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

I. CREATING A BIGGER HOME

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. LOOKING FOR HELP

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

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

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

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

III. GOVERNANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

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

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

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

I. FANLORE PASSES 25,000 ENTRIES

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

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

II. DEVELOPMENTS AT THE AO3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. OVER AT THE OTHER PROJECTS

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

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

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

IV. DOCUMENTATION

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

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

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

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

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

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

We are pleased to announce that the OTW has published its 2012 Annual Report (in PDF here or in HTML here). The report provides a summary of our activities during the past financial and calendar year, our financial statements for 2012, and our goals for 2013. This is the sixth annual report of the OTW (see previous reports).

The 2012 Annual Report highlights successes and achievements from across the organization and challenges we faced during the year. Building on the success of 2011, 2012 saw even more growth in our projects, membership, fundraising, and reach.

We encourage all those interested to take a look at the report and, if you have questions, please feel free to contact us here or through our contact form.

Thank you to all of our members, staff, donors and volunteers for your support!

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

I. DONATIONS & VOLUNTEERS ARE COMING!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. CHANGES AT THE AO3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. THE OTW IN REVIEW

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

IV. NEW CONTENT

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

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