San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is a major multifandom event taking place each July; this year it's July 18-21. For the first time, the OTW will be covering SDCC, from the convention floor to Hall H lines, from the fan panels to tv, movie and author press rooms. Legal Committee staffer Heidi Tandy will be focusing on legal aspects of fandom, fannish interaction with content creators and other issues of interest to all fans, including fanfic writers, fanartists and vidders.

In addition, the OTW is hosting a party on Wednesday, July 17, 8:00-9:30 p.m. PDT at the Tequila Bar & Grille at the San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina (333 West Harbor Drive, San Diego, CA 92101 map and directions here. There will be complimentary margaritas, sodas, chips & salsa, a few rounds of Cards Against Humanity, giveaways and other meet & greet moments designed to welcome everyone to San Diego and Comic Con.

We're requesting a voluntary donation of $5 to attend. You don't need to be attending Comic Con to join us, although the Marriott is adjacent to the Convention Center so anyone coming from the off-site SDCC hotels via Con Bus can reach it easily.

We'd also like to know what SDCC participants you would like Heidi to speak to and what questions you would like her to ask? The ComicCon schedule will become available around July 4, and we will send out another reminder after it is posted.

Let us hear from you! Just keep in mind that Heidi can only be in one place at one time, and that she can speak with only so many people in a single day. She is also scheduled to appear on two panels during the con. The first is a panel for the forthcoming SmartPop book Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, for which she and other current or former OTW staffers have contributed. Heidi will also be moderating a Harry Potter panel on Sunday afternoon. However, we would like to include as many of your suggestions as possible.

Some planned questions currently include:

• Have you heard of or planned anything for your property to be part of Amazon's Kindle Worlds project?
• How involved are you with tie-in creations generally, and do you see fan work to be different?
• How would you have answered this question 3 years ago? What about 8?
• How much regular contact do you have with legal staff in your work regarding fan creations or other things besides your own content?
• For fans: Have you ever received a C&D? What did you do? What would you do if you got one now?

We will be publishing stories from her SDCC visit in the week after the event (starting after July 25) in both print and video form - and she'll liveTweet as much as possible from the halls of the San Diego Convention Center through the OTW News twitter account.

We are pleased to announce that our first applications for new OTW volunteers are open! We have three roles from across the OTW in the first round:

• AO3 Documentation Volunteer
• Communications Staff (Media Outreach)
• Tag Wrangler Volunteer
  Updated 14 April 2013 - Due to the fantastic response from individuals interested in Tag Wrangling, we've temporarily closed the application while we train the over 50 volunteers who have already responded and get them settled in. We aim to reopen Tag Wrangler recruiting in mid-May.

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

You may be wondering why you aren't seeing positions listed here that you know are open. Those committees are finalizing their position descriptions and training plans, and we will be posting those opportunities when they're ready.

If you have any questions about volunteering for the OTW, please let us know through the Volunteers & Recruiting contact form.

AO3 Documentation Volunteer
The AO3 Documentation Workgroup manages external AO3 docs such as the FAQs and Tutorials, and helps create and/or expand our internal knowledge base.

We’re looking for some people who are familiar with the Archive of Our Own and are good at writing and proofreading help documentation. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, click through to read the full details and apply to join the workgroup. Applications are due April 26

Communications Staff (Media Outreach)
Communications has primary responsibility for internal and external communication for the OTW. We manage the OTW blog and social media outlets and assist other teams in managing project-specific communication. We also field requests from outside the organization and work to spread awareness of the OTW and its projects.

We’re currently looking for someone to perform Media Outreach, which involves making direct pitches to media contacts and working to place stories about the OTW. If you have knowledge or experience in the area of media relations and are interested in helping build up our communication strategies, click through to learn more about the role and apply to join the Communication Staff Applications are due April 26

Tag Wrangler Volunteer
The Tag Wranglers are responsible for keeping the hundreds of thousands of tags on AO3 in some kind of order! We choose which form of a fandom title appears on the Media pages, as well as all the character, relationship, and additional tags which appear in the filters and the auto-complete. We link tags together to make all the works and bookmarks on the archive easier to browse and search (so that users can find exactly what they’re looking for, whether that’s alternate universes with Cloud Strife, Steve/Tony and tentacles, or g-rated Rose/Kanaya fluff!)

If you like organizing, bringing order to chaos, excuses to fact-check your favorite fandom canons, or you just get a kick out of seeing all the wacky and wonderful terms fans come up with, you might enjoy tag wrangling! Updated 14 April 2013 - Due to the fantastic response from individuals interested in Tag Wrangling, we've temporarily closed the application while we train the over 50 volunteers who have already responded and get them settled in. We aim to reopen Tag Wrangler recruiting in mid-May.

The OTW maintains a variety of social media outlets. Some of these are for the organization as a whole, such as our Facebook page, and the blog on the transformativeworks.org website. Others are for specific projects, such as the fanlore_news Twitter, or the Twitter account for our tag wrangling committee. You can find a listing of the various accounts on our website.

Readership has been growing at some of our newer accounts, such as at Tumblr, and shrinking at others, such as at LiveJournal. The Communications Committee monitors activity at the various outlets to give us a better idea of where our audience is coming from.

For example, the following shows our subscribers to each OTW News site as of last month:

• LiveJournal 1851 Subscribers
• Twitter 1196 Followers
• Dreamwidth 763 Subscribers
• Tumblr 716 Followers
• Facebook 417 unique Likes
• Yahoo posting board 65 Subscribers
• Pinboard 36 subscribers
• Insane Journal 3 subscribers (feed only)

These numbers can be misleading, however, in indicating where people are actually reading the posts. For example, many people use RSS feeds from one of the above sites or from our organization's website blog. A lot of our Twitter readers are actually reading from Tumblr, and comparatively few of our LJ subscribers are actually reading our news at that site.

Where people engage with us also varies. We receive comments from the majority of our sites and maintain them so that people can reach us at the fannish locations that they are already using. On occasion we have received questions about what our commenting policy is, or where we prefer to receive comments, given the variety of places where our news appears.

Our policy for commenting at OTW outlets is as follows:

"Comments can be made at any of our posting sites and questions can be sent to us through these outlets.

However we ask that users do not include confidential information in these public posts (for example, questions about problems with a specific account on the AO3), but instead use email messages directed to the particular committees who can help them, such as Support for the AO3 or the Wiki Committee for Fanlore. Questions can always be sent to Communications who will redirect them to the appropriate venues.

In some cases when the OTW is attempting to gather feedback from users on particular issues we may request that users respond only on one particular site (such as an AO3 News post, or one made to the OTW News blog). This both encourages discussion among users rather than having scattered comments across our many locations, and also facilitates responses from OTW staff, who may not have user accounts at all of our mirror locations."

We encourage discussions at any of our sites. We also hope to make more OTW project users aware of our news outlets so that they can locate information and find a place for their questions to be answered.

Want a treat for the holidays? We have some AO3 invites for readers who can help us out in a project for next year!

As a service to fans, the OTW maintains a calendar of events related to its mission on the organization website. Most fans have heard of the San Diego Comic-Con, for example, but what about the many other fan-related happenings around the world? The calendar has included OTW events, fan gatherings & conventions, academic conferences, events related to open-source technology, fannish holidays & celebrations, and calls for papers in fan studies. At the beginning of each month, a roundup of upcoming events is posted to the OTW blog.

The events calendar becomes more useful for fans as the number and diversity of events it contains increases. As we move into 2013, the events calendar is a little bare and we would love to see it populated with events from fandoms and communities around the world. And for helping us with this task, we're pleased to be able to offer a reward in the form of an invitation to the Archive of Our Own for events occurring in 2013 submitted between now and December 12th at 1700 UTC (see what time this is in your timezone).

Do you know of an event that would be a good fit for the OTW events calendar? Then participating is easy:

1) Check the events calendar to see if your event is already listed.

2) Go to the events submission form and fill in all of the required details. Be sure to include the e-mail address in the 'Submitter's e-mail' field. Normally this is an optional field but we need an e-mail to send you the code. If you want the invite given to a friend, use their email and let them know to look for it (they can get caught in spam folders!)

3) That's it! OTW Communications staff will review submissions and add appropriate events to the calendar.

4) Individuals who submit an eligible event and include an e-mail address will receive an invite to the AO3. Eligible events must fall into one of the above listed categories, and include enough information for staff to be able to create a listing on the calendar.

AO3 invitation codes are limited to one per e-mail address. AO3 invitation codes will be e-mailed out by December 15th.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this post or use the Communications Committee contact form.

Thank you for helping us offer this service to fans!