working on internal and external outreach to gather feedback about the site. Questions about the site were included in the OTW Community Survey, and an internal questionnaire is being developed that will be used to gather feedback from OTW committees.

    VII. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS



    Volunteers & Recruiting has been working hard to engage with and process a swell of new volunteers resulting from the recent drive and survey projects! While other recent months saw about 20 willing-to-serve (WTS) forms per month, VolCom received roughly 140 forms in April. VolCom is working very hard to find placements for all of these volunteers and is also using the surge in WTS forms to test new intake procedures, as well as creating documentation for existing procedures. Some examples of their work last month:

    *New Staffers List*: Curtis Jefferson (Communications), crowa (Internationalization & Outreach), anatsuno (Journal), Francesca Coppa (Open Doors), Hadrien Asbury (Open Doors), tartan (Open Doors), arrow (Open Doors), Stiney (Open Doors), baerga69 (Webmasters), moonmagicks (Webmasters), Natalie (Webmasters), Lady Oscar (Support)

    *Departing Staffers List*: Suzanne Scott (Journal)

    *New Workgroup Members:* Matty (AO3 Documentation Lead), hele (AO3 Documentation), Kylie (AO3 Documentation), lionpyh (AO3 Documentation), mumble (AO3 Documentation), Scott S (AO3 Documentation), jrho (AO3 Documentation), Yshyn (AO3 Documentation), Maia Bobrowicz (Elections Workgroup), Lucy Pearson (AO3 Documentation & Elections Workgroup), Claudia Rebaza (Elections Workgroup)

    *New Tag Wranglers*: Batsutousai, supergreak, Salahra, afterandalasia
    *New Coding Volunteers*: Anoel, just_chiara, Lal, Mark Bowers
    *New Testers*: Vel, mary0111

    *Departing Tag Wranglers*: welfycat

    Read more

  • March 2012 Newsletter, Volume 57

    By .Julia A on Wednesday, 4 April 2012 - 12:26am
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    I. EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS



    April Showers Promotion



    Here at the Organization for Transformative Works, preserving fannish history is a central part of our mission, and we’re proud to be able to offer fans both a place to host their works on Archive of Our Own, and a way to tell their own fannish histories on Fanlore. However, we know that there are many, many wonderful fanworks out in the world which haven’t found their way to the Archive of our Own. There are even more fannish stories left untold on Fanlore – for example, we’d love to see the fannish activity over The Hunger Games documented as it unfolds. Last year, we welcomed more Fanlore edits and AO3 works with our April Showers promotion. This year, we’re hoping to do the same!

    We’ll be highlighting (but not requiring!) a different fandom for each day of the month on our Twitter @ao3org. When uploading to the AO3, tag your uploaded works ‘April Showers Challenge 2012’ – at the end of the month we’ll round up all the works with this tag and post stats on how many were uploaded for each fandom. To help you out, we’ll also be hosting an importing party on AO3. From Saturday 14th April, 17.00 UTC to Sunday 15th April, 02.00 UTC (see the time in your timezone), we invite you to join us in a live chat where our staff will answer questions about creating accounts, uploading, tags and more, provide a few invitations for those who need them, and celebrate as new works are uploaded! Stay tuned for more details.

    You should also keep your eyes peeled for news on Fanlore editing parties, where Fanlore staff will walk you through the process of creating and editing pages.

    Accessibility, Design & Technology, Internationalization & Outreach, and the Tag Wranglers have been working throughout March to prepare for April Showers 2012. They look forward to a successful and exciting event.

    Membership Drive

    Development and Membership is preparing for the upcoming membership drive, which will be held April 18-25. They’ve also been brainstorming about convention outreach and ways to celebrate the OTW’s fifth anniversary in September.

    The Journal

    The Journal, in conjunction with the Vidding committee, just released one of two exciting special guest-edited issues this year: issue No. 9 on Fan/Remix Video was released March 15, 2012 (layout markup and video hosting contributed by the Webmasters) for the latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures. Issue No. 10 on Transformative Works and Fan Activism will be released in June.

    We’re also working through submissions for No. 11, a general issue. If you’re interested in contributing to Transformative Works and Cultures, our next two special issues will be on Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies (close date for Symposium: May 1, 2012) and Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books (close date for Symposium: May 1, 2012).

    Speaking of Vidding…

    Natacha Guyot is working with the Internationalization & Outreach committee to put together a diverse showcase of video on the Archive of Our Own. I&O will be recruiting global fan vidders for the showcase. If you haven’t heard from OTW yet, you just might soon!

    II. BETTER SHARING WITH YOU

    Smallville Slash Archive

    AD&T started the month with a bang: the mass import of the Smallville Slash Archive to preserve its contents and ensure future maintainability. This was their test case for any imports of that scale and they’ve been working with Support and Open Doors to ensure an even smoother process and prompt technical support for affected authors in the future.

    Communicating with Each Other, and With You

    The Communications committee is still working on building the committee up and getting all regular tasks assigned.

    We’re pioneering a new newsletter format you see before you: Julia A and Nistasha (that’s us!) have stepped up and welcome any feedback.

    Jintian is working with Francesca to produce the Annual Report for the org (you can see previous annual reports to get a sense of what they’re like).

    Camden and Amanda have been working on our minutes and beta-ing. Communications is looking forward to working more with other committees when we’re all settled in!

    The Outside World

    Development and Membership would like to thank tag wrangler Elanya and Board member Jenny Scott-Thompson for representing OTW at two recent events (AggieCon and ORGcon, respectively).

    Tag Wrangling

    This month, the Tag Wrangling committee has been training up their brand new wranglers and working on some improvements to their in-house documentation and guidelines. The group also met with AD&T to talk about their wishlist for the wrangling interface and to discuss AD&T’s suggestions for improvements to the interface.

    Translation

    This month meant ALL the trainings! The Translation committee assigned liaisons for its nine translator teams (Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Swedish) and hope everyone will get back into the swing of things soon (they’re still toiling away at the OTW website!).

    Our intrepid new Translation staffers have now also been introduced to the wondrous intersection between code and grammar that is the Archive interface translation prototype. They’re currently polishing up their call for more testers, so watch out for more news on that front soon. (Sparkle hamsters go go go!)

    III. THE BOARD AND NEW OTW WORKGROUPS

    Our Glorious Board

    Board Minutes are online for 18th Feb, 25th Feb, 3rd March and 10th March. Sadly this is one of those months where most of what the Board has done is confidential stuff or in progress and not ready to be announced publicly, but we hope to be able to tell you more soon.

    The Board also agreed to open up the first half of Board meetings to all staff in the org (it was previously open to committee chairs only), which will allow more people to see how the Board works.

    The Board is also working on uploading some older minutes from 2007, so you can now see more of the history of the org.

    Archive of Our Own Documents Workgroup

    The Board has approved the creation of an AO3 Documentation workgroup. This workgroup will be responsible for a number of things, including managing the AO3 FAQs. If you’re interested in technical writing, or like explaining how to do things, AO3 would be glad to have you join the team! Just get in touch with the Volunteer and Recruitment committee.

    This workgroup came about through the tireless efforts of the Support committee, with help from AD&T. Congratulations and good luck to the Docs Workgroup!

    Speaking of Workgroups…

    The Board has also approved the creation of a Strategic Planning workgroup. This workgroup is first responsible for creating a “plan for the plan”, explaining how OTW will go about the process of writing the strategic plan. The workgroup will then be helping to implement it. If you’d like to know more, or you have thoughts on the direction of the org, do share them with the Board!

    IV. DEATH AND TAXES

    Legal

    The Legal committee is working on an amicus brief in a US case about the right of publicity and its application to noncommercial speech.

    Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk are also working with Legal to set up DMCA testimony for the end of May or the beginning of June.

    Terms of Service

    Our Content Policy committee has been preparing for the review and update of the OTW terms of service with input. They’ve enjoyed collaborating with the Support, AD&T and Abuse committees on this task.

    $$$

    The Finance committee had its first meeting of the term and completed the Delaware state filing. The committee is renewing OTW’s insurance, looking forward to the federal tax return, and training up new staff.

    The Grants team has completed a proposal to become its own committee, which will be presented to the Board soon. Grants is starting research for the first two grants of the year — two NEH grants due in May — and are starting on getting the grant application part of the wiki organized and user-friendly.

    V. CODEMONKEYS

    What are the Webmasters doing?

    The first-year staffers are wrapping up their basic training in Drupal (the open-source content management system we use on several of our websites), and the Webmasters are about to embark on the research phase of the transformativeworks.org redesign project.

    blue_meridian has stepped down as chair of the committee and is being succeeded by 2011 chair Kristen Murphy. We’re grateful for Blue’s service as chair, and very happy that she’ll be staying on as a staff member.

    What about the Systems Monkeys?

    Our Systems Monkeys closed 50+ tickets this month, and mainly focused on cleaning up the vault, where our committees store confidential information, such as passwords.

    In addition, Systems migrated the media directory on Buddha to qnap to free up disk space on the drupal server. They also set up a new error reporting system for the Archive, called Errbit. This logs errors and lets the AO3 coders spot problem bits of code

    On the Systems docket: expanding diskspace on Tao and working on the new righthaven server.

    The OTW Wiki

    Another new member joined the Wiki committee: welcome, Shannon!

    The Wiki committee is currently planning and working on several projects, including forums and a mediawiki upgrade to fight spam.

    Last weekend, the committee held two informal chats for our new members and gardeners, which we hope to turn into a regular event for anyone interested.

    On Fanlore, editors have been very busy adding vids to several new categories, for example Supernatural vids, Battlestar Galactica vids, Buffy the Vampire Slayer vids, Angel vids, and Firefly vids. Other new categories with many pages already are Vidding Awards and The Professionals Fanfiction.

    AO3 Coders

    Behind the curtain, AD&T has been preparing for a full email redesign to accommodate text and HTML versions, and finished the alpha version of a frequently requested work stats page (detailed post forthcoming). The next deploy, including character and relationship feeds as well as a host of frontend fixes, is just around the corner.

    VI. HELLOS AND GOODBYES

    Shout-outs: Volunteers & Recruiting!

    The Volunteers & Recruiting committee has bid a sad farewell to chair via_ostiense, and we all welcome a new chair, Renay. Thank you to via for all her hard work. After some tidying up after the beginning of term, V&R is moving on to focus on its main 2012 project: documentation, with help of some new staffers: Charlotte, Marta, bell, and Alison.

    Internally, they’ve been discussing a better way to handle forms that potential volunteers fill out when they want to offer their time and skills, in order to make it more clear what to expect from us and to improve the transparency of the project.

    They’ve also been conducting chair debriefs with the 2011 chairs to discover ways they can improve the experience for all our current and future committee leaders.

    Hi, New Staffers!: Eiress (Abuse), Charlotte Toolan (Financial, Volunteers & Recruiting), Lee (Financial), bell (Volunteers & Recruiting), Marta (Volunteers & Recruiting), Alison (Volunteers & Recruiting)

    Hey, NewFront-end coding volunteer!: Sam Johnsson
    Welcome, Tag Wrangling volunteers!: Ricky, nullityCoder, Scarabaes, fleurofthecourt, Erin Ptah, manaie

    Goodbye, Dear Departing Staffer: via_ostiense (Volunteers & Recruiting)

    Read more

  • Archive of Our Own Newsletter - February 2012

    By .Lucy Pearson on Saturday, 3 March 2012 - 9:30pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    Accessibility, Design, & Technology

    Welcome to the first of our new format Archive news posts! Until now, the regular news posts on what's going on with the site have been appearing under the heading of 'Accessibility, Design and Technology Meeting News'. This is because when we first went into open Beta, AD&T were the only committee working directly on the Archive. However, as the site has grown and changed, so have our committees! So, we're changing to a new AO3 news format which will give more space to showcasing all the different kinds of AO3 work and happenings!

    Who are our committees?

    The Archive of Our Own is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works. There are a bunch of OTW committees who work on the Archive: Systems are responsible for our servers, the Communications Committee helps to support the committees with news and other communications, Abuse and Content Policy deal with policies and user conflicts, and lots of other committees help and advise on specific issues. However, there are three committees who you'll be hearing about a lot in these news posts, as they do much of the day-to-day work on the AO3:

    Accessibility, Design and Technology

    AD&T are responsible for the design and building of the AO3. They manage the coders, designers and testers who work together to develop the site, are responsible for the overall planning on the project, and liaise with the Systems committee to keep the servers happy.

    Support

    Support are responsible for helping users with questions, problems and suggestions. They receive all the messages submitted through the Support form and make sure that users receive the help they need, working with other committees to get the answers to specific questions.

    Tag Wrangling

    The Tag Wrangling Committee are responsible for the tags on the Archive. They figure out policies to guide the wrangling of tags and manage the big team of tag wranglers who organise things behind the scenes. (If you'd like more detail on how tags are dealt with, check out our guide to tags on the AO3.)

    New code and bug fixes

    We just deployed some new code to the Archive: Release 0.8.11 is a small(ish) release which includes lots and lots of front-end fixes, enhancements to our 'edit multiple works' feature, and some tweaks to the email queue. Our next deploy is scheduled for sometime around the end of March.

    What's up in the world of tags?

    One of the things about wrangling is that there are more than 250,000 tags on the Archive. Even with our team of more than 100 volunteers and staffers, sometimes a tag gets wrangled incorrectly, or something is wrangled quickly without due consideration, or due to the fact we're human beings we simply overlook something important.

    One of the more recent examples of this would be the tag “Near Eastern Mythology”. A user brought this tag to the attention of the Tag Wrangling Committee, pointing out that the tag was flawed in several ways. Foremost, it was unclear as to which countries and cultures should be linked within this tag - the definition has shifted historically a number of times. More importantly, it was felt that the term “Near East” projected a specific Eurocentric-exclusive worldview. One of the Archive’s goals is inclusion of all who want to join, so this tag was problematic.

    After an extended conversation with several users and the Internationalization & Outreach committee chair, we decided there was no single term for the category that would be both accurate and inclusive. As such, we re-wrangled the character and relationship tags out of “Near Eastern Mythology” and into specific mythologies, including Babylonian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology, Persian Mythology, Semitic Mythology, and Sumerian Mythology. We’ve unmarked “Near Eastern Mythology” so it won’t appear in the auto-complete or fandom list (though, as always, we haven’t changed the tags on the actual works). The old tag itself is now a synonym of Mythology, so you can still find the works tagged by it.

    We always value user input on our tagging system - if you see a tag you feel is problematic in some way, please let us know by submitting a support ticket or send a tweet to @ao3_wranglers! Thank you to the user who drew our attention to this tag.

    Supporting our users

    Support has been hard at work throughout the hiatus. In January we saw almost 330 tickets sent in; so far in February we've seen 172. At the moment we only have 12 tickets open. *\o/*

    One of our big projects for the Archive this year is developing our internal and external documentation. We're jazzed that Support are so on top of tickets, but we want to make it even easier for our users to find stuff out by improving our FAQ and tutorials. We also want to make it easier for our staff to do their work by developing our internal knowledge base. Support are working with AD&T and the Volunteers and Recruitment Committee to create a documentation workgroup which will specialise in this area. If this is something you're interested in helping out with, please let our Volunteer committee know by filling out our volunteer form.

    Speaking of tutorials, Support staffer Sam has just completed a great one on Embedding Media. We have more coding plans to make this easier and better in the future, but this great resource takes you through all the tips and tricks you need to know with our current setup.

    Cool stuff on the Archive!

    We celebrated Valentine's Day on the Archive with our Seven Days of Love challenge encouraging more commenting, kudosing, reccing, and creating of works, and with a big Valentine's Day thank you to all the people who make the AO3 awesome.

    We're planning to repeat the April Showers Challenge which we ran last year to celebrate under-represented fandoms on the AO3. This year we're hoping to make it more exciting and wide-ranging by getting our users involved with suggesting fandoms to celebrate - stay tuned for more news on this soon.

    The coming weekend, we're excited to welcome the Smallville Slash Archive, which is making a new home here on the AO3 as the test case for our Open Doors project. *\0/*

    AD&T Committee business of note

    AD&T has gone back to a weekly meeting format, with the goal of getting together every Saturday for about an hour. So far we're doing well with the weekly part - keeping discussion to an hour is a lot more challenging!

    Last year's chairs Elz & Amelia are continuing their work into this year, Naomi is our new Board liaison, and we're happy to welcome a few new and returning staffers: Maia, who was on staff in 2008 and chaired the committee in 2009, is back on board, Sarken is taking up the mantle as our new front-end lead, and Jenn Calaelen has joined us from testers! We spent our first couple of meetings making plans for the new term and brainstorming about ways we can improve our processes in different areas. Now we're off and running on various projects and looking forward to a great term!

    Support Committee business of note

    Support is still in the process of forming its committee for the coming term. We hope to have our first meeting soon; until then we are discussing several issues via email. Matty is returning as chair, and Jenny S-T will be serving as our new Board liaison.

    Tag Wrangling Committee business of note

    We had our first meetings of the term on the 20th and 25th of February. Returning chair Alison Watson is joined by Emilie Karr as co-chair, with Sanders our new Board liaison. Our committee has increased in size this year, and we've been working hard training up some new wranglers while we get started on our plans for the term.

    If there are things you'd like to do or say, please share them in comments, via the AO3 support and feedback form, by volunteering, or in whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Everyone is welcome to this party!

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

    Read more

  • February 2012 Newsletter, Volume 56

    By Claudia Rebaza on Thursday, 1 March 2012 - 4:20am
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    Welcome to our first newsletter of the 2012 term! We're excited to be welcoming a whole host of new people for staff and volunteer positions: big BIG thanks go to our Volunteers and Recruitment Committee, who have worked tirelessly to induct all these shiny new people (see their update for the grand list of staff joining, leaving, or changing roles).

    As we've been welcoming so many new folk, a number of committees are still getting rolling and are still to have their first meeting of the term. However, you can see what folk have been up to - and what they're planning for the new term - below!

    Abuse:

    Abuse has expanded our staff. As always, we regularly see cases involving mislabeled works or questions about the ToS and occasionally about more serious matters. If you're curious about what goes on behind the scenes, you will be pleased to know we're working on a summary of last year's cases (with all identifying details removed). We continue to handle Fannish Next of Kin arrangements: please let us know if you would like to designate someone.

    AD&T:

    We were busy over the break - one of our big challenges was battling performance issues on the Archive of Our Own. AD&T worked with Systems on stabilizing and improving AO3’s performance – we’re grateful to them for all of their help!

    We deployed fixes to our HTML parser and new fandom feeds in January, and we’re putting the finishing touches on our February code push, which includes a number of delicious bugfixes.

    We’re planning to do our first Open Doors archive import on March 4th - we're so excited to be welcoming the SSA to the AO3!

    We’ve been brainstorming with Support about ways to improve our internal and external documentation this term, so people can find all the information they need. We’ve also been touching base with several other committees about ongoing projects and plans for the new term and continuing to code away on new features and improvements!

    Board:

    We have had several more meetings since our last update - minutes are available for 16th, 21st and 28th Jan, 4th Feb and 11th Feb. We have now chosen all our committee chairs for the new term, approved lists of potential new staff, and chosen board liaisons to every committee, as well as continuing our broader discussions. We have approved proposals for SOPA/PIPA protests, a new spam management setup for Systems, an amicus brief for Legal, an IRC channel as well as a chat bot for Coders, and forums for Fanlore, among other things.

    Communications:

    Communications has welcomed six new members: Amanda, Camden, Jintian, Julia A.H., Nistasha and Rose, and has new co-chairs Claudia R. and Lucy P. We're really excited about having a bunch of new faces, and we're also jazzed to be welcoming back former chair Francesca. All these new folks are currently working their way through orientation and Comms expects to hold its first meeting in the next week or so.

    Since we have lots of new people on the committee this year, it's an excellent time to work on improving and formalizing our internal processes so that the committee can work in the best possible way. We want to make sure that committees across the org have the help they need to get important news out in the world. We're working on various things behind the scenes, including ways of keeping track of external communication, better documentation for internal use, and clearer organization of posted content. Once we get rolling properly we'll also be evaluating the future use of the OTW's varied contact points (Twitter! LJ! Tumblr! Facebook! We has ALL the social media).

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy is planning some changes this year. Now that the committee has completed its core work - establishing the Terms of Service on the Archive of Own - a fully staffed committee is no longer needed. So, we hope to undergo a reorganization to become a working group with Abuse, AD&T, Legal, and Support contributing from time to time to review and update the Terms of Service.

    Development & Membership:

    Development & Membership has split into two teams, each with its own staff and projects, and have welcomed new staff members for both. The Grants team will focus exclusively on grant administration, while the DevMem team tackles more general fundraising projects such as fund drives and convention outreach. The first big project for the DevMem team will be the first of our two annual fund drives, coming soon. Grants has just had its first meeting where they will be finishing up their proposal to make grants its own committee and they plan to send it to the board as their first order of business.

    Finance:
    Finance are still getting rolling under new chair Nikisha Sanders. They're expecting a busy year as the org continues to expand and develop!

    Internationalization & Outreach:
    I&O has just held its first meeting where they welcomed three new members this term, Meep, Sole, and Eylul, creating a committee of seven members with which to take on new projects.

    Our first step will be identifying top priorities for the 2012 term and deciding how best to address them, as well as setting up liaisons with their sister committees. I&O is really looking forward to working with everyone, and hopes to cross some older goals off their list in 2012.

    Journal:

    Journal is hard at work on two exciting special guest-edited issues: issue No. 9 on Fan/Remix Culture and issue No. 10 on Transformative Works and Fan Activism. We're also working through submissions for No. 11, a general issue. If you're interested in contributing something to Transformative Works and Cultures, our next two special issues will be on Transnational Boys' Love Fan Studies (close date: March 1, 2012) and Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books (close date: April 1, 2012).

    Legal:

    Legal welcomed some new members and is gearing up for more work on the DMCA exemption process for vidders (stay tuned for more on this soon!). Rachael Vaughn is our hero for taking the laboring oar on the work of preparing our comment (and our example vid).

    Open Doors:

    Open Doors is settling in as a committee with a couple of new members, and will be assisting the fabulously diligent AD&T committee to import the Smallville Slash Archive into AO3. Those looking for more information can find it at the AO3 site.

    Support:

    Support has been hard at work throughout the hiatus. In January we saw almost 330 tickets sent in; so far in February we’ve seen 172. At the moment we only have 12 tickets open. \o/ We're really proud of how well our team are keeping up with the work.

    We welcomed one new staffer this term, MelanieW.

    Systems:

    The turn of the year is always busy for your Systems Monkeys, what with archiving mailing lists and making changes for outgoing/incoming staffers. Speaking of which, we have two brand-spanking new monkeys of our own to announce: Astirya and JayBee have joined us and are already stabbing at the typewriters. Since the last ORG-wide Systems has resolved over 80 tickets. In addition to the usual, we've worked up a quickie SOPA response with Webmasters, diminished spam issues on Fanlore, ameliorated email bounce issues, are developing a major upgrade for Fanlore, resolved CPU issues on zen & otw2, worked with ADT on db slicing and increasing performance (and once again getting rid of those pesky 502s), and fine-tuned squid for the Archive. In the works are upgrades, upgrades, more partitioning work and new servers. But what else is new? :)

    Tag Wrangling:

    Tag Wranglers are off to a big start this term, with their largest staff ever of 10, allowing them to average one staff member for every 11 wrangling volunteers! This has come in particularly handy with the four different training sessions held for groups of new inductees in February. New volunteers learned about the tools available to them and how to start off wrangling tags, which has previously been a steep learning curve for some volunteers. They got help with tricky problems with their fandoms, and were more able to find someone in the tag wrangling chat room during other hours to help with questions.

    Translation:

    The new Translation team has not had a chance to meet yet, so a report will wait until the next org next newsletter, but we are looking forward to the new term.

    Vidding:

    Vidding is collaborating with legal on the DMCA exemption renewal process for vidders and other commercial remix artists; vidding chair Francesca Coppa and co-editor Julie Levin Russo are also working with the Journal editorial team to put the final touches on next month's "Fan/Remix Video" issue of Transformative Works and Cultures: look for it March 15, 2012!

    Volunteers & Recruiting:

    At the beginning of the term, VolCom gets the biggest update - and a massive round of applause!

    VolCom has been busy getting staffing in place for the new term – and aside from hammering out a few org tools-related issues and tracking down a few potential staffers gone AWOL, things are now pretty much in place. Though we would absolutely love to hear from any committees who find themselves in need of anything particular in the way of staffing. And new staffers should always feel free to email VolCom at volunteers@transformativeworks.org if they have questions!

    VolCom has lots of plans for the new term, as well, though! One of our major foci is going to be on documenting ALL THE THINGS, particularly our processes! We are also planning to work on the intake process, develop the organization’s internship program, refine our mediation process and try and make all our work appropriately transparent! Really, every time we turn around we find another thing we want to improve! And we’re always interested in hearing from all of you!

    *EXITING STAFFERS LIST*: VolCom bids an understanding, but only partial, farewell to those staffers who have chosen to leave their old committees, but not the org: Eylul (AD&T), hele braunstein (Board member, Internationalization & Outreach staff, Translation chair), Rachel Barenblat (Board member, Wiki), Claudia Rebaza (Tag Wrangling), Hadrien_Asbury (Vidding), Shannon (Vidding)

    And we will greatly miss all of those who have chosen to leave us entirely: thecatwasnot (AD&T), Margarita Gakis (AD&T), allison morris (Board member, Communications, Development & Membership, VolCom, Webmasters), Sheila Lane (Board member, Financial chair), Kitsunegari (Communications), Megan Westerby (Communications, Development & Membership chair, Support), Candra K. Gill (Development & Membership), Fox (Development & Membership), jjtaylor (Development & Membership), minervacat (Development & Membership), Queue (Development & Membership), Zhailei (Fair Use Curriculum, Vidding), Patricia Nelson (Journal), Steven Hennig (Legal), Anna L. Rueden (Support), arithilim (Support), Cybel (Support), Oaktree89 (Support), Juliet Kemp (Systems), prk (Systems), Amy Wilson (Wiki), Tonje Anderson (Translation), Anne Jonas (Vidding, VolCom), new_kate (Webmasters), were_duck (Webmasters).

    *NEW STAFFERS LIST*: But we take equal joy in welcoming a veritable bevy of staff to the org: jackiekjono (Abuse, Financial), LunaMoth116 (Abuse, Wiki), Moth (Abuse, Legal), Sera Tran (Abuse), Maia Bobrowicz (AD&T, returning staffer), Jenn Calaelen (AD&T, Tag Wrangling), sarken (AD&T front-end lead), Amanda G. Michaels (Communications), Camden (Communications), Jintian (Communications), Julia A (Communications), Nistasha Perez (Communications), Rose Little-Wolf (Communications), Aja (Development & Membership), LizWeishaar (Development & Membership), Margot Horney (Development & Membership), bm1893 (Development & Membership - Grants Team), Evelyn Browne (Development & Membership - Grants Team), Laura Drescher (Development & Membership - Grants Team), Night (Development & Membership - Grants Team), soleta (Development & Membership - Grants Team), Tara Keezer (Development & Membership - Grants Team), Meep (Internationalization & Outreach), Sole (Internationalization & Outreach, Tag Wrangling), Rynne (Legal), Jay Bee (Open Doors, Systems), Rose (Open Doors), MelanieW (Support, Translation), Highlander II (Tag Wrangling), Kath Gee (Translation), Marta (Translation), Lena (Webmasters), Matt Lewis (Webmasters), nc (Webmasters), sunusn (Webmasters), coian (Wiki), lab (Wiki), Tiyire (Wiki)

    As well as a whole herd of new Tag Wranglers: ar, bm1893, briar_pipe, cher, eight_demands, Elanya, Eliza Wallace, ermigoa, false_alexis, frannie, hagar, Hsifeng, imaginarycircus, Jessica, Kymericl, Lee, meaplet, Mutecornett, Qem, Snowynight, Starrrz, Steelstar, Stephany Qiouyi Lu, tamara, Tina Rafols, whichy

    And a couple of new Translators: Calvin (Swedish), Nicolle Lamerichs (Dutch)

    And we just can't help but be excited to see an assortment of staffers choose to expand their horizons within the org by joining new committees: Lesann (Development & Membership), Hadrien_Asbury (Development & Membership - Grants Team), megan sumerell (Development & Membership - Grants Team), Eylul (Internationalization & Outreach), Rachel Barenblat (Open Doors), Ira Gladkova (Tag Wrangling), Sam Johnsson (Tag Wrangling) and Shannon (Wiki).

    Webmasters:
    Web have big plans for this year - we've started work on a massive overhaul of transformativeworks.org, which will be shinier and more useful! Hurray!

    Wiki:

    The Wiki Committee is slowly getting back together for the new term. With two people returning and four new committee members, we are still getting to know each other and are very happy to welcome coian, lab, LunaMoth116 and Tiyire! We have great plans for this term, including a forum, so wish us luck.

    Systems continues to work on our spam problem and has more anti-spam weapons in its arsenal. Currently, users may notice that there is a temporary block on creating pages for the first four hours after they register an account. Meanwhile, the gardeners are fighting the good fight and have blocked more than 1,000 spam accounts in the last 2 1/2 months. That means the RecentChanges page can look a bit like a blood-drenched battle field, but you can hide the carnage with this filter.

    In Fanlore news, editors have been busy adding information on lots of different topics. Editors who want to document fanfic writers' websites can now use a new template and category for Author Pages. Several editors have been holding Merlin editing parties on the weekends, and almost all fanwork pages and images have been added to the date categories--if you want to get an idea of what (mostly media) fandom looked like 30 years ago, check out 1982. More fandoms welcome!

    ========================================================================

    If you have any suggestions on how the improve the newsletter, or would like to direct messages to any of the committees, please comment and let us know!

    Read more

  • November 2011 Newsletter, Volume 55

    By Kristen Murphy on Saturday, 3 December 2011 - 2:56pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    Welcome to our last newsletter of 2011! Read about our Willing to Serve drive, the upcoming Board transition, and the latest news from AO3, Fanlore, and TWC under the cut.

    Willing to Serve Drive

    Ever thought about volunteering for the OTW? Our annual Willing to Serve drive is a great time to get involved. Check out the OTW committee descriptions and fill out our volunteer interest form if anything piques your interest! Our post on volunteering, roles, and involvement levels offers more information about the kinds of positions that are available.

    Many thanks to Volunteers & Recruiting for organizing this effort, and to all the committees for contributing information about their work.

    Board Election and Transition

    OTW members elected Julia Beck, Naomi Novik, Nikisha Sanders, and Jenny Scott-Thompson to the Board of Directors in an election held November 16-18. They will join returning Board members Francesca Coppa, Ira Gladkova, and Kristen Murphy on the 2012 board, as we bid a grateful farewell to departing members Rachel Barenblat, Hele Braunstein, Sheila Lane, and Allison Morris.

    The newly elected Board members will take office on December 9. Until then, they are "shadowing" the current Board by attending Board meetings and participating in discussions. This overlap period is an opportunity for the new Board members to familiarize themselves with procedures and issues and ask questions, while the standing board passes on information, visions, goals, and issues.

    Archive of Our Own

    The Tag Wrangling committee is polling the tag wrangling volunteers about possible improvements to the wrangling interface so the committee can work with AD&T to make tag wrangling even better. Freeform captains Laylah and Xparrot held an informative internal training session on how to wrangle freeform/additional tags, and the committee also worked with our Support liaison, Sam Johnsson, to create better liaison documentation to keep tag-related tickets flowing smoothly.

    Accessibility, Design, and Technology (AD&T) have been prioritizing development goals for the rest of 2011; you can read about this and more AD&T news in the most recent AD&T meeting notes.

    Fanlore

    Fanlore now has a Twitter account! You can find informal news updates at fanlore_news. Feel free to tweet at us your concerns, thoughts, and suggestions.

    The Systems committee recently installed Squid (a caching proxy) on Fanlore's server to help the site run faster.

    Also this month, the Wiki committee sought feedback on an addition to the Image Policy FAQ, which has now been implemented.

    Transformative Works and Cultures

    The Journal committee released a special guest-edited double issue of TWC (No. 8, Race & Ethnicity in Fandom, and Textual Echoes) on November 15, 2011, its third issue of the year (usually we do two!). We are already looking ahead to the third issue of 2012 while 2012's first two issues chug through production. The Symposium Blog team continues posting awesome thinkiness (and the team is always looking for guest writers!).

    Staffing News

    New staffers and volunteers: We welcomed tuff_ghost, euoi, and Neery to the coding team, astirya to Systems, and Heather Whitney to Abuse. CrunchySalad, des, Elizabeth McCollum, tai, Ridicully, Rodo, jiele, Sashataakheru, Sera Tran, Kim McGreal, and Lisa Burscheidt all joined the tag wrangling volunteers, while Tari (Korean), Paulina Bożek (Polish), natycuac (Spanish), vlausch (German and Russian), and Sofie (Swedish) signed up for the translator team. Agnieszka, CrunchySalad, linbot, metaphasia, Therese M, Makioka, and metagnat become tester volunteers. Megan Sumerell and sprat joined Volunteers & Recruiting, and havocthecat returned from hiatus.

    Departing staffers and volunteers: We bid farewell to Amy Wilson from the tag wrangling volunteers, and thank her for her work; Amy will continue to work in the Wiki Committee.

    Thanks for reading! This is the final newsletter of 2011. Most OTW staff and volunteers will take a short break beginning December 16, and we'll return in mid-January to kick off the 2012 term. If you have suggestions about how we can improve the newsletter in the coming year, we'd love to hear from you — please contact the Communications committee.

    Read more

Pages

Subscribe to Newsletter