Newsletter

  • February 2010 Newsletter, Vol 35

    By .fcoppa on Sunday, 28 February 2010 - 10:34pm
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    Welcome to our first newsletter of the 2010 term! We've re-formed our committees and completed our first month of goals. Read all about it beneath the cut!

    Abuse:

    Abuse is thrilled to say that our case numbers remain in the single digits -- keep it up, fandom! We're working on our communications, refining the language we use to contact users, and hoping to stay as useless as possible for the rest of the year.

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T have been making plans for the Archive in 2010, developing code and processes to make it more robust for the future, and adding lots more new things! We've been liaising with Support, Abuse and Legal to make sure that code and policy on the Archive work together. We're also developing a new process for design in order to get more cool stuff built faster.

    • Coders: The big jobs so far 2010 have been a revamp of the front-end code, a redesign of the tags system behind the scenes, and a lot of new collections and challenges code \0/
    • Tag wranglers: Our new wrangler leads have been improving communication and procedure, and waiting with bated breath for new tags code (METATAGS!)
    • Testers: Our testers had a relatively quiet January (no deadlines! but still lots of work) and are now in the middle of doing a big test of the whole Archive, in order to spot any bugs which sneaked on while the coders coded up a storm.

    Board:

    Members of the board are currently: coding the Archive code for Remix! gearing up for our March development drive! writing the OTW's third annual report! gearing up to do our taxes! making sure we don't get sued! and wrangling our new Archive Abuse team. We also sent out the first set of goals to the various committees and set up our first org-wide meeting.

    Communications:

    Communications would like to welcome Monica Jacobson onboard; look for her byline to appear on the OTW Blog soon. We are also working with committee members to create blog posts straight from their committee--so hopefully you will see more diversity on the blog and mirrors in 2010.

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy is digging into the nitty-gritty of importing archives into the Archive of Our Own -- an major task which is really important to our principle of maximum inclusiveness and our goal of serving as a cross-fandom backup. To do this, we're working closely with various staffers from several other OTW committees, and we're looking forward to getting this settled!

    Development:

    Development & Membership have been reforming as a committee, welcoming two brand new members, and planning for our year of fundraising! We are looking at streamlining data entry, making donation by check simpler, and finding grants that will benefit the OTW and OTW projects. We're also looking at ways to reach out at conventions and conferences, and to increase our outreach efforts in general. We're also excited about our upcoming membership drive -- kicking off on 9 March!

    Documentation:

    Documentation is busy with new assignments, now that the organization has geared back up. For this term, we'll be working on tightening up the documentation infrastructure to make sure that everything everyone needs is available to them where it should be.

    Finance Update:

    FinCom is in full swing with all the exciting year-end stuff: financial statements, taxes (\o/), state filings, la la. We have said a sad goodbye to our old chair, Susan Gibel and welcome new board member Sheila Lane (and her unnatural and obsessive love of taxes) as our new chair.

    International Outreach:

    Intl Outreach (or IO) is pretty much what it says on the tin, an effort to try and reach out to, basically, non-US audiences. We IO members believe that one of the OTW's most exciting aspects is that its projects have the potential to be truly accessible, welcoming, and useful to much broader audiences than we're currently catering to (and drawing volunteers from). We're in our third year now, and we believe it's time to show fandom we mean it when we talk about inclusiveness.

    This doesn't mean we'll rush out there and try to snare unsupecting French or Irish or Chinese fen right away, though. Rather, our first step is to take a good look at ourselves, at what the OTW has to offer to "international fans", and we're starting this by doing reviews of the existing OTW projects. Expect us to be pretty quiet for now as we'll be beavering away in the background, working with other committees to improve one small step at a time.

    Journal:

    The Journal team will be releasing Transformative Works and Cultures No. 4, a special issue on Supernatural guest-edited by Catherine Tosenberger, on March 15. The documents are currently in production. No. 5, a general, unthemed issue, is already underway, with several essays accepted and several others pending.

    Legal:

    Legal continues to have success with our single goal, "don't get sued." \o/

    Open Doors:
    The Open Doors committee is currently working with the archivists from the Fan Fiction Writers archive to transfer those stories into the AO3; we are also currently talking to a major Doctor Who fan club about a substantial zine donation to the Fan Culture Preservation Project as well as brokering smaller donations. We will also be working with ADT and Content Policy to develop a procedure to help archivists who want to transfer or back up stories to the AO3.

    Systems:

    Systems has finished a six month effort of moving all OTW services off our old server (xen) and spreading them across our various new servers. We should now have better capacity and redundancy for all services. Many thanks to Webmasters for assisting us in the migration of drupal to its new home.

    Xen will be decommissioned in an elaborate ceremony involving tequila, blood rites and an active volcano.

    Support:

    Support is super excited to be a full committee in the new term! We're still working closely with AD&T, which will be deeply involved with Support's big new project: the Support staff have been putting together a proposal for a future public support board on the Archive itself. This board will be somewhat akin to the LJ/DW systems, but customized entirely to our needs. We hope it will make our work more transparent (and less scary for potential volunteers!), and we also hope it will make it easier for us to work with other teams such as Abuse and Tag Wrangling. Current plans also include integrating a Feature Request system that all users can participate in. This proposal is currently out for comment by any/all other OTW committees and teams, and we hope to nail it down and start coding soon. With a plan for the future in place, we're now turning to urgent matters of the present: working away on responding to users' support requests, and passing feedback on to coders, testers, and designers.

    We're very excited to be welcoming Zhailei on board as a new staffer, who is bringing her expertise from other areas and a fresh eye to our existing structures. We also have a number of new volunteers joining the team to help us respond to the support requests coming in - yay!

    Translation:

    Since January, Translation waved a sad temporary goodbye to our beloved Italian member Dafne, who'll rejoin us in the summer, and a very happy welcome to sparkly new member Tonje from Norway. We're now a subcommittee of International Outreach and have been rallying our translation troops after the break, with the older teams focusing on updating translated tw.org content, and newer teams working away on translating it. We've two new language teams (Hebrew and Chinese), though they're sadly very small yet (one hard working person each! so yes, we're always looking for volunteers!); we're looking forward to having enough content to switch on those languages on tw.org.

    Next up is a review and tweaking of translation procedures to ensure that our translations are as up to date and as complete as possible.

    Vidding History:

    Francesca Coppa and Tisha Turk presented at a panel on vidding at Digital Media and Learning along with current TWC Symposium editor Alexis Lothian and former TWC staff Julie Levin Russo, among others.

    Volunteers:

    We've been busy removing departing staffers and adding new staffers for this term. We also set up two new committees: Support and International Outreach. There were also one or two (hundred) new archive volunteers to handle after Open Beta.

    Right now we're working on getting rid of the backlog and updating our documentation. Last but not least, the lovely Renay agreed to join the committee. \o/

    Webmasters:

    The Webmasters are excited to welcome two new committee members, were_duck and Zippit. <3 We are currently working with Open Doors to migrate their Special Collections site into Drupal (the CMS we use for the main website). We helped the Journal committee with layout for their upcoming issue, and we're preparing to support DevMem during the March fund drive.

    Wiki:

    The Wiki Committee has had a very busy February!

    We've asked Systems to install the Sphinx search engine, as our research has shown that it’s the best system available to us now. We are currently working on developing a test plan to test the search engine once it’s been installed.

    We've been working on new policy as well. A draft of the Major Fandoms as Categories policy has been completed and is ready for Board for review. We've also drafted a policy on images posted to Fanlore (focusing particularly on the question of copyrighted images and explicit images) and this draft has been sent to Legal and the Board for approval.

    We're attempting to post regular themes or challenges on the Dreamwidth Fanlore community to encourage participation. Some of these have been more successful than others, but we'll keep working on it, so bear with us.

    Read more

  • News from the Break

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 - 5:41am
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    The OTW has formally been on haitus for much of this month as we reconstitute ourselves for the 2010 term. But of course, "on haitus" doesn't mean "shut down"--some of us can't leave (OH HAI POOR SYSADMINS), some of us don't leave (the Board and VolCom have to put the org back together again!), and some of us really should take a well deserved break but can't help but add a bit--more--code--!! (You know who you are.)

    In our next newsletter, you'll meet the new committees and hear about what they've got planned for 2010. But for now: a few words from your favorite workaholics...

    Board:

    The Board has been working with Volcom on re-staffing and reorganizing as well as setting goals for 2010! We have also begun working on our (third!) annual report.

    AD&T

    Accessibility, Design and Technology have been pretending to take time off and sekritly doing a bit of coding, testing and deploying with a bit of designing on the side. The Support team is in full operation although we are pleased to note we're not getting quite as many requests in the last couple of weeks. For the curious, in the last 70 days we've received 1256 Support requests and have closed all but 93 of them. *pets incredibly hard working Support team*

    Some helpful Archive members have created the unofficial Archive of Our Own Collections Promotion LiveJournal community, which is a place for people from the Archive to promote their collections and challenges, and keep informed of new ones that pop up. We think it's pretty neat :)

    Our new chair is simultaneously finalising her PhD and the 2010 AD&T committee composition and we look forward to starting the new term off in her excellent hands.

    Finance:

    FinCom is planning weddings, catching up on Criminal Minds, and getting ready for the multitude of filings and reports due in the first part of the year! We are crunching numbers so hard, they're going to need a chiropractor when we're done with them.

    Webmasters:

    The Webmasters spent the break installing a new comment notification module for the OTW blog — we can haz full-text notifications! — and implementing changes to our user accounts policy. Our recent post on website accounts and comment notifications describes these changes in more detail. We are excited to welcome some new committee members and are currently working on a training plan for them.

    Systems:

    Systems never sleeps! Over break we deployed on the archive servers and tweaked the servers to assist with Yuletide madness, broke RT then fixed it, purged the mailing list archives, added server monitoring and pretty stats gathering, migrated the volcom database, upgraded drupal core, and assisted with volunteer changeovers, along with handling the usual crises. Happy new decade to all!

    Translation:

    Translation has undergone cell division and branched out into the brand-new International Outreach committee, which is taking shape as you read this (and still open for applicants, if you're interested!).

    Read more

  • December 2009 Newsletter, Vol. 34

    By .fcoppa on Thursday, 31 December 2009 - 4:40am
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    Welcome to our last newsletter of 2009: committee updates below the cut! We'll be back, better than ever, in 2010, so catch you on the flip side!

    Abuse:

    The Abuse team is working closely with Archive Support to handle the deluge of new feedback, questions, and requests coming out of Open Beta and Yuletide.

    ADT/Archive:

    YULETUDE WHOOO!! \o/

    Board:

    Members of the board have been working on setting organizational goals and revamping structures for OTW's next (third!) year; many of us are also neck-deep in work for the individual projects we work on for the org (the Archive! the server move! the website! searching out volunteers for next year! etc.)

    Communications:

    Communications has been working closely with other committees to keep information flowing inside and out of the OTW. Toward the end of the year, we have been trying to help AO3 Support, which has been heroically trying to keep up with the amazing feedback coming out of the AO3's Open Beta and Yuletide.

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy has also been all-hands-on-deck to help out with the feedback coming out of the AO3's Open Beta and first Yuletide.

    Development:

    DevMem has just posted its End of the Year Reminder post: after running two very successful drives, we want to remind you that there is still time to donate--and get a tax credit, or have employee matching funds apply--for 2009. We hope to see you all in 2010!

    Documentation:

    Documentation has been organizing the end-of-term tidying up to make sure things are ready for the incoming term in January, so things pick up smoothly right where they left off.

    Elections:

    Our work here is done; the OTW is currently updating the procedures and timeline for next year's election season.

    Finance:

    FinCom is busy transitioning from one Head Shark to another, as our beloved Susan steps down as Treasurer. (snif!) We're also looking forward to next term and getting ready to unleash financial statements, annual reports, and tax filings upon the unsuspecting public.

    Journal:

    TWC is on track for No. 4, a guest-edited issue about Supernatural. This issue is no longer accepting unsolicited content because we’re so close to print. No. 5, a general issue, is on track as well.

    Legal:

    Continuing to work on our primary mission: don't get sued! \o/

    Open Doors:

    The Web committee has been helping Open Doors move to a Drupal subsite; we hope to be debuting that site at the beginning of next year. The Fan Culture Preservation Project has also had a terrifically successful year and continues to help to broker large fannish donations: check out Iowa's greatly expanded page of Fandom-Related Collections.

    Systems:

    Thanks to a Webmasters-wide and Systems-wide effort (you might have heard the grunting) the server move of transformativeworks.org to a speedier, less crowded new home is now complete. The OTW Elections site and our donation software have also moved, and site visitors should see a commensurate improvement in performance. This also means at long last the org completes secure transactions on the main website (at https://transformativeworks.org), rather than at a separate secure subsite. This brings us very close to the victorious conclusion of our server-moving project, with only Open Doors and a few of our internal services left to move.

    Translation:

    Translation staff welcomed new volunteers in the wake of AO3 open beta, and are working toward making the Archive (and all of the OTW!) more internationally accessible - we have an international outreach subcommittee in the works for 2010, and big plans. We are also excited to announce that we have worked with Webmasters to add Russian localization to transformativeworks.org!

    Vidding History:

    Francesca Coppa, chair of Vidding History, will curate a second exhibition on vids from 2007 - 2009 for DIY 24/7; this exhibition will be web based and debut sometime next year. We are also hoping to expand our scope in 2010, so stay tuned!

    Volunteers:

    Volunteers has been collecting "Willing to Serve" entries and will be working closely with the board to restaff committees for 2010; Volcom has also been responsible for overseeing the formal transition of personnel within the org during the OTW's winter break between terms.

    Website:

    The Webmasters are currently basking in the high speeds and improved navigation that were the results of our work with Systems to move transformativeworks.org and our OTW Elections subsite to a beautiful new server. We have also been thrilled to work with Translation to add Russian to the range of languages we are currently supporting at transformativeworks.org. Currently we are dipping into some new-to-us software -- OJS, which Journal uses to publish Transformative Works and Cultures, needs a little CSS help, which we are doing our best to provide. On the horizon, we have plans to improve comment notifications, and we are industriously wrapping up our year of hard work and preparing things for next year's committee.

    Wiki:

    We've had a few question recently about with our fair use policies and we worked with Legal to resolve them. We've been testing a search function extension that will make it much easier to search the wiki. It's still in test right now, but we hope to have it out soon. We're also writing a new policy out that will make major fandoms a category by themselves. And we've added 2 volunteers to work on documentation. Look for all of this to be done early next year.

    Read more

  • October, 2009 Newsletter (Vol. 33)

    By .rbarenblat on Friday, 30 October 2009 - 1:50pm
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    Welcome to our October, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

    Abuse:

    Abuse has been hard at work getting ready for Open Beta. Committee members are finishing up boilerplate responses and walking through sample cases. We're also coordinating with the website Testing Procedure folks to make sure that Abuse aspects of the website are up and running optimally.

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T have moved the Archive to our lovely new servers and dropped a lot of new code in as well. Go look at the new improved Bookmarks and start thinking about what fields you'd like to see in cut-down views! Read our FAQ! Marvel at our News Posts!

    We're also planning for Open Beta, this is currently scheduled for mid November and is dependent on the code changes we need being ready in time :)

    We want to run a competition to design the perfect AO3 logo and are looking for volunteers willing to coordinate it.

    Board:

    The Board has been busy keeping track of general org-wide goings-on.

    Communications:

    Communications is currently offering its support to the new Support team as we plan for the coming of Open Beta. Board Member Rachel Barenblat, ADT member Zooey Glass, Legal Comm member Casey Fiesler, and DevMem-ber Monica will also be offering Comm some backup assistance for the rest of this term: thank you, guys!

    Content Policy:

    No update at this time.

    Development:

    Development had a pretty busy month which included running our October donations drive. Thanks to all of you, it was our most successful drive yet: we raised a total of US$15,573, which will go into our coffers to support colocation and bandwidth costs, organizational expenses (including the occasional unpredictable ones), and the projects we hope to dive into in Year Three. Thanks to everyone for your generous support -- it means the world to us!

    Documentation:

    Documentation added two new members this month - welcome JJ and groovekittie! We continue to move about behind the scenes, organizing everything in our path to help keep things running smoothly. The next couple of months will be busy ones for us as we prepare for the end of the current term and get things shipshape for next year.

    Elections:

    The Elections committee is proud to have announced that Elizabeth Yalkut and Allison Morris will be joining the OTW board in the next term. Although we didn't get to hold a competitive election this year, we are delighted to have attracted two such marvelous new Board members. Welcome, Elizabeth and Allison!

    Finance Update:

    No update at this time.

    Journal:

    The academic journal has upgraded its software and moved to a new server. The move was a bumpy one, with a 2-week-long outage, but the shiny new results will make up for the inconvenience. TWC is on track for No. 4, a guest-edited issue about Supernatural. This issue is no longer accepting unsolicited content because we're so close to print. No. 5, a general issue, is on track as well.

    Legal:

    The Legal Committee continues it role of supporting other OTW Committees as needed. Over recent weeks, we have advised Communications, assisted DevMem and Translation on phrasing, and reviewed more licenses for ADT. In addition, we continue to respond to numerous and varied queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month responded to a journalist seeking comment on Fairey v. AP, and to fan-centered organization on the 501c3 process, as well as providing advice to individual fans on fandom-corporate partnerships, and suggesting options for dealing with spam farmers.

    Open Doors:

    The Open Doors committee is continuing to work with Fanlore on the Geocities Rescue project. Archivists, if you can, back up as much as you can to your own HD and we'll keep working with you to help these fan works find a stable, longterm online home with OTW.

    Systems:

    No update at this time.

    Translations:

    No update at this time.

    Vidding History:

    No report at this time.

    Volunteers:

    The Volunteers committee is keeping busy preparing for the end of this term and the beginning of the new one in January. Many committees are looking for volunteers or staffers. Do you have some bold new ideas? Want to contribute and learn new skills? Check out our Willing to Serve post and contact us. Volunteers & Recruiting is looking for people, too! Do you have a bit of a micro-manager in you? We want you! * bribes with cookies *

    Webmasters:

    Congratulations to our own Allison Morris, who will be joining the OTW Board next term! We're all excited for her. <3

    Besides celebrating the news, we've been working hard behind the scenes with Development & Membership to support the recent donation drive. Next up, we'll be working with Open Doors to move their Special Collections index, currently a standalone HTML site, into the Drupal content management system we use for the rest of transformativeworks.org.

    Wiki:

    No update at this time.

    Read more

  • September, 2009 Newsletter, Vol. 32

    By .fcoppa on Friday, 25 September 2009 - 5:54am
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    Welcome to our September, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

    Abuse:

    Abuse is busy preparing for open beta! We're working closely with ADT and the newly-formed Support subcommittee to refine procedures and best practices, and there is some really exciting code and design coming out of this collaboration... which no one will ever see because it is admin-only. But we're really excited anyway.

    ADT/Archive:

    err.. +points at News Post #4+

    +falls over+

    Board:

    The Board has been working through some of the stickier financial, administrative and personnel parts of the move to colocation and the upcoming membership drive and electoin.

    Communications:

    Communications has been continuing to try to bring you all the OTW-related news you could want in these exciting times. We've also done a couple of interviews; more news of these coming soon.

    Content Policy:

    We're double- and triple-checking all the interactions between the Archive Terms of Service and the code that ADT is finalizing; there are some fantastic features we're excited to nail down the details on.

    Development/Membership:

    DevMem has been busy behind the scenes working with Webmasters and Systems on readying our donations software and introducing new features for our October donation drive. Right now we're gearing up, which means everything from collecting new lolcats to drafting our materials so that the Translation folks can work their magic. We're also working with Elections to ensure that we can provide the materials they need in the event that we have a contested board election this November. Throughout, we've been kvelling about the news that the OTW finally owns our own servers -- it's exciting to know that our fundraising work has paid off in such a tangible way!

    Documentation:

    No report.

    Elections:

    Sept. 23 was our first deadline to declare candidacy in the Board elections. We are now extending the nomination period for a week: email elections-chair@transformativeworks.org before September 30, 2009 to throw your hat in the ring, or if you have any questions.

    Finance Update:

    FinComm continues to pay the bills, keep the lights on—and oh, yeah, I think we bought some expensive computer equipment lately.

    Journal:

    TWC No. 3 appeared on September 15, and it's available here:
    http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/current
    The issue features articles, interviews, dialogues, and book reviews discussing a variety of fandoms and topics through a number of different voices. Look for our in-depth update in otw_news!

    Legal:

    The OTW was asked to collaborate with the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Right to Write Fund on an amicus brief in the pending Salinger/60 Years Later case. The OTW's Rebecca Tushnet and Casey Fiesler collaborated with lawyers from Stanford's Center for the Internet and Society and the UC Berkeley School of Law to produce the brief, which was served on August 3, 2009. You can download a .pdf of the amicus brief by right-clicking and saving.

    We also filed two sets of answers to the Copyright Office's supplemental questions regarding a proposed exemption to the DMCA for vidders and other remix artists. These documents can be downloaded and read on the Legal Advocacy page as well as the Vid Test Suite page of the Vidding History project.

    Open Doors:

    GeoCities Rescue: Open Doors wishes to remind everyone that GeoCities is closing for good on October 26, 2009!!! If you have fic on a GeoCities site that you want to preserve, or if you are the moderator or site admin of a fanfiction archive there, please Contact Open Doors!

    Fan Culture Preservation Project: Just a quick update! In the three months since we've been open, we've processed nine fairly significant donations, with a tenth--a large donation of well over 500 classic zines--in the works. Check out our project page for more information; we'll keep you posted as these collections are cataloged.

    Systems:

    Systems has been working to install us on our new servers so we can move to Open Beta as soon as possible! They’ve also been helping Webmasters gear up for the October Membership Drive.

    Translations:

    We are very happy to report that we’ve begun to translate news posts to those languages which have the necessary womanpower—we believe this is a vital step towards our self avowed goal: international outreach. We are continuing to move our language teams to Basecamp, the Org’s organizational platform. The teams have been busy as usual translating the website and Archive News posts to the different languages.

    Vidding History:

    The Vidding History committee worked with the OTW's legal team to file two sets of answers to the Copyright Office's supplemental questions regarding a proposed exemption to the DMCA for vidders and other remix artists. These documents can be downloaded and read on the Vid Test Suite page of the Vidding History project.

    Volunteers:

    Volunteers has been heroically continuing to help OTW connect with fabulous and talented people (and if you're a coder with IE7 skills, call us! Call us toll-free right now!)

    Webmasters:

    We recently launched the brand-new OTW Elections site, the product of several months of collaboration among Webmasters, Elections, Systems, and Translation. We worked with the Translation team to add two new languages -- French and Danish -- to the main website. We also launched our new site theme, Cavatica (named for our committee's heroine, Charlotte A. Cavatica), which is visually similar to the old theme but will be easier to maintain and adapt as the site evolves. Finally, we're preparing for the October membership and donations drive.

    Wiki:

    Fanlore is currently advertising for Documentation Specialists to help with reorganizing and rewriting policy pages and help files. If you’re interested, please do volunteer!

    Read more

  • July, 2009 Newsletter, Volume 31

    By .fcoppa on Friday, 17 July 2009 - 8:33pm
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    Welcome to OTW's July, 2009 newsletter. Get status reports and updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees right under the cut!

    Abuse:

    Abuse has been getting set up on our shiny new issue tracker, which we will be using to retain records of cases, and making recommendations to ADT about how to handle ambiguous feedback about content on the Archive. We're also putting together a longer blog post all about the awesomeness of us, coming soon!

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T is hard at work as usual, we deployed new code to the Beta Archive over the weekend of the 4th of July, pushed various projects a little further along the path to completion and welcome an intern from Darmstadt (Germany) to the team.

    We're still working on co-location and hope to be ordering our much anticipated new hardware in the very near future.

    We recently launched a new series of News posts about the Archive, which aim to keep people informed about what we do and answer some frequently asked questions. If you have questions then check out the posts so far - one, two and three - and comment to one of the posts if you have a question not answered there.

    Board:

    The Board have been working this month with the individual committees they chair or liaison with to move some key projects along (Legal, Vidding History, Open Doors, DevMem, ADT) and/or keep the org running (Volunteers, Financial, Webmasters).

    Communications:

    Communications has been working closely with Open Doors on the Geocities Rescue site, and is also still developing a "for the media" page for transformativeworks.org. We have also provided PR materials for Azkatraz, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, WriterCon, and other upcoming conventions, so look for flyers and buttons!

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy has just released -- with most of the heavy lifting done by ADT -- an updated Terms of Service for the Archive. We're now holding a two-week public comment period, which will end July 28, 2009, when the Board will vote on the changes and additions. Most of this is relatively minor tweaks, and it's all driven by user feedback; you can see the blog post with the changes laid out at here. Let us know what you think! Content Policy committee members will be available to answer questions.

    Development:

    DevMem has been doing behind-the-scenes work training committee members to use CiviCRM, the database we use to keep track of members and donations. Some members have reported a new bug encountered in donating which we're working to fix. In happier news, we've welcomed Ivy back from maternity leave; welcome back, Ivy!

    Documentation:

    No report.

    Elections:

    Elections has been working with Web on the elections subsite, and are currently reviewing our new timeline and faq pages to submit to the board.

    Finance:

    The sharks of FinCom have been continuing to fill purchase requests, paying the bills, and crunching numbers.

    Journal:

    Issue three of the Academic journal is into the copyediting phase, and is on schedule for publication on September 15. The team is already hard at work on issues four, five and six.

    Legal:

    The Legal Committee continues to advise and support other OTW Committees as needed. Over recent weeks, we have reviewed license terms for ADT and privacy policy for the Web team, as well as advising the Wiki team on some revisions. We have also been working with the EFF and other organizations in providing responses to Copyright Office questions on the DCMA. In addition, we continue to respond to queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month responded to some queries asking for clarification of our policies on subtitling and dubbing by fans.

    Open Doors:

    The Open Doors committee is pleased to finally announce the GeoCities Rescue Project for fans who want to preserve fiction or resource sites currently hosted on GeoCities. Please check out the Geocites Rescue Project Page for more info, or just contact Open Doors.

    We are also pleased to announce that we have several more donations to the Fan Culture Preservation Project and are currently working with 15-20 other donors! So if you have non-digital fan artifacts that need a new home, please contact Open Doors.

    Systems:

    Systems has been closely working with ADT to implement the Archive's latest code deployment, as well as keeping OTW's general systems running.

    Translations:

    This month we are very excited to welcome new members for the French team. On the administrative side, we have been working on providing better tools for our translators, with the assistance of the Volunteers&Recruiting Committee. This move to OTW’s virtual office, Basecamp, is still ongoing.

    Translators have also kept tirelessly working on the website translation, both to keep translations of it up to date, and to translate the many new pages--like that of the Fan Culture Preservation Project.

    Vidding History:

    Vidding History has been working with Legal to provide responses to Copyright Office questions vis a vis the DMCA petition the EFF and others made on behalf of remix artists (and vidders)! We've also been in quiet, behind the scenes conversations with many video streaming sites following the demise of Imeem.

    Volunteers:

    Volunteers posted a job search for experienced XHTML/CSS Coders. OTW wants you! We also helped Translations setting up the first two language teams in Basecamp.

    Webmasters:

    We've installed a new anti-spam measure, Mollom, following the recent rash of comment spam. Mollom works behind the scenes, so it shouldn't create any hassles for legitimate visitors. We're still hard at work on the Elections subsite, and have presented an initial draft to the Elections Committee for review.

    Wiki:

    In addition to their usual ways of growing Fanlore, Wikicomm has also joined forced with Open Doors to work on the Geocities Rescue Project. Fanlore will be helping to preserve resource sites and the look and feel of older fanfiction sites.

    Read more

  • June, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 30

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 - 9:34pm
    Message type:
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    Get updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees: right under the cut!

    Abuse:

    Abuse has been hard at work getting boilerplate texts written to efficiently handle user complaints and concerns. We are combing through drafts to ensure we are clearly communicating with users regarding areas of difficulty and the terms of service.

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T are busy negotiating with a co-location facility to work out our requirements and costs - Network ports! Power consumption! We're about to spend a lot of money so we want to spend it wisely (thank you so much for supporting us in making this dream a reality).

    The draft Open Beta plan is getting fleshed out and we're busy making a list of features we have to finalise. I feel a blocking Open Beta list coming on...

    One of the most important features will be an Invitation Code system. We know we have to manage adding new users carefully, we don't want to open up the Archive for use then have it burst into flames! There will be codes for existing users to hand out, and a sign-up queue so you don't have to rely on knowing someone with an account. We're finalising the design now and will start coding it shortly (many thanks to Denise from Dreamwidth for letting us look at how Dreamwidth does it).

    Thank you for all the suggestions for Collections & Challenges. The submissions are now closed and we are busy collating your feedback to incorporate into our proposed design - we may not be able to use every suggestion but we will try very hard!

    Our next code deploy will probably be another small one with a bunch of fixes - we're currently aiming for the weekend of the 4th of July.

    Board:

    The Board continue to work on the upcoming colocation and open beta of the archive in terms of money, resources and personnel, as well as setting general org-wide goals.

    Communications:

    Communications has set up the Fan Culture Preservation Project page and will be announcing a GeoCities Outreach project in the near future. We're also putting together a "For The Media" page and planning events to celebrate our coming Server Colocation!

    Content Policy:

    No report.

    Development:

    Development and Communications are collaborating on a merchandising committee for the Fall, '09 fundraising drive; stay tuned.

    Documentation:

    Our AD&T liaison Amy has been hard at work supporting the move forward to the next stage of the Archive of Our Own. In addition to wrangling meeting minutes and keeping all the training and design documentation straight on the wiki, she's been collating your feedback about Collections and Challenges and putting it into a format our designers and coders can work with. \0/

    Elections:

    Elections is compiling instructions and information for the revised, in-house election software that OTW's Webmasters are working on, as well as draft text for their forthcoming website.

    Finance Update:

    The sharks of FinCom are circling slowly around bank options, evaluating the benefits of short-term investment CDs in the event of a budget surplus this year and preparing recommendations for the Board on a move to a different level of checking account. We've also been working with various committees to nail down budget projections for the remainder of the year, and supporting Systems in the move to purchase servers, as well as paying the regular bills.

    In more exciting and less numerical news, we're also celebrating the engagement of our darling Cat Meier and flailing over just how we're going to manage to turn a mutual love of sharks, Excel sheets and Alec Hardison into an appropriate wedding gift.

    Journal:

    The TWC team is working hard to put together issue three of our academic journal, which is scheduled for September 2009.

    Legal:

    Legal continues to provide confidential advice and opinions within the org. We could tell you more, but then we'd have to kill you.

    Open Doors:

    The Open Doors committee is proud to announce the Fan Culture Preservation project: if you have zines or other (nondigital) fannish artifacts you don't want anymore and don't know what to do with: please call us! We are partnered with the Special Collections department of the University of Iowa, and we can help arrange for your zines to be housed and preserved. (We can also help you arrange a bequest!)

    We are currently finalizing a Geocities Outreach plan; if you, or someone you know, is in danger of losing an old Geocities fan fiction or information site, and you don't have any other way to preserve it, please contact Open Doors. We can help!

    Systems:

    Systems is planning a 'help us with colocation' recruitment drive; watch this space!

    Translations:

    No report.

    Vidding History:

    We are currently working on a page of fair use resources for vidders. Francesca Coppa will also be presenting on a fair use panel at the Open Video Conference in NYC, June 19-20, 2009.

    Volunteers:

    The Volunteers committee could welcome quite a few new coders and testers to the Org. \o/ We've also been working with Translations in reviewing our management tools in order to adapt them to the needs of the language teams.

    Website:

    We recently worked with Open Doors to create a page for the Fan Culture Preservation Project. We're making progress on our big summer project, the Elections subsite, and we've been squishing bugs and smacking down spammers on the side.

    Wiki:

    The Wiki committee continues to make policy decisions and oversee the general running of Fanlore.

    Read more

  • May, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 29

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 - 10:17pm
    Message type:
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    Join us in celebrating our unofficial 2 year anniversary: our first "fanarchive" LJ post went live on May 20, 2007. WOOT! Find out what your favorite OTW projects and committees are doing: more info right below the cut!

    Abuse:

    No report.

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T has been researching co-location facilities and getting quotes on hardware, which is starting to look excitingly detailed. These are the first steps towards actually buying and owning our own servers! We have also started working on the features we'll need to go to Open Beta!

    We're currently hard at work on a bunch of projects:

    • Enhancing our invitation system, we'll need this when we start taking on a lot more users
    • Improving our administration interface
    • Improvements to tag wrangling - we're working to fix the 'SGA and SG-1 in the filters' problem.
    • Adding a FAQ and a posting interface for Release Notes and Bug Updates - this is so we can communicate better
    • ...and of course a bunch of smaller bug fixes

    We're also still looking for suggestions on Collections and Challenges. We need as much input as possible so we can build something awesome. Head over to Collections and Challenges. It's Design Time!, the Livejournal post or the Dreamwidth post and share your ideas. Submissions close on 30th May so please, tell us what you know!

    We have a small deploy planned for the weekend of the 30th - this will mostly be bugfixes - details in the next set of Release Notes that get emailed to Beta testers.

    The testing team who worked on r1278 were amazing! We re-tested almost the entire Archive (which is now a mammoth task). A big thank you to the dedicated and brave people who volunteered to help right in the middle and were fabulous.

    We've been training up the lovely new coders who joined us recently, who are making great progress! We've spiffed up our training materials and our reward has been lots of enthusiasm and activity - we've just seen our first archive code commit from the lovely Amelia, who joined us a few months ago. The new training materials make it even easier to learn to code with the OTW, so if you've been pondering joining us, now is a great time to jump right in!

    Board:

    The Board has approved funding for colocation servers and is working on structuring the OTW's finances to grow with the ongoing costs of a much bigger Archive. We hope to formally announce a timeline and a series of festivals to celebrate our colocation!

    Communications:

    Communications is working on several projects; a "for the media" page for the tw.org website, the Open Doors "Fan Culture Preservation Project" press releases, some outreach ideas for Fanlore.

    Content Policy:

    No report.

    Development:

    Members of Development will be forming a subcommittee with members of Communications, Web, and some specially recruited volunteers to research OTW merchandise for future drives. Stay tuned!

    Documentation:

    Documentation has no new news, but continues to document everything it can find.

    Elections:

    The Elections committee will be running the voting and tabulation for the fall election in-house. We're working closely with Webmasters now to set up the infrastructure to do just that.

    Finance Update:

    Fincom closed the books on 2008 with the completion of the 2008 financial statements, which were released in conjunction with the OTW annual report, which is now available on our web site. We've filed the organization's 990 return, and will post that soon to our reports page soon. We've also been paying the OTW's bills and catching up with other OTW committees to finalize the 2009 operating budget.

    Journal:

    May 15th marked the deadline to submit contributions for the third issue of the TWC academic journal. The TWC team is now busy going through the editorial process; issue three will be out by September 2009.

    Legal:

    As ever, Legal Committee continues in its role of providing advice and support to other OTW Committees. Recently, we consulted with Content regarding the application of a specific clause in the Terms of Service, and we have advised the Web team and the Board on various glossary and license issues. We also continue to respond to queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month commented on some specific speech and copyright issues referred to us by the membership.

    Open Doors:

    Open Doors is still working with Webmasters and Communications on our project page, and we're now workshopping a press release.

    Systems:

    Systems has been working with the various committee chairs to test the exportation of certain project pages to the zen server.

    Tag Wranglers:

    The Tag Wranglers continue to be quite busy in the Beta Archive. We’ve brought on new volunteers to help us with a wider variety of fandoms. In the next few months we look forward to the coding of the next generation of behind-the-scenes wrangling tools which will allow us greater flexibility to handle a few of the issues we’ve come against. Meanwhile, the fandoms already wrangled are working well with filters and browse.

    Translations:

    At the beginning of this month we waved our committee member logovo goodbye (who is probably glad to have her life back :P), and as a parting gift, she recruited her own successor, hele. We give a our gratitude for a wonderful time to logovo, and an excited welcome to hele!

    We are working on standardizing the translation process to facilitate the volunteers’ work. The committee is also testing the admin side of the new translation interface, with sights on being able to include translators in the testing soon. The teams continue to work tirelessly on translating the website, and keeping the translated versions of the website up to date (no mean feat!).

    Vidding History:

    Members of Vidding History and Legal went to DC to on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Extended coverage of our panel is at our blog post here.

    Volunteers:

    Volunteers continues to work managing staffers and other personnel as well as maintaining our various corporate home systems and software.

    Website:

    As part of our Elections subsite project, we're currently testing software that enables multiple sites to be run from a single Drupal installation and database.

    Our fabulous chairperson, Jinjur, will be handing out OTW buttons at Wiscon (May 22-25).

    Wiki:

    We've opened up a Fanlore community on dreamwidth for anyone who wants to get involved with editing the wiki, along with adding a news page to keep everyone updated on the latest changes.

    Read more

  • April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 28

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 29 April 2009 - 9:00pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
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    Welcome to our second April newsletter! Progress reports from all your favorite committees and OTW projects are right under the cut!

    Abuse:

    We're busy designing our process of receiving complaints from users and responding to them and have been putting together a way to handle the non-English-language users of the Archive with Translation -- who are deserving of SO MANY kudos -- which we're looking forward to releasing soon!

    ADT/Archive:

    Accessibility, Design, & Technology are in the process of preparing for another code update on the Beta Archive of Our Own and are currently poking the changes on our Test Archive. We should be deploying the new changes on the first weekend of May. Changes include:

    • The new Translations interface which Elz and Cal have been slaving over.
    • Being able to filter by Pseuds which is Enigel's baby.
    • Changes to the way works display by the beautiful Zooey - we're pulling 'Warnings' out and making them more visible.
    • We're also pulling the default Archive font we're using as not enough people's systems default load Candara as pretty as they should :(

    Jennifew is heading up the MASSIVE task of regression testing the ENTIRE Archive after the Rails upgrade - every page is subtly affected. We're looking forward to inflicting all this on our faithful Beta testers so we can pick up the next round of (inevitable) bugs.

    Finally, Our beautiful Amelia has been contacting people about co-location, we don't have anything firm back yet but we have three different proposals we're waiting on details for.

    Board:

    As a whole, the Board has continued to work on large org-wide issues of structure and personnel, as well as supporting and shepherding along forthcoming projects like server colocation, the Fan Culture Preservation Project, and our Elections subsite. Board member Rebecca Tushnet also gave the keynote speech at the Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property Symposium at American University School of Law co-sponsored by the OTW.

    Communications:

    The Communications team continues to strategize outreach. We recently added a Where To Find Us page to the "About The OTW" section of transformativeworks.org, so please come and join us on Facebook, MySpace and other venues. We have also been working to support the OTW at cons.

    Content Policy:

    Content Policy is preparing the additions to the ToS for posting on the AO3 website at the next scheduled code update in early May, at which point there will be a further two-week comment period before the ToS additions become effective.

    Development:

    After the March membership drive, members of DevMem took a few days off to bask in the knowledge that nearly 400 people donated during the drive and that we now have members in 17 nations around the world! (See our recent blog post for more information about that.) Since then, we've been working on generating documentation for civicrm, the open-source software we're now using to keep track of members and donations. We also sent a delegation to Muskrat Jamboree, a fan con in Boston in early April, where we hosted an informational panel about the org.

    Documentation:

    The Documentation committee has been working on our formatting for minutes and other internal documentation. We’ve continued to set up infrastructure and line ducks up in a row, setting up liaisons with more committees to streamline the documentation process and provide more direct support.

    Elections:

    Elections is considering options for vote tabulation, both entertaining bids for outsourcing and consulting with Webmasters about the logistics of running the voting ourselves.

    Finance Update:

    The Finance Committee has been running the numbers for our 2008 Annual Report: stay tuned!

    Journal:

    Karen Hellekson represented the Academic Journal group at the OTW informational panel held at Muskrat Jamboree on April 3, 2009. She spoke about the fan connection and urged fans and acafans to consider submitting, and she handed out the journal's most recent general call for papers (available here: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/8).

    Catherine Tosenberger, the guest editor of forthcoming TWC No. 4, special Supernatural issue, was interviewed by Sequential Tart. The interview was published on April 6, 2009 (available here: http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1364). She spoke not only about SPN but also put in a great plug for TWC!

    TWC has been accepted for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/). We will be inputting article metadata to facilitate dissemination of content.

    Legal:

    OTW staffers Kristina Busse, Francesca Coppa, Casey Fiesler, Karen Hellekson, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet all presented papers at the IP/Gender Conference at the American University School of Law on April 23-24, 2009. The event was co-sponsored by the Women in the Law Program, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, the Program on Information and Intellectual Property, and the Organization For Transformative Works.

    The Legal Committee continues to provide advice and support to other Committees and the Board as needed, consulting recently on the issue of a possible legacy to the OTW. As always, we welcome queries from the public, and we attempt to respond to them promptly, as they arise.

    Open Doors:

    The Open Doors committee continues to work on setting up the Fan Culture Preservation Project website; we are also working on a gameplan to help preserve fan sites which will be destroyed when GeoCities goes down later this year.

    Systems:

    No report at this time.

    Translations:

    Apart from our usual translating gig we were figuring out how to restructure our teams this month, and we're also trying to streamline our translation procedure a bit. We hope this will make both our administrative work and the translators' experience a lot smoother.

    We have also been staring over Elz's shoulder in fascination as she continues to code the Archive's translation interface for us; we're very excited to get to testing it soon-ish (in fact, we're in the process of setting it up! whooo!)

    Last but not least a shout-out to our fabulous translators: in addition to our Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, German, Czech, Finnish and Italian teams we could also welcome Japanese and Danish to the fold this month! <3

    Vidding History:

    Francesca Coppa, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet will be heading to Washington DC on May 7th to testify at the Copyright Office in support of the EFF's petition for a DMCA exemption for fair use remix artists, including vidders. More information about the upcoming hearing is here: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/hearings/2009/#may7.

    Vidding History members Coppa and Turk also presented vidding-related academic work at IP/Gender on April 23-24, 2009.

    Volunteers:

    No report at this time.

    Webmasters:

    We've posted the full text of OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed DMCA exemption for vidders. It's accessible in PDF or HTML format from the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids page.

    More recently, we've been in discussion with Elections and Systems as we take the first steps toward setting up an Elections subsite. This will be our main project for the next few months.

    Wiki:

    We're still at work cleaning out policies and bugs, as well as trying to fruitfully incorporate new feedback received on the workings and content of Fanlore. Outreach is still a main goal of ours for this year, with new links forming with the RPG and filking communities recently (Francesca, thank you for the help!)

    Read more

  • April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 27

    By .fcoppa on Sunday, 12 April 2009 - 1:55pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:

    Welcome to our next newsletter; get progress reports from all your favorite committees and stay on top of your favorite OTW projects--right under the cut!

    Abuse:
    No report.

    ADT/Archive:
    AD&T are trialling a new way of navigating through pseuds on the Test Archive right now. We plan to make it possible to manage your different identities better. We've also rebuilt the way the inbox works and are in the process of splitting out the 'Warning' tags from general tags when viewing story summaries.

    We're researching co-location facilities and ongoing hardware costs. We need a good idea of how much it will cost us to move to hardware with enough grunt to support a lot more users. synecdochic talked about why having the right hardware and architecture is important if you're interested in knowing more.

    All the excitement emanating from our team on Ada Lovelace Day seems to have proved inspirational, and we're happy to be welcoming some new coders on board. We're also sprucing up our training documentation and working to improve support and training for new coders, as part of our committment to fostering the tech heroines of the future.

    Board:
    The Board continues to work with Systems on co-location for the AOOO; with Financial on writing the Annual Report and making budgets; with Volunteers on various personnel issues; with Open Doors to get the Fan Culture Preservation project up and running; with Legal to support the EFF's DMCA exemption; with Webmasters and Elections on election software and installation; & with Abuse on privacy issues. Board chair Naomi Novik also took out some time to go on NPR to speak against DRM technology on audiobooks.

    Communications:
    The Communications team helped to promote the latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, on gaming, and we're pleased at the response across the blogosphere; we got slashdotted and we're hoping to develop additional articles in the print press. Meanwhile, we also continue to support the OTW's presence at various cons and conferences. We're also particularly proud of our Ada Lovelace Day post. Breaking news: we now also have a mirror site on Dreamwidth, a new fan-friendly social networking site.

    Content Policy:
    No report.

    Development:
    Big report on the March, 2009 drive coming soon!

    Documentation:
    The Documentation Committee is pleased to announce our newest addition, tree! tree brings our committee up to seven members, and we are delighted to have someone else to assign work to.

    Documentation has also started our first big internal documentation push—developing “What Is It?” primer pages for each committee. These pages will help new staff and volunteers get a better feel for what the committees do, and how they operate.

    Committee chairs should expect to hear from their assigned Documentation person soon, if you have not already; your Documentation person will help figure out what kind of information your “What Is It?” page should have and how to organize it. Once the skeleton of the page is there, committee members are encouraged to add information to it. (Don’t worry about organizing it—info dumps are OK!)

    Staff and volunteers are also encouraged to check out the internal FAQ. It’s a work-in-progress, and we welcome any contributions.

    Elections:
    No report.

    Finance Update:
    Finance is working on our Annual Report, coming soon!

    Journal:
    Issue number two of the academic journal TWC, a special number about Games, is out! The communications team has made a big push to advertise it heavily to the gaming world, and we have been tracking links. We are very pleased by the response, as we've been featured on Slashdot and other prominent sites. The editorial team is embarking on a spree of solicitation for No. 3 (a general, unthemed issue), and for No.4 (a special issue on Supernatural). http://journal.transformativeworks.org We will also be represented at events such as Muskrat Jamboree, where a Journal member will sit on a panel about OTW.

    Legal:
    Legal is collaborating with Vidding History to support the OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's DMCA exemption; see "Vidding History" below for more info.

    Open Doors:
    Open Doors will soon announce its new Fan Culture Preservation Project with a press release and a webpage; currently, we have finalized the legal arrangement with our university partner and are now actively working on establishing a collection/saving some zines. Stay tuned!

    Systems:
    No report.

    Translation:
    We continue to welcome our new fabulous volunteers, which now include a Danish translation team. For now work on the OTW website goes forward as the main focus of our efforts.

    Vidding History:
    OTW Goes To Washington! Board members Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet, as well as TWC Review Editor Tisha Turk are going to DC in early May to testify at the Copyright Office in favor of the EFF's proposed exemption to DMCA prohibitions on DVD ripping for makers of fair use user-generated content. Tushnet and Coppa will also be presented on vidding at the Columbia Symposium on Gender and the Law on April 10th; Turk will be presenting on vidding later that month at the IP/Gender conference at American University School of Law.

    Volunteers:
    The Volunteers committee welcomes our newest member, avaloste! We continue to bring new staffers and volunteers into the Org, and have recently made some changes to our internal process that should not only make it easier to do, but easier for future Volunteers committee members to learn.

    Webmasters:
    The Webmasters are currently working to upgrade CiviCRM, the software we use to support DevMem’s fundraising efforts. We are also working closely with Translation to resolve a lingering site bug, and will work soon with the Elections committee to create a home for Elections-related content.

    Wiki:
    Wiki recently announced its new chatroom for fanlore participants; they also ran a "Fanlore Live" panel at Escapade.

    Read more

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