Newsletter

  • January 2011 Newsletter, Volume 45

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 2 February 2011 - 2:30am
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    Welcome to the OTW's fourth term! Below the cut, you'll find our January newsletter, with information about our committees and their goals for 2011.

    Abuse:
    Abuse is gearing up for what will hopefully be another uneventful year.

    AD&T/Archive:
    AD&T never sleeps! The Archive made it through its second Yuletide - thanks to all of the coders and testers (with huge help from Tag Wranglers and Support omg!) for their tireless hard work -- and to the users for their patience and enthusiasm! With the change of terms, we're sad to be losing some folks who have done amazing work in the past, but we're also excited to be bringing a few new faces on board who have already started doing amazing work of their own. Special kudos to Kylie, who is taking over as the sole lead of the testing subcommittee for this term.

    Two big things we're working on to start the term:

    1) New servers! We've got 'em! Working jointly with Systems, we sourced and purchased 3 powerful new servers to join our 2 existing servers, a storage server to hold lots of data, and a switch to let them all communicate. The servers that fandom bought! \0/ \0/ \0/

    2) Improving our process. We're always brainstorming ways to make things run more smoothly, and next month, we'll be moving our code from the subversion version control system to git, which offers some better workflow options for our coding team. To go along with that, we plan to move to a regular monthly deploy schedule, which should make it easier for testers, support, wranglers, users and challenge mods to keep track of what's going on and when new code is coming through the pipeline. We've also been working on improving our documentation and training for new volunteers, and we're excited about the possibilities for the coming term!

    Board:
    The first major task of the 2011 Board was to appoint committee chairs and approve potential staff members for the new term. We're delighted to welcome all our new chairs, staffers, and volunteers, and look forward to a productive year. We're also pleased to announce that after spending last year as a subcommittee of International Outreach, Translation is once again an independent committee. Though related, Translation and IO have distinct purposes that we hope will be well served by this change in structure.

    Communications:
    Communications have met for the first time and are working on our strategy for the term. Our aims are to keep the OTW transparent and to provide information about the issues that impact our members and our mission, and our newly international committee should help us to deliver that better than ever.

    Content Policy:
    Content Policy is just getting up to speed, and we'll begin meetings and policy discussions soon. Projects we anticipate for 2011 include completing the update to the original/nonfanwork policy, continuing to work on the importing archives/Open Door policies, and beginning to draft fanart and fanvids-relevant parts of the TOS.

    Development & Membership:
    Development & Membership are proud to welcome a number of new members and to start the new term with big goals and plans! Our intern Benny has been working on documentation and pre-planning for the March Drive. Expect steady progress from this incredibly international team as we cement our grant application process, plan activities and outreach to unite the Org and generally shout from the rooftops with excitement.

    Finance:
    FinCom just shelled out for our shiny new servers, and we have never been so happy to spend so much money! \o/ We're also gearing up for our busy season - annual reports and filings and taxes, and all the things we love to do (so you don't have to).

    International Outreach:
    We have been regrouping after the break and reviewing our internal structure. We are collaborating with other committees on various exciting projects, which will come to fruition later on during the term. We also continue to provide international news coverage to the OTW blog.

    Journal:
    Journal has just sent the guest-edited March History issue to copyedit, which kicks off production. We welcome a few new people in Symposium, Review, Symposium Blog, and proofreading. We are hard at work on submitted content for the September issue. And several exciting guest-edited issues are generating some buzz in acafan circles. In short, Journal anticipates another year of on-time, high-quality issues!

    Legal:
    Legal welcomes some new committee members, who will be learning more about what we do. We look forward to another smooth year.

    Open Doors:
    Open Doors is excited to welcome a new committee member, and we're happy that the rest of the committee wanted to serve again. We're looking forward to a busy year: we have archives to save and import, and lots of zines and fannish paraphernalia to archive with the Fan Culture Preservation Project.

    Support:
    Support stood strong through term break, continuing to support users on the finest Archive in the land through numerous year-end challenges. Support is delighted to welcome additional staff members to the team, bringing fresh eyes to help strengthen our process. A FAQ and Tutorial review is already underway and plans are to proceed full steam ahead finalizing the underlying policies and front-end interface for the AO3-integrated Support Board.

    Systems:
    Systems has grown by two more monkeys - er, members. Deborah Kaplan, a veteran, has rejoined our ranks, and our newest victim is James_, a long-time Unix admin who lives in the UK near Cambridge.

    In other news, Moose has volunteered to be our gardener. We are doing vault clean-up and code-work. We've upgraded the dev system because there are so many busy ADT coders. The new AO3 ixsystems servers have arrived and are racked at the colo, but we're waiting for the switch to starting bringing them into the fold. Drupal just had an update, and we're working on the new VolCom db.

    Tag Wrangling:
    The Tag Wrangling Committee welcomes both new staff members and new volunteers this term. Wranglers are hard at work wrangling tags left over from holiday challenges, while committee members are looking for ways to streamline our process for future challenges and make wrangling clearer for staff, volunteers, and users alike.

    Translation:
    The translation teams have kept working hard through the break to translate the website, and some of our oldest teams are begining to tackle the translation of the Archive of Our Own FAQ. We're also preparing ourselves to do a rehaul of some of our older documentation to make sure no part of the website is falling through the cracks. In more immediate news, we'd also like to welcome hele as our new chairperson!

    Vidding:
    Vidding is biting its nails waiting for the new servers to be installed - and then boy, have we got some fun things for you! Stay tuned for increased multimedia at the AO3 and elsewhere in 2011!

    Volunteers & Recruiting:
    We're delighted to welcome four new members this term! Over the break, we trained our new staffers and began setting up all the new staffers and volunteers on your committees. We also debriefed last term’s committee chairs to develop a better understanding of what worked, what didn’t, and what resources everyone needs in order to make chairing a smoother and more rewarding process. We purged the old mailing list archives and chat transcripts, and went through the mailing lists, 16Bugs, and 37 Signals to see that everyone has the right access. Looking forward, we are excited about the new database and are planning a redesign of VolCom’s presence on transformativeworks.org, to make volunteering for the OTW more transparent.

    Webmasters:
    We’re delighted to welcome two new members this term! First on our agenda will be the annual check for outdated content, when we review the website and encourage committees to update the information about their projects. We’re also gearing up to work on our major goals for the term; our first priorities will be to finish and launch the new Open Doors site and fix some style bugs on the Journal site.

    Wiki:
    The fabulously international 2011 Wiki committee met for the first time recently, and we've begun brainstorming about what we want to do in 2011. Our first priority is outreach -- we'd like to get people from many more parts of fandom participating in Fanlore -- and we welcome your suggestions on how to reach out to the corner of fandom where you hang out! Meanwhile, the first challenge of the year has been posted to the dreamwidth community: Origin Stories. Tell us how you got into fandom!

    Read more

  • November 2010 Newsletter, Vol 44

    By .mjacobson on Wednesday, 1 December 2010 - 4:03am
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    Welcome to our November newsletter! OTW news for you, just below the cut.

    Abuse:
    We're putting together our year-end report, which should be out December 15, and wrapping up the cases we've got.

    AD&T/Archive:
    This month we did ALL the things to the AO3. Or that's what it feels like, and we're still going strong. A major code release, including an upgrade to Rails 3! A new HTML parser and sanitizer! Continued work to improve and complete the collections and challenges code, using our big test case, Yuletide Treasure! Celebrating the anniversary of AO3 Open Beta! And another big code release!

    We're simultaneously wrapping up business for this year and girding our loins for the madness of the holiday season - coders are still working hard on refining performance, while AD&T and Systems work on the choosing and buying of the new servers we desperately need. We're also readying ourselves for the temporary departure of one of our senior coders, who will be taking some maternity leave shortly!

    Thank you to our sister committees, Tag Wrangling and Support, as well as the tireless Systems committee, for all of their work during these huge initiatives — the AO3 (and the OTW) is a huge collaborative effort, and none of us could do it on our own. <3

    Board:
    The Board is working hard to wrap up this term's business and prepare for 2011! We're looking at everything we accomplished, and at all the ways we can do even more in the future. As part of that, we worked this month to carry out the first contested OTW Board election, and we're proud to welcome Ira Gladkova and Kristen Murphy to our ranks, taking the place of outgoing founding board members Naomi Novik and Rebecca Tushnet.

    Communications:
    Communications continues to bring useful news and interesting information to fans through its blog and various other social network accounts — and now, with more international stories courtesy of our International Outreach committee. If you see a story we should be reporting, please drop us a line by commenting on our blog or one of its mirrors, tagging a link with "for:otw_news" on Delicious or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter.

    Content Policy:
    No report.

    Development & Membership:
    DevMem kept ourselves hopping with work on all our usual tasks, including fundraising and...planning for more fundraising. Specifically, we submitted another grant on the behalf of the TO3 project, and started groundwork on other upcoming grants. We're also beginning to rough out some plans for the structure of our committee for next term to allow us to specialize and build teams to create membership resources and to communicate the relevance of the OTW to a diverse fannish population. We've also been tying up the final loose ends from the October drive, and we created a list of eligible voters for the November OTW Board election and worked with Webmasters and the Elections officer on elections tasks. We are also working with the Webmasters on populating a calendar with conventions, conferences, and other events relevant to fans all over the world. We've sent the second iteration of our membership expiry emails — the first truly monthly notice, so we're still perfecting it. We also got some great social media news recently, which indicates that the OTW's message is being heard by more people in more ways than we suspected, which is a great indicator of positive attitudes toward transformative fanworks out in the wild!

    And finally, two exciting announcements! One: the premiums for international donors have arrived and are about to be shipped out! That means the arrival of premiums is imminent for everyone! Two: DevMem will be welcoming an intern in 2011. We're very excited. VERY.

    Finance:
    Paying bills, appreciating donors, and prepping for year-end.

    International Outreach:
    We're still busy evaluating this year and tying up loose ends -- it's been our first season, so we want to make sure we're all set for an ambitious second term! We also met with AD&T and discussed the revamping of the relationship between what we informally call 'interpretative fanworks' (like translations or podfics) to their respective 'original' work. We're currently dissecting our notes and converting them into actual feature requests for archive coders. In the meanwhile, we hope you've been enjoying our international news tidbits!

    On the translation front, we're ridiculously excited to welcome Chinese as our newest language on the OTW website. A big happy thank you to our Chinese translators!

    Journal:
    Journal is working hard to prepare copy for the special guest-edited History issue, to appear March 15, 2011.

    Legal:
    Still not sued! Legal also continues to answer questions and provide legal information to fans who contact the OTW for help.

    Open Doors:
    The Open Doors committee continues to take fan collections into the Fan Culture Preservation Project. We are also investigating the possibility of collecting the entire 900 gigabyte Geocities file (currently being offered as a torrent) in order to collect historical fan activity on Geocities; stay tuned for further developments on this.

    Support:
    Support have been very busy this month responding to user comments, AO3 bugs, and enhancement requests. AD&T has worked incredibly hard on the huge upgrades and enhancements of this past month, and Support has in turn been kept hopping! There have been a lot of changes to the AO3, and we're keeping up with them so that we can help make things better for today's Archive users -- and tomorrow's! We have welcomed two new Support staffers to our team, phela and Cybel, and they are being trained right now. We're happy to have them. We are also proud to congratulate our committee member and former chair, Ira Gladkova, on her election to the OTW Board.

    Systems:
    No report.

    Tag Wrangling:
    Alert tag wrangling volunteers and staff worked this month to isolate and describe a recent bug that was causing filtering problems for new tags on the archive -- thanks to the coders' hard work coming up with a fix, all should now be well!

    To help reduce the server load on the Archive during the heavy-use periods surrounding the holiday season challenges, tag wranglers are planning to shut down all non-emergency wrangling for the peak usage days. Keeping our hands off the wrangulator when people are uploading all their shiny new challenge fic with shiny new tags will be tough, but we'll manage somehow.

    Vidding:
    The vidding team continues to work on the Vidding Resource pages (item 1 on the road map) and on preparing for the Dark Archive. We are also waiting for details on VID EMBEDS AT THE AO3 and will release details ASAP.

    Volunteers & Recruiting:
    VolCom has had another busy, productive month! Our biggest news is a little belated — Cesy has left the committee proper in order to carry out an ambitious training development project aimed at increasing the sustainability of all of our projects. Initially focusing on new coders, she's working to help build a structure that we can use to help our volunteers develop their skills. We're also assembling pools of new potential staffers and volunteers for next term. VolCom works through the end of term in order to get ready for the next year, so we've taken on our new 2011 staffers: via_ostiense, ElegantPi, and kinetikatrue — and we're training them now so that they can help induct and train next year's new staff!

    Webmasters:
    Webmasters have had another busy and productive month. We now have a calendar! We've loaded a few events to start with and will be adding more soon. You can also submit events, so please let us know if there's an upcoming convention, open-source meetup, academic conference, or other event that should be on our radar. The calendar is a collaborative effort by the Webmasters and the Development & Membership committee — thank you, DevMem!

    We also have a new tag cloud to help you find news posts by topic. We have plans in the works to redesign our home page and make the tags more prominent; for now, you can find a link to our tags at the bottom of every page on the website.

    A big part of our November was our team's collaborative work with VolCom, DevMem, Systems, and the Board on elections-related tasks. We're thrilled that blue_meridian and allison had a part of making the OTW's first-ever contested election a smooth and well-documented process for everyone.

    We are currently working with Systems and Vidding on the streaming technology that will be used to establish the library of vids described in point 1 of the OTW's Vidding Roadmap.

    And finally, we are proud to see our chair, Kristen Murphy, preparing to take a seat on the 2011 OTW Board. We think she's the cat's pajamas, and we know her drive, belief in our mission, and desire to make the OTW ever more inclusive and transparent will have a wonderful impact on our future.

    Wiki:
    We've added clarification and finalized our Image Policy. We've done some more work on re-organizing the zine categories, and started to tidy the help pages up. We're hoping to have Fanlore out of beta by the end of the term.

    Read more

  • October 2010 Newsletter, Vol 43

    By .allison morris on Tuesday, 2 November 2010 - 4:08pm
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    Our October was jam-packed, and our newsletter is a little late as a result -- we think it was worth the wait. Find news from all our committees behind the cut!

    Abuse:
    No report.

    AD&T/Archive:
    AD&T have been working really hard upgrading the Archive to run on Rails 3. Coders have rewritten ALL the code, and our wonderful testing team have been working like crazy to ensure that all these changes haven't broken anything (thanks so much to the volunteers from the Yuletide community who stepped up to provide additional testing help).

    Most of the changes made for Rails 3 will be invisible to the user, but we hope that they will bring a significant increase in performance. Our coders have also sneaked in some new code, including more new challenges features and new options for sanitising user code (which will mean a lot more freedom styling your works).

    The new release also launches VIDEO EMBEDS! HAPPY END OF OTW TERM, FANDOM!

    Because we're making such big changes, the Archive will be down for a day when we deploy this new code. We'll send a message to all registered users before we take the site down.

    After this release, AD&T won't be standing down - we have one last crazy burst of work to ensure that everything is running smoothly for the annual endurance test party which is the Yuletide Treasure challenge. This is currently the biggest challenge run on the Archive, and it's one that we use as a test case for new features, so the end of our term is very busy!

    Board:
    The Board has been working with ALL the committees this month -- it's an especially busy time, as projects are beginning, growing, and coming into their own across the OTW. We are also preparing for our own end-of-term, and for the OTW's first ever competitive election process; we're thrilled to have four such amazing, hard-working, and eminently qualified candidates. We are continuing individually to liaise with our individual committees, and are continuing to develop and encourage sustainable and effective procedures across the organization.

    Communications:
    Salut! Guten Tag! Buon giorno! We hope you've noticed a more international flavor on the blog last month - we will try to bring you more global coverage of issues that are important to fans and fandom. Communications has also been doing more behind the scenes communicating, not only continuing to answer the org's email but also serving as the first point of contact for collaborative projects with other nonprofit and fan-related organizations.

    Content Policy:
    We are working on some FAQ additions, including a better explanation of how to use freeform tags to indicate interactions between characters. We are just becoming wise to the ways of freeform tags ourselves!

    Development & Membership:
    Thanks to our members, donors, and supporters, DevMem held a very successful donation & membership drive! We're gathering the last of the mailed checks from the post office, and once that's done, we'll be posting all the details and a big giant grateful thank you! Because that really can't be said enough: the OTW is fan-created, fan-supported, and fan-directed, and fans keep our mission and all of our projects strong. We're also working with the Webmasters on a calendar project we think you'll find exciting, gearing up to apply for even more grants, and looking for more opportunities for outreach.

    Finance:
    No report.

    International Outreach:
    We're busy tying up loose ends for this year, reviewing what we did this term and following up issues with other committees. We're pleased our collaboration with Communications is going swimmingly and have more news posts in the pipeline. Following user feedback we received in September, we're preparing to meet with AD&T and other interested parties to review the current "translation relationship" (linking translations to original versions etc.) on the Archive -- we and the Translation committee are pretty excited about this.
    In the meanwhile, translators have worked on election materials as well as translating OTW news posts for the blog.

    Journal:
    Journal continues its quiet behind-the-scenes timely awesomeness: even before the fabulous September 15 issue was released, the Journal team was working behind the scenes on the next few issues. Next up: the special March issue, a guest-edited volume on the topic of history. Visit TWC's Web site for a full slate of upcoming issues, both themed and nonthemed: http://journal.transformativeworks.org

    Legal:
    We continue to be blessedly inactive. We anticipate a few nonprofit housekeeping-type issues in the next few months.

    Open Doors:
    In addition to continuing to field donations to the Fan Culture Preservation Project, Open Doors is eagerly awaiting ADT's deployment of the code that will make large scale importation of archives to the AO3 possible. (Yuletide will be the test case.) Once this is possible, we will be able to launch projects to back up large, deteriorating archives within the AO3!

    Support:
    Support have been working super-hard developing better working models as well as keeping up with support requests. We've been working with Content, Abuse and AD&T on better FAQs and documentation to ensure our users have the information they need. We're currently gearing up for the end of year rush of support requests which will come with the new Archive release and with Yuletide treasure and other holiday challenges - we expect to be very busy, so please bear with us if we take a little longer than usual to get back to you.

    Systems:
    No report.

    Tag Wrangling:
    It's Yuletide time! The Tag Wrangling Committee and wrangling volunteers have been working closely on the upcoming Yuletide project to ensure that it runs smoothly, updating tags and organizing behind the scenes to make sure everything is in good shape. We're learning a lot about how to make the tagging system work well for challenges going forward.

    Vidding:
    EMBEDS ARE COMING! Yes, you soon will be able to embed video hosted elsewhere on the Archive of Our Own, which will allow vidders to have a stable home (URL and comment base) even as various streaming sites go up and down. We are continuing to work on the Vidding Resource pages and hope to have a good clear set of instructions about how to host your own video available soon. Also, vidding Chair Francesca Coppa and ADT member Amelia Ryan attended the Open Source Video conference to investigate what systems are being developed for actually hosting video. We are currently testing a couple of drupal-based open software packages we learned about at the conference for the Dark Archive. So please stay tuned!

    Volunteers & Recruiting:
    VolCom wants YOU! We've been busy collecting responses to our recruiting post, and in the next week or so we'll start conversations with the volunteers who said they would be interested in joining the best committee of all, VolCom! Most other committees will be taking on their new staff in January, and VolCom needs to be in place to make that happen. We're also starting the work of closing down the 2010 OTW term and laying groundwork for the next -- we know it seems early, but we like to be thorough, and November is the month we're busiest with that part of the job.

    Webmasters:
    We've launched the revamped Contact Us page and are putting the finishing touches on the new events calendar (coming soon). We've also been working on applying more meaningful tags to news posts. We're currently investigating a problem with our Dreamwidth layout in IE7 as well as some bugs with our translation software.

    Wiki:
    The Wiki Committee has posted another draft of the Image Policy for comment and rolled out a set of image templates to make uploading images easier. Based on feedback, we revised the draft policy and hope to produce a final version shortly. We also approved a new floating category for tropes & genres. Finally, we continue to post bi-weekly challenges on the Dreamwidth community; the current one is a thousand ships.

    Read more

  • September 2010 Newsletter, Vol 42

    By .mjacobson on Friday, 1 October 2010 - 1:24am
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    Welcome to our September 2010 newsletter! All the OTW news that's fit to print, just below the cut.

    Abuse:
    No report.

    AD&T/Archive:
    Since last month, AD&T celebrated the archive's birthday and deployed release 0.8.1! We're now coming up on 110,000 works and 10,000 users, and we had our 3,000th commit to the project. Thanks to everyone who helped with and attended the AO3 birthday party, which was awesome!

    Our next big project is upgrading the archive code to Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9. It's a pretty significant undertaking, given how much code we have, but there should be some real upsides in terms of performance and code maintainability. We've also welcomed Kylie as the new co-lead of the testing subcommittee, and want to offer thanks in advance to the testers, who get to test ALL the pages in the archive when we do a big upgrade like this, and are thusly worth their collective weight in gold.

    Board:
    The Board has been working hard to be sure that all our committees are within reach of their 2010 goals. We are continuing individually to liaise with our individual committees, and are putting procedures in place to be sure that the OTW remains sustainable and effective.

    Communications:
    Communications has been handling the OTW's email correspondence and queries; we are also pleased to be working with International Outreach member Helka Lantto on getting more international voices and issues on our blog.

    Content Policy:
    No report.

    Development & Membership:
    This month DevMem worked with AD&T to throw a party for the first birthday of running the Archive of Our Own on fan-owned servers! We've nearly recovered from the experience, finally, and it was a blast, and we're planning to do it again for next server birthday. We're also quickly approaching our October fund drive and preparing exciting new donation premiums (still very SEKRIT, but trust us on this -- they're going to be awesome)! We've worked with the Open Video Alliance to sort out the details of having OTW representatives speaking at their upcoming conference, and our social media reach continues to flourish. We're also heading into the busiest part of our grant-writing season, so we've been thrilled to welcome Alexandra Edwards to our team as a grants-focused volunteer working closely with Kate Mollen, our resident grants expert. We've also welcomed AnnaK, previously of the Volunteers and Recruiting committee, to our team - she's starting her work with us by focusing her energies within a cross-committee workgroup on a mission to make the inner workings of the OTW more transparent and accessible to new potential volunteers. And we're still churning away on everything else, of course -- we have big plans for supporting all of the OTW's big plans.

    Finance:
    Same old, same old with the sharks of FinCom; still paying the bills, still operating in the black, still worshipping Shemar Moore.

    International Outreach:
    IO has been deeply embroiled in the minutiae of analyzing website texts with the Webmasters to make them even more internationally inclusive and accessible. We also spent waaaay too much time partying it up at the AO3 birthday bash, and happily linked up our member Helka as Comm liaison. In translation news, we're hoping to get a Portuguese translation team off the ground (cross your fingers for us!)

    Journal:
    Journal released issue Number 5 of TWC on time and to much rejoicing! But not that much: we are hard at work on the next THREE issues.

    Legal:
    The Legal Committee is excited to support the OTW's newest initiative: the Fair Use Curriculum project. We plan to create a team of educators, students, parents, and lawyers who will develop a United States copyright law curriculum for high school students. The aim of this project is to educate and inform students about the copyright and trademark issues that impact their lives, including the principles of fair use and the concept of transformative works. The resulting curriculum will be made available at no cost to educators worldwide. Interested? Read our post to find out more.

    Open Doors:
    Open Doors has begun the process of brokering two more large collections of zines for the Fan Culture Preservation project: that of long-time fan Susan M. Garrett, who recently died, and that of Morgan Dawn. We have also been working with ADT to outline the complex and multi-committee procedure for importing huge archives to the AO3.

    Support:
    Support doesn't have a lot to report this month! The Birthday Party definitely increased interest in the Archive, so we've been fielding an elevated number of tickets since then, a good chunk of which either begin or end with how much the user loves the Archive (yay!). We're moving forward with Support Liaison positions, process documentation, FAQ, and tutorial reviews as well as the proposal for the new Support Board. Next month's update should be huge.

    Systems:
    Systems is happy to announce that once again nothing has 'sploded on their watch. This month we've been spec'ing out the new archive servers with AD&T, improving monitoring, and struggling with 32-bit versus 64-bit issues.

    Tag Wrangling:
    Tag Wrangling continues to stay very busy! We have liaised with Support, International Outreach, and AD&T to make small but important changes that increase inclusiveness and welcome diverse fannish cultures. We've continued to work on our internal standards as well, and are planning to make our processes more transparent to users -- watch for an upcoming blog post! We've also successfully developed our planned policies regarding wrangler absences and retirement.

    Vidding:
    Vidding is continuing to work on carrying out the OTW Vidding Roadmap, including the Dark Archive and the Torrent of Our Own. We're sending representatives to speak at the Open Video Conference this weekend, and a representative of ADT will be attending the technical panels so that we can keep up to date on cutting-edge developments in open source video hosting technology.

    Volunteers & Recruiting:
    Here in VolCom we've implemented our on-call rotation system this month, which is going swimmingly and allowing us to focus on all of our end of term tasks. We're putting the finishing touches on our annual willing-to-serve and still-willing-to-serve calls, and are also planning to reach out to all of our current non-staff volunteers to be sure that we know if they have interest in any of our standing committees. We've done some work to clean up ALL the OTW mailing lists. We've got bittersweet news this month, as well -- longterm volcomrade AnnaK has transferred to the Development & Membership committee -- she's still helping us out, though (we're crafty like that). She's working on the cross-committee effort to make our work more transparent to potential volunteers, which directly benefits us (well, okay, and the entire OTW). We've also been talking quite a bit about how awesome VolCom is, and how cool and rewarding we think our work is, and how weirdly challenging it is to convey that to potential new volunteers. We make everything go! We help everyone! It's pretty great, and we all exist in the happy glow of carrying out a fulfilling mission as a result. We're working toward a better explanation of why it's a great committee to work in than the previous sentences, but if you or anyone you know has an interest in helping people help the OTW, give us a holler and volunteer now. Then you can brag on how you twigged to our awesome before we even laid it all out! :D

    Webmasters:
    The Webmasters have been busy in the last month! We're building a calendar for the website where we'll be able to advertise OTW events, such as the recent AO3 birthday chat, as well as external events like fannish cons, academic conferences, and technology meetups. We hope to launch the calendar in October. We're collaborating with VolCom and DevMem to produce new resources for volunteer recruitment so that potential volunteers will be better informed about opportunities within OTW and what the work involves. We're working on a redesign of the website's "Contact Us" page. We also assisted the Journal committee with layout for TWC Issue 5, and we've been consulting with International Outreach on some rewrites of website content.

    Wiki:
    This month the Wiki Committee has updated the administrators description and capitalization policy as well as updating the "What Fanlore is not" page. We posted the Intro to Fanlore FAQ for comment, and a follow-up revision to Question 10. We've continued to post bi-weekly challenges on the Dreamwidth community, this time we invited people to add material about their first fandoms. We've started recruiting new gardeners -- let us know if you're interested in helping us out!

    We're still working on the Image Policy FAQ, but we hope to have it available for comment soon.

    Read more

  • August 2010 Newsletter, Vol 41

    By .mjacobson on Monday, 30 August 2010 - 1:07am
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    Newsletter
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    Welcome to our August 2010 newsletter! Get the updates on our activities and exciting plans just below the cut.

    Abuse:
    No update at this time.

    AD&T/Archive:
    AD&T have been busy with lots of exciting things. We met with our awesome Systems team to talk about our plan for upgrading our servers (bigger! faster! shinier!) and are now gathering quotes for the new hardware. We'll keep you posted as we get more details!

    In coding, we have some awesome things about to go live — notably the first versions of our long-awaited Skins features AND some new export options for works — you'll be able to download fics to enjoy on Kindles, iPhones, and other portable devices! Our testers are being kept busy making sure the code for this stuff is all working swimmingly.

    With all these cool features and our plans for expansion moving on apace, this seems like an excellent moment to remind people that this party is for everyone! Anyone can request an invitation to the Archive by joining our invitations queue, and if you're an account holder you can request invitation codes to give out to other people by going to the 'invitations' section under your user home and asking for the amount you need. We're happy to give out larger numbers if you're running a challenge or want to bring a whole community over to the Archive. Share the love!

    Board:
    The Board has been working hard to help all of our committees achieve success as we gain traction in the second half of the 2010 term. We are continuing to liaise with our individual committees, and are working to be sure that the OTW remains sustainable and effective.

    Communications:
    No update at this time.

    Content Policy:
    Content Policy is continuing work revising and updating the Archive FAQ and has been doing preliminary work on future Archive multimedia and art policies.

    Development & Membership:
    DevMem continues to grow and become ever more effective at the work of sustaining OTW's future stability and effectiveness. This month we lured the amazing Minervacat onto our team, and got jjtaylor settled and up to speed — they are both full of plans and energy, and are exactly what we need! Look for great things from both of them (some of those great things will not be flashy, but if you feel inexplicably positive about the world one of these days? Well, it's probably their work in action.) We're excited about our graphics challenge to publicize the TO3 and generate happy buzz about the OTW's vidding roadmap, so look for a signal boost about that here soon! We're continuing our social media growth, and are gratified to see that OTW conversations are continuing outside our more "official" spaces. Also in social media news, the OTW has just been added to social-relay site JustCoz — an online relay system that lets you donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes that matter to you. It's a way to potentially allow members and supporters to help us to reach out to our communities. Finally, we are hip-deep in big plans for our October funding drive — we're planning to turn the spotlight around and ask the community to focus on all the reasons we each support fandom and the OTW! Intrigued? It's going to be fantastic, so be ready!

    Finance:
    Finance is thrilled to share the news that we are still not broke! And we are very very good at counting money, so you can trust us on that one. Aside from assiduously maintaining the OTW accounts, we've been helping AD&T and Systems with their plans for eventual server expansion, and planning budgets that will work within our ability to maintain steady growth into the future. Finance is also delegating a committee representative to examine the practical applications of adding value via glitter from vaunted expert in glam maximization Adam Lambert, and we will be applying those lessons to our work in the future for the betterment of the entire organization.

    International Outreach:
    We've continued to work with Webmasters on reviewing the OTW website — our combined goal is making it more accessible to international readers. (A big thanks to Charlottes for taking time out of their busy schedules to do this with us.) We've also been working with Tag Wrangling and AD&T on multilingual issues: how to make tags work in more than one language and how to post stories that are in more than one language.

    The translation teams continue to work hard on translating content, and are always on the look out for new translators to help them. We've also been psyched to assist Support with a first query in a language other than English (keep them coming! <3).

    Journal:
    The TWC team is completing layout and polishing our editorial for our fifth release, a general issue ranging through a wide variety of topics of interest to both fans and fandom scholars. We're working on our sixth issue, focusing on the history of fans and fan engagement, and due out in Spring 2011, as well. Calls for papers for several guest-edited special issues have been released and are on TWC's web site.

    Legal:
    The Legal committee continues to stay abreast of issues of concern to fans, and is working behind the scenes to advise fans who have legal concerns in reference to their fannish (and transformative!) work.

    Open Doors:
    No update at this time.

    Support:
    A somewhat quiet month for Support! As promised last time, this month we focused on talking to our wonderful and awesome sister committees, Tag Wrangling and AD&T, about how we will be working together, both in the immediate future and with some tentative ideas for post-Board. We discussed ways to keep AD&T and Support abreast of each others' doings so Support can answer tickets quickly and accurately and so that AD&T can be made aware of bugs and top user issues/priorities; likewise, the Tag Wrangling committee helped us settle on ways to efficiently pass wrangling-related tickets between committees and follow up on them. We have even more plans for more and better inter-committee communications and procedures coming up — but our Support team will look a little different by then!

    We have some major changes to our staff this month. Last time we welcomed aboard two amazing new staffers; this month we bid goodbye to our previous chair, Ira, who's stepping down for health reasons (but will remain on staff) and welcome our new chair, Megan! Megan hails from Development & Membership and looks forward to helping Support support our community and create a specialized Support board for our needs!

    As always, we continue to work hard on answering tickets, and improving how we do it! <3

    Systems:
    Systems is keeping the OTW humming along, and is working with Finance and AD&T on plans for server upgrades.

    Tag Wrangling:
    Tag Wrangling's first full month as a committee has been a busy one! We have come up to speed quickly and are working with other committees to create good, accessible solutions for use in wrangling guidelines, assuring that we can get as close to our goal of fannish inclusiveness as possible, and so that the AO3 can welcome fandoms from a variety of sources and fan traditions. We're also working on the more practical side of wrangler wrangling, developing clear volunteer hiatus, leave, and resignation guidelines so that everyone who needs a break can get one, and everyone who needs to move on to other work can do so without worrying that their carefully wrangled fandoms will fall into neglect (we love our fandoms, you see.) :)

    Vidding:
    Vidding has been working on the first two parts of the Vidding Roadmap: specifically, the Vidding Resource site (including hosting for vids and other video cited in scholarly work) and the Dark Archive (we are currently pricing cloud space and examining software options; in particular, we are considering using Drupal as our content management system.) More news as we finalize these decisions!

    Volunteers & Recruiting:
    Volcom has had another busy and productive month! We continued to add new volunteers, including coders, testers, and tag wranglers. We're instituting a new workflow so that we can continue to do our day-to-day tasks while working on larger projects that will help the OTW run more smoothly — first up is some database cleanup in preparation for a move to a new, easier to use system. Sounds exciting, right? It is. To a certain sort of person. A certain awesome sort of person! If you'd like to get involved by joining us in the Volunteers & Recruiting Committee or elsewhere in the OTW, please get in touch via our contact form. We'd love to have you join us! See what we did there? Recruiting! It's super fun. :D!

    Webmasters:
    In the last month we've rolled out new, customized styles for the OTW mirror blogs on Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, and LiveJournal. We also finished a lengthy round of Drupal software upgrades with the help of our hardworking friends in Systems. More recently we've been assisting the Journal committee with layout markup for the upcoming issue of TWC and collaborating with Development and Membership on the TO3 multimedia challenge.

    Wiki:
    We've had a good month for getting things fixed: the TOC problem with one of our Fanlore skins has been fixed. We've also gotten our user rights management extensions set up. We've also been working on correcting system and user messages, and on updating the help pages.

    On the policy side, we're working on an Administrative FAQ that will be out shortly, as well as continuing to work on a Content FAQ and the Image Policy FAQ.

    And lastly, we've resumed the posting of challenges to the Dreamwidth Fanlore community and we'll be posting a new one every 2 weeks for the remainder of 2010.

    Read more

  • July 2010 Newsletter, Vol. 40

    By .allison morris on Saturday, 31 July 2010 - 8:30pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    Welcome to our July 2010 newsletter. Get the updates on our activities — including changes to committees, a legal victory, and software improvements — just beneath the cut!

    Abuse:

    We released our mid-year report!

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T have been working hard on projects designed to help ensure the long-term stability and performance of the Archive. Our brilliant team of volunteers have been hard at work extending our suite of automated tests: as well as helping us keep an eye out for anything that breaks in the future, this work will enable us to make improvements to our existing code. It will also facilitate our upcoming upgrade to Rails 3, which we think will make our code much more efficient. In the midst of all this, we've been talking to the Board and Finance about our budget in the medium term, and are developing a plan for expanding our servers!

    Design-wise, we've been discussing some major improvements to the Archive interface that (we hope) will make browsing and navigation much better. As part of this, we've been working with International Outreach to develop ideas for improving multi-language support and other international features. We won't be making any of these changes until after our Rails upgrade, but we're excited about the plans.

    We also waved a fond goodbye to our Tag Wrangling Subcommittee, who have spread their wings and become a full committee in their own right. We're proud to see how they have grown, and look forward to working closely with them in future.

    Board:

    The Board is celebrating the fantastic work being done all over the OTW, and is proud to help make it all happen -- the recently announced DMCA exemption for vidders is the most visible achievement. We've worked with Tag Wrangling to help them become a full committee, and are working closely with the chairs of several committees to incorporate the amazing work done over the years by the Documentation team into their purview. We have also continued to liaise with our individual committees and to make sure that chairs have the personnel and resources they need.

    Communications:

    The Communications team has been answering mail and dealing with the media over our DMCA exemption victory and also working with Legal to answer fans' private legal queries on fannish matters. We are also thrilled to be collaborating with DevMem to build up our Public Relations arm: our new Press Room, featuring press releases and media mentions, and an increasingly beefed up presence on social network sites.

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy is revising the Archive FAQ and thinking ahead to art policies.

    Development & Membership:

    We've been busy this month, and it's all been the good, productive, and exciting kind of busy! We wrote and submitted two applications for Creative Commons Catalyst Grants, instituted honoree and memoriam donation capability on all OTW website donation forms, saw our social media presence grow in both influence and effectiveness, and collaborated with the Vidding and Legal Committees to create and distribute the press release announcing the Library of Congress ruling in favor of a DMCA exemption for vidders and other remix artists. We're field testing the extreme-alpha version of our in-person OTW outreach kit by equipping an Otakon-attending OTW staffer with flyers, buttons, and hints on talking about OTW projects to help people find out about us, get excited, and get involved! We're also starting plenty of new initiatives, including exploring new ways to reach out, working to implement membership expiration reminders, and applying for more grants to support all OTW projects. Finally, we're excited to welcome a new committee member: jjtaylor, who most recently served with Docs, will join us beginning in August!

    Documentation:

    Our work here is done: Docs was originally created to get the OTW's internal documentation up and running on an internal wiki, and we've reached a point where the other committees are using it to their best advantage. \o/ So it's time for the Documentation Committee members to say a sad farewell to our beloved Docs, and move on to other things. Margie is stepping down from any formal role as she takes a break, while Amy, carpet_diemon, and JJ put their talents to work directly on other committees. Our thanks to everyone — it's been an amazing ride. <3

    Finance:

    FinCom would like to wish everyone a happy Shark Week! We continue our swim through, ah, bill-infested waters, and are making progress on budgeting and capital project planning.

    International Outreach:

    This month, we've had an exciting meeting with the AD&T design experts to talk about multi-language browsing in the archive. (We advise, they come up with clever solutions. It's a great arrangement if you ask us!)

    We also had some input on the archive's forthcoming diversity statement and continue to do other behind-the-scenes work that we hope to report on in the next newsletter.

    Journal:

    The TWC team is beginning work our sixth issue even as we put the finishing touches on work for our fifth, which entered production this month. Calls for papers for several guest-edited special issues have been released and are on TWC's web site.

    Legal:

    Legal and Vidding are thrilled at the OTW's victory in obtaining a DMCA exemption for fan vidders and other noncommercial remix artists. See our blog posts for more details. The Legal committee has also been working behind the scenes to advise fans who have legal concerns.

    Open Doors:

    The Open Doors committee has been working to codify a privacy policy for use with the Fan Culture Preservation Project at the University of Iowa. We also continue to broker donations to that project. We are continuing to work on our new site: the webmasters have done their job, now we have to provide them with new copy and updated information. Stay tuned!

    Support:
    We've had an exciting month! We're super happy to welcome two new staffers aboard: Anne-Li and hermitsoul. Both are already making awesome contributions, including helping us go over our volunteer and staff induction procedures so we can give Volunteers & Recruiting accurate and up-to-date lists with an eye towards how induction will work come the Support Board.

    We're also RIDICULOUSLY excited for the new Tag Wrangler committee and have been discussing how the sister committees will be working together in the near future. The chairs of AD&T, Support, and Wrangling will be meeting next month to discuss in depth how the three committees will work together on the Support Board.

    And speaking of the board (as we do, constantly), we're reviewing some broad policies right now to make sure we get it right; we're also focusing on separating our dreams of how the Board will work into the essentials and the things we would merely love super hard. These lists will be passed on to coders to help make their job easier (we love you!). So close!

    And as always we continue to answer tickets. We love you guys!

    Systems:

    Your Systems Monkeys have been setting up new monitoring software, which will help us (& AD&T) get more information about how the systems are running, and make better decisions for future expansion/purchases; we’re working on core Drupal updates (a seemingly never-ending task); and the back-up server is now backing up all databases, offloading that load from the main servers, and its disk space will soon be upgraded so it can back up files as well.

    Tag Wrangling:

    Tag Wrangling is thrilled to be a brand-new fully powered committee! We've existed as a subcommittee within AD&T for a while now, but with 133 volunteer Wranglers working around the world to organize (what was at last count) 99,666 tags, we outgrew subcommittee status! We'll continue to be a sister committee to AD&T, working closely together with the coders, testers, and designers building the AO3, as well as continuing our strong relationship with the Support committee. In the past two weeks, we formed as a team, settled into our new organizational tools, met with other committees, and began to develop plans for the remainder of the term. We're excited at our new role, and ready to forge ahead!

    Vidding:

    The Vidding and Legal committees are celebrating their triumph in the DMCA exemption for vidders and noncommercial remixers! We are also in the process of putting together proposals on the Dark Archive and the Torrent of Our Own for the Board.

    Volunteers & Recruiting:

    VolCom have been tightening up our committee procedures and examining our workflow this month. A few incredibly productive meetings have charged us up to research new options for a better, more intuitive volunteers database; to eliminate duplicated tasks, unnecessary bottlenecks, and confusing processes; and to comb through our records to make certain they are consistent and up to date. We're also documenting what we do and why we do it, with an eye to training new committee members in the future, keeping our work, and that of the OTW, sustainably staffed. We'll soon be taking on the administration of the OTW's internal documentation wiki, a knowledgebase for which we're indebted to the Documentation Committee. This month, at the direction of the Board, we created a new committee — Tag Wrangling — and equipped them to do the work necessary to their goals. We also, of course, continue to do the rewarding day-to-day work of welcoming new volunteers to the organization, and to brainstorm ways to remove barriers to donating time and effort to the OTW.

    Webmasters:

    The Webmasters are focused on wrapping up ongoing projects and performing software upgrades to prepare for the busy season ahead. We recently installed some new software to help with translation workflow and version control, which we hope will make life easier for our friends in International Outreach. We've also created a new Press Room page to showcase media mentions of the OTW.

    Wiki:

    The Wiki committee welcomed a new member, Amy, who will be our much needed tech guru. Work continues on category refinement, the FAQ, and the templates for the new Image policy. We've also added a "Wish list" to the menu on the front page. This is a running list of things that need work on the wiki, which we hope will provide some prompts or ideas for people who want to contribute but aren't sure where to start.

    Read more

  • June 2010 Newsletter, Vol 39

    By .mjacobson on Friday, 2 July 2010 - 5:51am
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    Welcome to our June 2010 newsletter, with apologies for the belated posting! This month's updates are just below the cut.

    Abuse:
    No report.

    ADT/Archive:
    AD&T have had a quietish month, working towards our latest deploy of new code to the Archive. We're working on improving our code for enhanced performance, and have been building up our automated test suite.

    Board:
    The Board have been discussing server expansion (yes, already!) and performance improvements for the AO3 (especially now that we're moving quickly toward multimedia.) We have also continued to liaise with our individual committees and to make sure that chairs have the personnel and resources they need.

    Communications:
    We continue to answer the mail, give statements, and post to our blog and mirrors. We've also been encouraging (and helping) other committees to communicate more directly to our membership.

    Content Policy:
    No report.

    Development:
    The Development & Membership team has bid a fond farewell to one of our members, Shoshanna, who went out with a bang by leading a very successful OTW meetup at Con.Txt (and in the process, helped to build a kit for helping anyone to hold the same sort of gathering)! We're continuing to move forward with our work on multiple grants, and are building resources to make the grant application process into a sustainable workflow. Our social media presence is having an increasingly healthy social life, and we're working to make that presence more meaningful to the fans in those spaces. We're also brewing up a little graphics challenge, so stay tuned for that!

    Documentation:
    Documentation has been implementing the plan to tighten up our internal wiki's infrastructure to keep all our information where it will be the most useful.

    Finance Update:
    Fincom is doing very exciting things! Like budgeting! And networking with vendors! And delivering Candygrams!

    Academic Journal:
    The TWC team is looking ahead to No. 6 even as team members finish up work on No. 5, the production of which starts in July. Calls for papers for several guest-edited special issues have been released and are on TWC's Web site. Behind the scenes, volunteers are working to look up and hotlink the DOI numbers for all references cited in the essays so they may be hotlinked. And the new Symposium Blog (http://symposium.transformativeworks.org/), edited by Dana Sterling and cryptoxin, is now live!

    International Outreach:
    No report.

    Legal:
    Still not sued. ;) Steven Hennig has joined the legal team. He is a technology lawyer in Toronto who follows intellectual property law and paints custom sneakers. Steven is actively watching the debate over the recently tabled Canadian copyright bill which, if it were to become law in its current form, could grant significantly broader rights for a number of fannish activities, including video remixes and fan fic. If you would like to keep informed or get involved in the overhaul of Canadian copyright from a pro-consumer prospective, consider checking out http://www.speakoutoncopyright.ca.

    Open Doors:
    No report.

    Support:
    A rather quiet month for Support as well, though we continue to work hard on tickets! We've had some great feedback and suggestions on the Support Board plans, and over the next month we hope to incorporate that and get the development party started!

    Systems:
    With Webmasters' gracious assistance, Systems went live with http://symposium.transformativeworks.org right on schedule on June 6th so that the smart, talky TWC people will have a place to blog. Your systems monkeys are also continuing work on our new backups server which will reduce backup costs and also server slow-down during db backups.

    Vidding History:
    Vidding History welcomes Leigh (our new torrent guru) and April (a digital librarian) who will be working on the TO3 and the dark archive. We have also been working on drafts of particular Vidding Resource pages, including a style guide for the citation of vids as well as directions for streaming video from your own site.

    Volunteers:
    The Volunteers committee continues to help our committees and projects stay strong and well staffed, and to assure that they have access to the tools they need. This month we bid farewell to our chair, Fran, who has done invaluable work for the committee and is taking a well-deserved break. We'll miss her, though! We're always interested in people who would like to lend a hand and get involved in the Org, so if that's you, then don't hesitate to contact us!

    Webmasters:
    Webmasters and Systems worked with the Journal committee to launch the new Symposium Blog, which is now up and running. Lately we've been talking with Translation about ways to improve our workflow for keeping translated Web content up to date.

    Wiki:
    Implementation of the Fandom as Category policy is finally winding down, with only a few more small fandoms left that need categories. We’ve also added two new categories, Poetry and Newsgroups, based on specific feedback. We continue to update the help pages and the Image policy is still in the hands of the OTW’s Legal committee. Several members of the committee held a panel at Con.txt this past weekend with the goal of encouraging more participation in Fanlore.

    Read more

  • May 2010 Newsletter, Vol. 38

    By .allison morris on Monday, 31 May 2010 - 8:35pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    Welcome to our May 2010 newsletter. Get the updates on our activities, just beneath the cut!

    Abuse:
    No update at this time.

    ADT/Archive:
    AD&T have worked hard to bring another set of shiny improvements to the Archive. We're super-excited about the new Advanced Search function - it's still in its Beta stage, but it's already a massive improvement on our old search function. We hosted two major challenges on the Archive during April/May - Final Fantasy Exchange and the multifandom Remix - and we're proud of how well our teams and our servers rose to the challenge (thanks to the people involved in highspeed coding and testing!)

    Board:
    The Board has been coordinating & approving various OTW projects as well doing some financial planning for the coming years. (And paying our taxes!)

    Communications:
    Communications has been working with International Outreach and with our Development team to expand our communications in content and in venue - keep your eye out for more International Content and for announcements of new OTW venues.

    Content Policy:
    We are starting to review feedback on recent plans/proposals, including the breadth of the definition of fanworks and issues that will come up with the expansion of the Archive to host fanart. As the design for hosting fanart emerges, we expect to be seeking even more feedback.

    Development:
    This month, with help from Systems and Webmasters, we successfully updated our donation system software. This makes us more efficient and has made our receipting system just a little more awesome -- it also meant that during the upgrade process, a few receipts were delayed, so please accept our thanks for your patience if you were one of the donors affected! We're currently doing behind-the-scenes work implementing a new process to make it easier for our supporters to make donations in honor of other fans. We continue to work applying for grants to support OTW projects. We're also making small changes to the way the OTW uses Twitter with the aim of making our OTW_News Twitter account more useful for sharing information.

    Documentation:
    Most of the Documentation committee has been dealing with RL over the past month, but in the meantime we've been getting feedback from the other committees on how best to tighten up our infrastructure to keep all our information where it will be the most useful. Over the next few weeks we'll be putting that plan into action on our internal wiki.

    Finance:
    The 990s are DONE! Federal taxes have been filed, and for those number geeks among us, OTW brought in enough revenue in 2009 to move us from the extremely short postcard return to one with actual pages. Aside from that, the sharks have stayed busy providing assists on keeping our DNS registration current, working with Systems on acquiring a new back up server, and moving AO3 forward with more bandwidth.

    Academic Journal:
    The TWC team is working hard to put together issue No. 5, which is scheduled for September 2010.

    International Outreach:
    We've been planning future contributions to OTW News by drafting blog post guidelines (to keep things in context and intelligible for a diverse audience) and already got cracking on a couple of topics, so do expect news from us soon. Our subcommittee Translation and our volunteer translators have done amazing work by not only continuing to keep up with the OTW website, but also starting to translate the Archive release notes -- see the 0.7.5 release notes in multiple languages. We're really proud and hope this will be both useful to you and for spreading the word about the archive (and yes, we're always looking for more translators!)

    Legal:
    All quiet, just the way we like it.

    Open Doors:
    Open Doors continues to shepherd collections to the FCPP and to help people transfer their digital collections/webpages/small archives into the AO3.

    Support:
    Support has mockups for our Support and Feature Request boards! They're undergoing commentary and review, and it is SO, SO exciting! We're hoping to finish that process up next month and, gasp! pass it over to the wonderful AD&T for coding. That is our big and awesome news, and we really cannot wait! As always, we're hard at work answering support tickets -- please feel free to contact us any time =D

    Systems:
    Nothing blew up. All systems are go!

    Vidding History:
    We have been adding volunteers to our new mailing list and will soon begin working on our resource pages. We are also putting together a proposal for tech specs for the dark archive and the TO3; stay tuned. (Torrent gurus! CALL US!)

    Volunteers:
    The Volunteers committee continued handling various staffing related tasks. If you'd like to get involved in the Org, don't hesitate to contact us!

    Webmasters:
    This month we've been working with the Journal committee to set up the new Symposium blog (coming soon). We also upgraded our website software with help from Systems, and we're continuing to work on style enhancements for the otw-news mirror sites.

    Wiki:
    We've been busy this month with several ongoing projects. We've refined the Fandom as Category policy and have been (along with a lot of other users) adding fandom categories and categorizing zine pages. We've done away with the policy on "breadcrumbs" and have been working with Legal to continue to revise the Image policy based on user feedback.

    Read more

  • April 2010 Newsletter, Vol. 37

    By .mjacobson on Saturday, 1 May 2010 - 5:37am
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    Welcome to our April 2010 newsletter. Get the updates on our activities, just beneath the cut!

    Abuse:

    We continue to aspire to enter the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the entry Mostly Useless, and fandom is doing a great job not giving us work. In between sitting around eating bon-bons and watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand, we’re talking with Content Policy about the enforcement issues surrounding the discussion of “original” work in the Archive.

    ADT/Archive:

    The entire AD&T team has been incredibly busy once again, with a host of new features on the Archive, including a plain text skin, a new 'light' style, new features for related works and translations, and tons more cool stuff. April saw FOUR new code releases on the Archive, and we're already stacking up lots more stuff for the next release.

    We asked for feedback on features people would like to see for fanart on the Archive, and got an AMAZING response. We're now working through the wishlist and figuring out what we can implement when - we're excited! We also provided input on the Vidding Project Roadmap and bounced around in glee a lot!

    News from sub-committees coders, testers and tag wranglers: Everyone is working like crazy and being AWESOME.

    Board:

    The Board has been working hard on a number of things, including: our 2009 annual report, our policy on gray-area fanworks and original fiction, and our Vidding Project Roadmap (coming soon! see below!)

    Communications:

    Communications continues to bring you all the OTW news that's fit to print and to be the first point of contact for people who need things from us. We are also hoping to bring you more stories focusing on international fannish issues in the near future, so stay tuned!

    Content Policy:

    No report.

    Development:

    Development has been working with International Outreach on plans for...international outreach! We've also been working at reaching more fans online, via social networking sites, and on reaching more fans offline, via in-person networking at conferences, conventions, and other gatherings. We're also working with the Webmasters committee to upgrade our donation software, and we continue to lay the groundwork for grant applications.

    Documentation:

    Documentation is sad to report that two of our members have had to step down on account of RL over the past month, but the rest of the committee is still working away at keeping things tidy for the organization.

    Finance Update:

    The sharks of fincom are still making sure the bills get paid and getting ready to file the annual federal tax return (990).

    Academic Journal:

    The academic journal team plans to launch a new blog, edited by Dana Sterling and cryptoxin, called Symposium. It will provide news and meta aimed at the acafan. We have a tentative launch date of early June.

    International Outreach:

    We've been discussing some of our suggestions for the OTW website with Development & Membership and Communications. Among other things, we're looking into integrating more international content into the OTW News blog, improving the OTW presence on other networking sites, and reworking some of the current website content.

    Legal:

    Still not sued! :) The Legal Committee also continues to be a resource for individual fans who have legal questions or concerns.

    Open Doors:

    In response to questions, Open Doors recently clarified that the Fan Culture Preservation Project is open to fans around the world. Both the OTW and our partner, The University of Iowa, are interested in preserving fannish artifacts that are not in English or come from countries outside the U.S. International fans are also welcome to request copies of materials from the project at the same page rate, though postage will vary depending on where the materials have to go. Open Doors is still working on revising its website; we are clarifying our procedures for bringing works into the Archive now that we have new automated Importing and Collections features. So stay tuned!

    Support:

    Support's been super hard at work answering tickets -- we're down quite low again and so proud of our awesome and amazing volunteers! We've had an administratively quiet month but we're back in the saddle and working hard to get us closer to the much-coveted Support Board -- we really can't wait! As always, we are super happy to hear from users and help with questions and concerns, so please do keep contacting us through the feedback form!

    Systems:

    Your Systems Monkeys are hard at work obtaining global dominion, one server at a time. This month that involved transferring DNS to a new, cheaper but reliable service, researching backup server hosting services, starting up a new Symposium WordPress blog on stage for Journal, doing a test upgrade of CiviCRM (eep!), Beta deployment support, fixing bugs in OJS, and the usual daily monkeyworks.

    Vidding History:

    Big news on the vidding front! The Board of the OTW has approved a five-step VIDDING ROADMAP! This will be released ASAP--we're just putting the shine on. Many parts of this project can happen right away--with your help! If you are interested in helping us make this project a reality, please volunteer using the Volunteers webform or the Vidding contact form.

    Volunteers:

    The Volunteers committee kept busy with bringing new people into the Org and handling.various and sundry staffing related tasks.

    Webmasters:

    The Webmasters are testing some software upgrades, designing new styles for the otw-news mirror sites on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, and InsaneJournal, and working with the Journal committee on their upcoming new project.

    Wiki:

    Wiki has been busy this month! The Wiki committee welcomed new member Aethel~, who has been doing amazing work with our help pages. We have posted two new policies. The Fandoms as Category Policy is now final, and we have begun the process of creating the new categories and links to go along with that. The Image Policy has been posted as a draft on the wiki and on the Fanlore Dreamwidth community for comments for the last week. We’ve received a ton of good feedback on the policy and it’s now headed back to the drawing board for revisions based on that feedback.

    Read more

  • March 2010 Newsletter, Vol. 36

    By .mjacobson on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 - 7:06pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    Welcome to our March 2010 newsletter. Get all the OTW news that's fit to print, right beneath the cut!

    Abuse:

    Abuse continues to enjoy being largely useless. We're contributing perspectives to the Content Policy discussions on non-fanworks and giving Support a hand when we're needed to clarify policy.

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T and all its many members have been busy as usual! March saw another ginormous code drop onto the Archive, with more features for collections and challenges, a complete renovation of our front end code, new features for tag wranglers and the addition of user icons! The testing team were kept busy testing all this shiny new code, while tag wranglers have been hard at work getting to grips with their new wrangling tools and developing new policy. Forthcoming: more internal stuff to train and support our volunteers, the first steps towards user skins for the Archive, and lots more shiny code!

    Board:

    The Board has been writing the 2009 annual report, which should be released shortly, and doing our 2009 taxes. We have also been examining contingency plans for credit card processors, and working with Content Policy, ADT, and Open Doors on an Importing Policy for the Archive of Our Own.

    Communications:

    The OTW Communications team wishes you a Happy Ada Lovelace Day, and worked on promotions for the March Fundraising Drive and the exciting March issue of Transformative Works and Cultures.

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy is preparing to revisit a big issue: whether the AO3 should host non-fanworks, specifically stories not based on any existing source. (At this time, we don't anticipate ever hosting non-fanwork art or video, regardless of what we decide about stories, because of the greater resource and policy demands.) We welcome your thoughts, which can be submitted at our contact form.

    Development:

    The Development & Membership team is celebrating the success of our recent membership drive, and preparing to send out our new, fancy stainless steel water bottle premiums to those donors who opted for them! (They're still available, of course, and we welcome new donors and new members year-round.) We're also working with the Webmasters team to upgrade and improve our donation software and making improvements and updates to the information we offer to our membership and to the public. And finally, we're spending time on two of our big goals this year: seeking out grants to help fund some of our awesome projects, and improving our outreach at in-person fan conventions and gatherings.

    Documentation:

    Documentation continues on our quest to keep the OTW organized, but has no major update for the month.

    Finance Update:

    The update from the sharks can be summed up in one word: Taxes. As in buried under. We're preparing to file the 990 return for 2009, filed the DE state form, and have (temporarily) lost our chair, Celli, to tax related psychosis.

    Journal:

    The academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, released No. 4, a special issue dedicated to the WB show Supernatural and guest edited by Catherine Tosenberger, on March 15, 2010. Work is already underway for No. 5, which is a general-themed issue.

    International Outreach:

    No report.

    Legal:

    Still not sued!

    Open Doors:

    Open Doors has been collaborating on the archive Importing Policy; we have also slowly been adding personnel in anticipation of there being lots incoming archives when the importing policies and procedures are worked out. We are also still in the process of redesigning our site on tw.org.

    Support:

    Support has had a busy month - we've been training up our new volunteers (welcome on board! \0/), liaising with other committees about our procedures, and working through tickets requiring further attention. We're excited to also be moving forward with our project for a support board on the Archive itself; we're finishing up on collecting initial ideas/requirements and going into the mock-up stage. Finally, we've also been handling a lot of requests relating to the most recent updates to the Archive, ranging from lots of feedback on the new look to handling new importer and parser issues. As always, if you run into any problems, please let us know via the Support and Feedback form!

    Systems:

    As previously newslettered, the Systems group has moved services onto new servers. With this came some upgrades, some improvements, and some problems in the fall out. A few things went kaflooey and discombobulated [those are technical terms! Honest!] requiring tweaking and tuning, especially of Rails. This mainly involved the AO3 services.

    Vidding History:

    No report.

    Volunteers:

    Volunteers has continued to add lots of people as coders, testers, and tag wranglers. We welcome new volunteers, regardless of skill level, and have recently helped AD&T with their new coder training.

    Webmasters:

    The Webmasters are happy to report that from a technological standpoint, the recent membership drive went very smoothly. We've completed our annual check for outdated website content, and we're in touch with various committees about making revisions. We continue to work with Open Doors on the development of their new website, which is progressing well. We're making a big push to update our internal documentation. And we continue to focus on training our new members, who have just graduated to serving on-call rotations! ::pins gold stars on them::

    Wiki:

    The wiki committee is pleased to say that in early March we reached 100,000 edits. This past month, we installed and tested the Sphinx search engine. It's up and running. We also put the first draft of our Fandom as a Category policy out for comment and hope to have the revised version written and out for comments by the beginning of April. In mid-April, we plan to put the new Image policy out for comments.

    We'd also like to let everyone know that, we will announce the call for comments on the OTW News, as well as the wiki itself, but for the time being, we will be using the Dreamwidth Fanlore community for comments and discussions.

    Read more

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