OTW Sections

  • February 2013 Newsletter, Volume 66

    By Claudia Rebaza on Saturday, 23 February 2013 - 9:43pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

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

    I. ALL THE ACTIVITIES EVERYWHERE

    Welcome to the OTW's first organization newsletter for 2013! This newsletter appears every month from February to November (omitting our term break period in December and January). Since our last check-in there have been changes to the Board, changes to the chairs and staff of various committees, new policies and procedures, and a lot of work carried over from 2012.

    II. META & MORE

    Without question one of the biggest changes occurred in the past week when the Board voted to allow the posting of meta on the Archive of Our Own. This promptly caused the formation of an internal discussion involving committees such as Accessibility Design & Technology, Abuse, Support, Communications, Tag Wrangling and others in order to inform what will become the first draft of proposed definitions, Terms of Service and FAQ changes, and documentation by our Content Policy workgroup. This process is expected to be ongoing for the next month, although Content Policy may provide an update on our progress before the first proposed draft appears. We will make proposed definitions etc. available for public comment before any changes are adopted.

    Before the meta announcement these committees had already been quite busy since the start of the year. Our Abuse team grew by two new members, Beth H. and new Board member Cat Meier. Aside from the meta discussion, Abuse has been dealing with an influx of cases which run the gamut from issues surrounding fanmixes to plagiarism to alleged hate speech to non-fanwork illegal content.

    Accessibility, Design & Technology successfully deployed v0.9.5 of the Archive while weathering some site security storms that are currently keeping the Ruby on Rails community on their toes. They're already hard at work on the AO3's next deploy, which will include a shiny new header and code for the 852 Prospect import, to name only a few highlights.

    Together with Open Doors, they welcomed new coding volunteer Stephanie who is working specifically on a tool for handling large archive imports. New staffer tuff_ghost has been doing amazing work, some of which will be seen in the upcoming deploy's greatly redesigned Archive emails. As our opening 2013 post demonstrated, there's been skyrocketing use of kudos, comments, and subscriptions on the site, so automated notifications have been growing fast too. However, one set of emails that has dropped in the last month has been our AO3 invites. With our backlog of pending requests now sent, the wait time for an automated invite is under 24 hours.

    Internationalization & Outreach have been talking with AD&T about putting the Diversity Policy up on the Archive, and are also involved in the meta discussion.

    Support has been averaging around 100 tickets a week, though the committee currently has no unclaimed tickets and very few that haven't had at least a first contact! Kudos also goes to the Translation Committee as there have been a few tickets recently in non-English languages, and their teams have jumped right in and helped get translations written to send to the users.

    Support is hosting a live chat on February 23rd-24th, from 4pm to 4am UTC. If you have questions and haven't sent in a ticket or just want to say hi, drop on in! They are planning on doing these every other-ish month and rotating the time - the current plan is to cover the other half of the clock for the next chat so that they can meet with users in Asia and Oceania as well as any European and American night owls.

    Tag Wrangling started the new term off with a bang in the form of a much-requested feature - the Fandom lists now ignore articles like "The" when sorting alphabetically, putting to rest the qualms of many users and wranglers. Since then wranglers have been busy renaming fandom titles to add missing "The"s back (an ongoing process; with over 11,000 fandoms in use on the Archive, the task is not inconsequential!) They've also been busy on revised training plans for new wranglers, working out the specifics for new features to improve and simplify wrangling, and discussing the guidelines on Additional tags. And, as ever, the diligent volunteers have busily continued wrangling. The wranglers recently got the unwrangled Characters pile down below 6,000 which had climbed to nearly double this, and have done as much or more with Relationships and Freeforms - in addition to dealing with the dozen or more new Fandom tags coming in daily!

    AO3 Documentation recently made minor improvements to several of the FAQs and are currently working on overhauling some of the others. Category Change is working on a proposal for internal discussion that should be distributed by month's end.

    III. ELSEWHERE IN THE ORG

    Development & Membership has begun planning for the first fund drive of 2013. It will take place April 3-9 with the theme "Fandom Is Love." Thet're also developing Basecamp templates for convention outreach tasks, and have sent materials to OTW representatives to hand out at two upcoming cons, Escapade and YAYcon.

    Journal is in production for two issues simultaneously, one to be released March 15 and one to be released June 15. Editorial personnel are attending academic conventions in the first half of the year and will advertise TWC and solicit papers. The newly renamed Fanhackers blog should go live next month thanks to help from Webmasters and Systems.

    Open Doors has been cleaning house: reorganizing/updating the committee's information on the internal wiki and the website, working with Legal on more detailed agreements with mods, and developing new materials for the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP). They have also been speaking with more mods on manual and auto-importing plans, and continuing to shepherd zine and other donations through FCPP.

    Wiki has been clarifying the committee's responsibilities and working on procedures and documentation with their new liaison from Volunteers & Recruiting, Alison. They've also been talking with several committees about better cooperation and exciting projects for this year, and have a new Communications liaison, Agnieszka, who can be seen and chatted with through the fanlore_news twitter account.

    IV. LEGAL AND TECHNOLOGY

    In other social media news, the OTW now has a Google+ account dedicated to our legal and technology news, and Communications held a contest for submissions to the OTW Events Calendar. Work has also begun on the OTW Annual Report.

    Systems worked with Communications to issue a report on their activities for 2012 as well as the technical setup on the AO3, which is a must-read for anyone who wants to know about the increasing tech demands being put on the organization.

    Webmasters implemented a new Release Management process for OTW's primary web properties and completed its first release of 2013! This included a new job board for Volunteers & Recruiting as well as several fixes for existing bugs. Over the next few months, some bugs remaining from the Drupal 7 migration will be fixed, and several new features will be introduced.

    Legal filed an amicus brief in U.S. federal appeals court in the case of Fox v. DISH Networks and responded to a steady stream of legal queries from both inside and outside the org.

    V. GOVERNANCE

    The Board of Directors welcomed new members Maia Bobrowicz and Cat Meier, and bid farewell to departing members Julia Beck, Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, and Jenny Scott-Thompson. The Board thanks them for their service.

    The new Board has been making efforts to clarify its purview by clearly delineating which decisions the Board is responsible for making and which should be delegated to committees. They believe this will help to reduce confusion, improve efficiency, and make workloads more manageable. Aside from the previously discussed decision about nonfiction meta, the Board has been approving expense requests, reviewing and discussing reports from Volunteers & Recruiting and Strategic Planning, and dealing with procedural issues such as quorum and tiebreaker policies and Board members' personal communication styles and preferences.

    Strategic Planning's Tag Wrangling report (the first team surveyed) has been released to the general public. Their report on Volunteers & Recruiting has been sent for the first round of fact-checking and will soon be ready for review by the Board. They are in the process of drafting the Open Doors and Systems reports, and are about to deploy the survey for retired Systems staff. The next report Strategic Planning begins to draft will be Wiki/Fanlore, and the next team they survey will be Translation.

    VI. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting continues to be hard at work with the final stages of the project to revise the organization's recruitment and will soon be working with chairs and leads on reopening intake. The results of the annual Still Willing to Serve (SWTS) survey were reported to Board, summarizing the staff feedback from that process. The Volunteers & Recruiting annual report is nearly complete and they are starting a project to audit access to organization-wide tools to make sure that internal records and account access for all personnel match and are up-to-date. The committee has also created interactive tutorials for org-wide tools that can be used as part of training for new staff, and have requested feedback from other committees and volunteers.

    As is typical during the term transition period, a number of positions have been vacated and refilled.

    *New Directors List*: Cat Meier, Maia Bobrowicz
    *New Chairs List*: Sole G. (Internationalization & Outreach Co-Chair), Highlander II (Tag Wrangling Co-Chair), Curtis Jefferson (Communications Co-Chair), Sam Johnsson (Support Co-Chair), mumble (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Betsy Rosenblatt (Legal), Tiyire (Wiki), Jay Bee (Open Doors Co-Chair)
    *New Workgroup Leads:* Franzeska Dickson (Vidding), Eylul Dogruel (Elections Officer), Lesann (Survey Co-Lead)
    *New Staffers List*: Agnieszka (Communications), Alison Watson (Open Doors), bm1893 (Translation), briar (Tag Wrangling), Claire Oberholtzer (Translation), Natalie (Strategic Planning), Priscilla Del Cima (Internationalization & Outreach), Qem (Tag Wrangling), Lady Oscar (Accessibility, Design & Technology), tuff_ghost (Accessibility, Design & Technology), bethbethbeth (Abuse)

    *New Communications volunteers*: ash48
    *New Coding Volunteers*: Nick Case, Stephanie S

    *Departing Directors*: Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, Jenny Scott-Thompson, Julia Beck
    *Departing Chairs*: aethel (Wiki), Elz (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Lucy Pearson (Communications Co-Chair), Rebecca Tushnet (Legal), Alison Watson (Tag Wrangling Co-Chair)
    *Departing Workgroup Leads:* Francesca Coppa (Vidding), Eylul Dogruel (Survey Co-Lead), Jenny Scott-Thompson (Elections Officer)
    *Departing Staffers*: aethel (Wiki), AlexElizabeth (Support), Julia Beck (Internationalization & Outreach; Translation), Francesca Coppa (Communications; Open Doors), Franzeska Dickson (Tag Wrangling), erda (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Kylie (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Lesann (Legal), Kristen Murphy (Webmasters)
    *Departing Workgroup Members*: Lucy Pearson (AO3 Documentation), Maia Bobrowicz (AO3 Documentation), Yshyn (AO3 Documentation)
    *Departing Coders*: Highlander II
    *Departing Testers*: Highlander II
    *Departing Tag Wranglers*: lunaris1013
    *Departing Open Doors Volunteers*: Hadrien Asbury

    The OTW thanks all staffers and volunteers for their time and contributions to the organization.

    Read more

  • International Volunteer Day Open Letter

    By Claudia Rebaza on Wednesday, 5 December 2012 - 7:41pm
    Message type:
    Event
    Tags:
    OTW Sections, OTW Board, Volunteers & Recruiting

    Dear OTW volunteers,

    In 1985, the United Nations established December 5 as International Volunteer Day—a day for celebrating and honoring volunteerism around the world. The Board members of OTW want to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU to all of the volunteers who keep us going.

    Right now, we number more than 400 active volunteers and volunteer-staff running 18 committees and 7 workgroups; keeping AO3 online and functioning; building Fanlore; editing Transformative Works & Cultures; preserving fansites through Open Doors; and providing legal resources for fans across the globe. We balance the books and manage the official OTW sites; we recruit and coordinate our volunteer base; and we wrangle the tags and answer the tickets. We raise money and build our membership; we provide translations and network with fans in dozens of countries, using a range of communication outlets to give voice to folks across thousands of fandoms.

    We do it all while working in almost every time zone, around the clock, with every single one of us giving our time, energy, and love to truly make this an organization for fans, by fans.

    Whether you just joined us this year or if you've been around since the beginning five years ago, we thank you for your dedication to OTW and the hard work you do.

    In solidarity and gratitude,
    The 2012 & 2013 OTW Board
    Andrea Horbinski
    Eylul Dogruel
    Francesca Coppa
    Franzeska Dickson
    Ira Gladkova
    Julia Beck
    Kristen Murphy
    Naomi Novik
    Nikisha Sanders

    Read more

  • November 2012 Newsletter, Volume 65

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 30 November 2012 - 6:34pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

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

    I. RETURN OF THE FILTERS

    Accessibility, Design and Technology deployed new code which not only brought back tag filtering at the Archive of Our Own but a number of additional features, concluding several months of coding, testing, more coding, and more testing. Feedback has been largely positive, and further improvements are in the works. Unfortunately, wranglers and staff were affected as the new search engine is having some trouble with new wrangling connections and metatags, so wrangling is currently off-line as Tag Wrangling helps coders and testers iron out the bugs there.

    Accessibility, Design and Technology are now hard at work on the next release, which will also focus on challenge & collection bug fixes. Since site performance has been stable and the new filtering code has made the servers happier, the number of invites going out every day has been increased from 500 to 750, a huge jump compared to the 100 to 150 increase made back in July. The automated invitation queue, which has been holding steady at over 30,000 requests during our busiest months, is now on the decline, leading to shorter wait times for people wanting accounts on the Archive.

    II. GETTING FEEDBACK

    The Category Change workgroup solicited feedback from AO3 users about the current Fandom Categories in the Archive and how people find material. They spent some time this month acknowledging and gathering those responses for further review.

    Meanwhile Content Policy worked with Abuse and Support on proposed Terms of Service FAQ changes. The changes are basically housekeeping and clarifying current practice. The documents are currently open for public review and feedback until December 10.

    Support had its first Open Support Chat this month. In spite of short notice quite a few people came by with questions, and fans are still finding the announcement posts and using them for open discussion. Support found the experiment was a success and it is something they plan to do again in the future!

    Legal issued a call on behalf of the EFF, by having fans who lost content due to the Megaupload seizure contact EFF to share their stories.

    III. GEARS TURNING

    Abuse has focused on a number of tag-related complaints, mostly regarding incorrect warnings, but also concerning the new trend toward "creative" tags, as well as dealing with a slight uptick in harassment complaints. They're working with Support on complaints that bridge both committees, and with Legal on fanmix download issues.

    Strategic Planning released its first report internally focusing on Tag Wrangling. The Tag Wrangling Committee is currently reviewing the report for factual accuracy before a wider release. They’re also working on reports for Volunteers & Recruiting, the Wiki Committee and Fanlore editors and gardeners, Open Doors, and Systems, and putting together surveys for the rest of the OTW teams.

    Translation have three new staffers and are slowly working on translating content and working with other committees to get important documents accessible for non-English speaking fans. They are also exploring ways to create a better community for translators, part of which involves working with Grants and Webmasters.

    Webmasters was focused on finalizing committee roles for the next term, selecting a piece of software to help them track incoming work, and closing out our Drupal 7 upgrade. Webmasters also provided input into Volunteers & Recruiting's need for a Drupal update.

    Wiki had some great news: they completed the upgrade of their mediawiki version! They are still working on fixing some remaining bugs, and also spent time working on improving internal documentation and cooperating with Legal regarding fair use issues on Fanlore.

    IV. GOVERNANCE

    New Board members Franzeska Dickson, Eylul Dogruel, and Andrea Horbinski officially took office on November 1. Recently the Board has been working on committee chair, workgroup lead, and Board liaison appointments for 2013. The Board also elected new officers, as follows:

    • President: Kristen Murphy
    • Secretary: Ira Gladkova (interim, to be reconsidered in early 2013)
    • Treasurer: Nikisha Sanders
    • Elections Officer: Eylul Dogruel

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has been busy completing a number of projects as the end of the year approaches. Following the large-scale revision of induction and removal procedures for all personnel roles within the organization, they started on a project to revise recruitment procedures - the first step in the process to reopening external recruitment. At this point, there is no target date for that to occur as there are a number of steps and other committees involved, but things are moving in the right direction.

    They have also deployed the 'Still Willing to Serve' (SWTS) survey, which asks all current staff on OTW committees to indicate their staff plans with the organization for 2013 and provide feedback regarding their experience with the organization this year. SWTS closes on November 30th, at which time the committee will begin preparing for the removal of any departing staff and analyzing feedback solicited through the SWTS form.

    Additionally, due to the large number of inductions during the first part of the year and some updated information regarding tool access requirements for specific roles during induction/removal revision, they are planning an audit of access to all organization tools managed by the committee over the next couple of months. Along with ensuring access for all personnel is up-to-date, they will be revising how access is tracked in personnel records and building a procedure for regular periodic audits of each tool.

    New Staffers: christycorr (Translation), marina (Journal), Andrea Horbinski (Board of Directors), Eylul Dogruel (Board of Directors), Franzeska Dickson (Board of Directors), Tuulia (Internationalization & Outreach and Translation)

    New Tag Wranglers: Curtis Jefferson, Schuyler Dade, Tuulia
    New Translators: Tuulia

    Departing Workgroup Members: Copracat (AO3 Documentation)
    Departing Coders: echthroi, Schuyler Dade

    Read more

  • Newsletter di Ottobre 2012, Volume 64

    By .Agnieszka Siem... on Sunday, 4 November 2012 - 6:10pm
    Message type:
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

    Per maggiori informazioni sulle competenze dei nostri Comitati, visita la lista dei Comitati sul nostro sito.

    I. DETTO, FATTO

    Questo è stato un mese importante per il nostro Comitato Legale che, insieme allo staff di Vidding, ha difeso e ampliato la dispensa DMCA per i registi di fanvideo! Questa dispensa permette a ogni persona di ottenere copie di alta qualità da una fonte (per esempio da un DVD) per scopi trasformativi. Il nostro team ha affrontato alcune forti opposizioni dall’industria nell’ultimo anno, perciò siamo estremamente compiaciuti che il loro duro lavoro sia stato ripagato. Grazie a tutti coloro che hanno aiutato l’OTW in questa campagna, specialmente i registi di fanvideo la cui testimonianza è stata decisiva per il nostro caso.

    Il Comitato Sviluppo e Adesioni vorrebbe peraltro ringraziare tutti coloro che hanno contribuito alla campagna associativa di Ottobre, che ha raccolto più di 18,600$.

    II. FACILE PARLARE, DIFFICILE PARLARE BENE

    Il Comitato Journal sta portando a termine gli ultimi manoscritti per le due edizioni speciali previste per inizio 2013 (“fumetti” e “boys’ love”). Kristina Busse ha rilasciato un discorso introduttivo intitolato “Cinquanta sfumature di Fandom: le ripetizioni e l’originalità nei fanwork trasformativi” alla conferenza “Borders and Beyond: Considering Communities” lo scorso 11-13 Ottobre 2012 a Gainesville, Florida.

    Open Doors ha raccolto di recente tutto il feedback per i test dell’importazione dall’archivio 852 Prospect e lo ha mandato al Comitato Accessibilità, Design e Tecnologia (AD&T) in prospettiva di un test a più ampio raggio e, se tutto andrà per il meglio, della tanto attesa possibilità di importazione. Lavorerà con AD&T anche per quanto riguarda l’importazione di un piccolo archivio slash tedesco e assisterà un altro moderatore per l’importazione manuale di due archivi storici.

    Il Supporto sta sperimentando un rapido miglioramento della gestione dei ticket. La maggior parte delle richieste ora riceve una risposta iniziale entro 48 ore - rispondono a tutti i ticket, perciò se non hai ricevuto notizia entro una settimana sarebbe utile inviare una nuova richiesta, nel caso qualcosa sia andato storto (per fare un esempio, un paio di volte di recente il Supporto ha tentato di rispondere a un ticket ma la mail è rimbalzata indietro). Il Supporto ha preso in esame anche alcune segnalazioni di inviti o codici di attivazione non arrivati a destinazione. Gli sviluppatori hanno lavorato negli ultimi tempi per migliorare e risolvere il problema, ma qualche volta le mail dall’archivio vengono etichettate come spam. Se stai aspettando risposta dall’AO3 e non è ancora giunta, per cortesia contatta il Supporto!

    Le linee guida per la Gestione delle Tag sono ora pubblicamente accessibili come voci delle FAQ dell’AO3. Un enorme ringraziamento a Sam per il suo duro lavoro su questo progetto! I wrangler (coloro che gestiscono le tag) sono peraltro impegnati nell’assistenza per il ritorno dei filtri.

    Il Comitato per la Normativa sui Contenuti spera di rilasciare alcuni cambiamenti di routine (non sostanziali) già proposti ai Termini di Servizio e alle FAQ dell’archivio ed è attualmente impegnato a sollecitare commenti interni agli stessi.

    III. AGGIORNAMENTI

    I Webmaster stanno ancora lavorando all'aggiornamento del software di gestione dei contenuti utilizzato sui siti transformativeworks.org, elections.transformativeworks.org, e opendoors.transformativeworks.org, da Drupal 6 a Drupal 7. I siti saranno nuovamente offline per ulteriore manutenzione, che sarà annunciata quando saranno stabiliti date e orari.

    Il principale obiettivo del Comitato Accessibilità, Design e Tecnologia è in dirittura d'arrivo, e include il ritorno dei tanto attesi filtri per le tag! Tutti stanno lavorando duramente: è necessario programmare, testare, revisionare la documentazione per i nuovi filtri, e in generale curare ogni aspetto. Lo staff è molto felice di vedere molti nuovi programmatori coinvolti nel progetto; la prossima cosa che vuole fare è organizzare il team di testing.

    Il Comitato Wiki è vicino al completamento dell'aggiornamento di mediawiki per Fanlore. L'account Twitter è stato hackerato per breve tempo allo scopo di inviare messaggi di spam alle persone. Il Comitato si scusa per l'inconveniente e ringrazia tutti coloro che hanno segnalato il problema.

    James del Comitato Sistemi ha lavorato moltissimo sull'Archive of our Own, e le sue fatiche includono l'implementazione di un test server alternativo per le prove di utilizzo per specifici tipi di problemi. Si sta anche occupando dei server dell'Archivio principale, agendo sulle impostazioni per assicurare che funzionino senza intoppi, e facendo da collegamento con l'host principale per risolvere un problema dalla loro parte.

    IV. AMMINISTRAZIONE

    Il Board è in pieno avvicendamento, con i nuovi membri del Board che mettono in ombra quello attuale per apprendere tutto sui loro nuovi ruoli. I nuovi membri saranno insediati a partire dal 1° Novembre. Il Gruppo di Lavoro per le Elezioni sta lavorando agli ultimi tocchi per la documentazione da preparare in chiusura dell'anno corrente e l'avvio del prossimo.

    Il Comitato Finanze è stato impegnato a preparare i rapporti trimestrali - che sperano di poter rilasciare presto - e gestire la campagna di Ottobre, oltre che comprare nuove componenti hardware per i computer che fungono da server. Il Comitato Sussidi ha osservato una pausa durante l'estate, ma in questo momento sta contattando altri comitati per esaminare i progetti che vorrebbero attuare (e le rispettive wishlist) che potrebbero dover essere accantonati momentaneamente per ragioni finanziarie. Il loro primo obiettivo è lavorare con il Comitato Journal per finalizzare una proposta di finanziamento.

    V. QUESTIONE DI OCCHIATINE

    Il Comitato Volontariato e Reclutamento ha perseguito il proprio progetto per la revisione e la documentazione per le Investiture e i Ritiri. Stanno anche preparandosi all'annuale progetto "Still Willing To Serve", per il quale l'attuale staff dell'OTW indica se ha intenzione di restare per un altro mandato e in quali cariche. Infine, sono anche in procinto di inviare il Codice di Condotta e la Procedura di Intervento Costruttivo-Correttivo al Board.

    Nuovi Presidenti: Tara Keezer (Sussidi)
    Nuovi Tag Wranglers: julzbullard
    Staff in uscita: Cinco (Sussidi), Natacha Guyot (I&O), Hadrien Asbury (Finanze), Rachel Barenblat (Open Doors), Shannon (Wiki), Tuulia (Wiki)
    Tester in uscita: Cinco

    Read more

  • October 2012 Newsletter, Volume 64

    By Claudia Rebaza on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 - 6:06pm
    Message type:
    Newsletter
    Tags:
    OTW Sections

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

    I. WALKING THE WALK

    This was a big month for our Legal Committee who, along with staffers from Vidding, successfully upheld and expanded the DMCA exemption for vidders! This exemption allows people to obtain high-quality copies of a source (for example by ripping a DVD) for transformative purposes. Our team faced some strong opposition this year from industry, so we’re extra pleased that all their hard work paid off. Thanks to everyone who helped the OTW with this, especially the vidders whose testimony formed a central part of our case. We’d also like to give particular thanks to Rachael Vaughn, who worked closely on this, and to Tisha Turk, Rebecca Tushnet, and Francesca Coppa, who testified.

    Development & Membership would also like to thank everyone who contributed to the October membership drive, which raised more than $18,600.

    II. TALKING THE TALK

    Journal is pushing through the last few manuscripts for the two special issues of early 2013 (comics and boys’ love). Kristina Busse gave a keynote address entitled “Fifty Shades of Fandom: Repetition and Originality in Transformative Fanworks” at the Borders and Beyond: Considering Communities conference, Oct 11-13, 2012, in Gainesville, FL.

    Open Doors has recently compiled feedback from the 852 Prospect import testing and sent it to Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) in preparation for a larger test, and if all goes well, the long-awaited import itself. They will also be working with AD&T on the import of a small German slash archive and be assisting another mod with the manual import of two memorial archives.

    Support has been maintaining a speedy turnaround for tickets. Most tickets now receive an initial response within 48 hours – they answer all tickets, so if you don’t hear back within a week then it’s worth submitting a new ticket just in case something went awry (for example, a couple of times recently Support tried to respond to a ticket and the email has been bounced). Support is also still seeing quite a few reports of invitations or activation emails not arriving. Coders recently did some work to try and improve this problem, but emails from the Archive do sometimes get flagged as spam. If you are expecting an email from the AO3 and it doesn’t arrive, please get in touch with Support!

    All of Tag Wrangling's guidelines are now publicly accessible as AO3 FAQs. Huge thanks to Sam for his hard work on that project! Wranglers have also been assisting in doing testing for the return of the filters.

    Content Policy hopes to release some proposed housekeeping (non-substantive) changes to the archive's Terms of Service and its FAQ shortly and is in the process of soliciting internal comments for that. Meanwhile the Category Change workgroup has issued a call to all users of the AO3 to tell us how you go about finding fanworks and how you use the media categories page.

    III. UPGRADES

    Webmasters are still working on upgrading the content management system used on transformativeworks.org, elections.transformativeworks.org, and opendoors.transformativeworks.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. The sites will be going offline again for further maintenance, which will be announced when dates and times have been determined.

    Accessibility, Design & Technology's major focus has been on their upcoming deploy, which will include the return of the long-awaited tag filters! Everyone has been working hard: coding, testing, revising documentation for the new filters, and generally preparing everything. They have also been really happy to see lots of new coders getting involed; the next thing they want to do is build up the testing team.

    The Wiki Committee is close to finishing the mediawiki upgrade for Fanlore. Their Twitter account was also briefly hacked to send spam messages to people. The committee apologizes for the inconvenience and thanks everyone who alerted them to the problem.

    Systems' James has been doing lots of work on the Archive of our Own, including setting up an alternative test server for use testing specific types of issues. He’s also been taking care of the main Archive servers, tweaking settings to ensure they run smoothly, and liaising with the colocation host to resolve a problem on their end.

    IV. GOVERNANCE

    Board is in its overlap period, when incoming Board members shadow the current Board to learn about their new roles. The new members will take office on November 1. Elections Workgroup is working on the final bits of documentation in preparation to shut down this year and start preparing for next year.

    Finance has been busy preparing quarterly reports - which they’re hoping to release soon - and handling the October drive, as well as buying more new computer bits for the servers. Grants took a hiatus over the summer, but is now contacting other committees to consider projects they want to do (and wish list items) that may be on the back burner for financial reasons. Their first task is working with Journal to finalize a grant proposal.

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

    Volunteers & Recruiting has progressed through their project for revising and documenting Induction & Removal. They’re also gearing up for the annual Still Willing To Serve project, in which current OTW staff indicate if they will be staying on for another term and in which positions. They are also preparing to submit the Code of Conduct and Constructive Corrective Action Procedure to Board.

    New Chairs: Tara Keezer (Grants)
    New Tag Wranglers: julzbullard
    Departing Staffers: Cinco (Grants), Natacha Guyot (I&O), Hadrien Asbury (Grants), Rachel Barenblat (Open Doors), Shannon (Wiki), Tuulia (Wiki)
    Departing Testers: Cinco

    Read more

  • September 2012 Newsletter, Volume 63

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

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

    I. MOVING ON TO YEAR SIX

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

    II. GOVERNANCE

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

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

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

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

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

    III. FANLORE

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

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

    IV. AO3

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

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

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

    V. ON THE TECHNICAL FRONT

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

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

    VI. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

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

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

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

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

    Read more

  • Next candidate chat and transcript

    By Claudia Rebaza on Tuesday, 2 October 2012 - 3:21pm
    Message type:
    Announcement
    Tags:
    Elections, OTW Sections

    Our remaining chats with our new Board members, Andrea Horbinski, Eylul Dogruel and Franzeska Dickson are coming up. The meetings are open to all of our members and to the public. They will be held in the OTW public chatroom.

    Transcript of the previous chat is now available on the elections website. This is unedited except for formatting. We reserve the right to edit, in case fannish and legal identities are accidentally linked, but this is our only reason for editing. Both members and candidates are encouraged to comment on them here.

    The date and times of the remaining chats are:

    Wed 3rd Oct 0500 UTC Franzi & Andrea (What time is that where I live?)
    Sat 6th Oct 1500 UTC Andrea & Eylul (What time is that where I live?)

    The candidates’ personal bios are now available on the OTW Elections website, and their manifestos will be up soon. You may also feel free to contact our candidates unofficially to discuss the OTW and their views. They have asked the OTW to make available the following personal accounts:

    Eylul's Dreamwidth
    Eylul's LinkedIn
    Franzeska's Dreamwidth
    Andrea's Dreamwidth
    Andrea's Twitter

    Franzeska Dickson does back office work in finance. Always a geek, she was introduced to fanfiction by alt.tv.x-files at the tender age of 13 and has been in fanworks fandom ever since, first as a reader, then a writer and beta, and now a vidder. Her favorite venues and events are pan-fandom ones, including her own rare Asian fandoms exchange. She has previously served on the Content, Abuse, Webmasters, and Tag Wrangling Committees as well as filling various other volunteering positions within OTW.

    Eylul Dogruel is an artist and an MFA candidate at Marmara University, Istanbul. She has an eclectic background combining computer sciences and art. Her knowledge and interests cover a range of topics including new media, sci-fi, customer support, web technologies and usability. Eylul is a lifelong fan and has moved through various media and gaming fandoms. She is a fanfic reader, fanart appreciator, an MMO roleplayer and, occasionally, a meta writer. Her current fandoms include Warcraft, Doctor Who and The Longest Journey/Dreamfall.

    Andrea Horbinski is a Ph.D. student in modern Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow to Japan and was a founding member of the OTW's Internationalization & Outreach committee. She joined online fandom in 1999 after writing her middle school graduation speech on her love of Star Wars, and soon became involved in anime and manga fandom as an AMV editor and later a fan translator. She has discussed fandom, anime, manga, and Japanese history and folklore at conventions and conferences including Otakon, Sirens, WisCon, and the Popular Culture Association, and as well as writing for the Symposium blog of the Transformative Works and Cultures journal, she continues to actively produce fan translations, fanfic, and vids.

    Read more

  • Candidate manifestos and chat dates

    By Claudia Rebaza on Friday, 28 September 2012 - 8:33pm
    Message type:
    Event
    Tags:
    Elections, OTW Sections

    We have now scheduled three one-hour chats with our new Board members, Andrea Horbinski, Eylul Dogruel and Franzeska Dickson. The meetings are open to all of our members and to the public. They will be held in the OTW public chatroom, accessible at this link: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/eb4b6

    While we would like to vary the times and days to allow better global accessibility for our membership, combining schedules in order to allow all candidates to attend posed a challenge. Transcripts of the candidate chat will be made available on the elections website shortly following the event, and both members and candidates are encouraged to comment on them. Each chat will be with two of the new Board members, which is actually more realistic for board meetings anyway, now that we're spread more equally around the world.

    The date and times of the chats are:

    Sat 29th Sept 1800 UTC Franzi & Eylul (What time is that where I live?)
    Wed 3rd Oct 0500 UTC Franzi & Andrea (What time is that where I live?)
    Sat 6th Oct 1500 UTC Andrea & Eylul (What time is that where I live?)

    The candidates' personal bios and manifestos will soon be available on the OTW Elections website. You may also feel free to contact our candidates unofficially to discuss the OTW and their views.

    Given that we won't be holding an election, our new board members will begin their overlap period early. They'll be attending the open session of board meetings, discussing issues, and handing over their other staff responsibilities to their successors. They will take formal office and become full voting members on 1st November, so for a short time we will have 10 board members, until Jenny's term ends on 1st December.

    There will be another election next year, when three board members' terms expire (Francesca, Kristen and Ira). Any member of the OTW who has also been an OTW staff member on a committee for a year will be eligible to stand - see the elections site for more details on our policies and the reasons behind them.

    All other information for 2012 or any past election activity can also be found on the OTW Election website.

    Read more

  • Help Us Celebrate Our 5th Birthday!

    By Claudia Rebaza on Sunday, 2 September 2012 - 5:06pm
    Message type:
    Event
    Tags:
    OTW Sections, OTW Graphics

    This week the OTW is reaching a milestone. On September 5, 2012 we'll be celebrating five years as the Organization for Transformative Works, and we're hoping that you'll join us in celebrating our various projects and organization history!

    Starting at 23:00 UTC on September 4, we're going to hold trivia and participation contests across our various OTW News outlets. In order to give you more choice about how, when, and where to participate, these contests will vary by site and will appear across multiple timezones. So if you read this news on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth or the transformativeworks.org website you will be seeing different posts until 23:00 UTC on September 6. (Our Tumblr site will be holding its own celebration during its First Friday event on September 7.)

    As prizes for our contest winners, we will be offering invites to the Archive of Our Own (AO3) on each of our contest sites. So if you know someone who has been wanting one, let them know they should stop by and take part!

    What Will Happen Where

    On LiveJournal and Dreamwidth we will be making three separate posts across different timezones. Each post will contain five trivia questions based on the OTW's various projects. All comments to these posts will be screened. You are welcome to answer any or all three sets of trivia questions but multiple responses from a given username will only be counted as one entry to the contest, regardless of whether you got one or all sets of questions correct. When the contest ends at 23:00 UTC on September 6, we will count how many participants answered any of the three sets of questions correctly. All participants with correct entries will then win an invite sent to the email address of their choice.

    On Twitter, Facebook, and transformativeworks.org we will be making five posts across different timezones. Each post will contain either a blurb about the OTW for retweeting, sharing or reblogging, or a small writing or image challenge related to the OTW. Anyone who links us to their responses to all five posts will win an invite sent to the email address of their choice.

    Winners will be notified by our response to their winning comment. The notification process should be complete by September 8, and all winners will have to provide us with an email address for their invitation. (They can designate a friend to receive the invite if they wish.)

    If you have questions let us know in comments or through our contact form.

    Also, if you would like to help us share our celebration, we have some nifty icons created by our Communications volunteer, Rachel. Thank you to everyone who has supported the OTW in these past five years.

    ,

    These celebration contests are void where prohibited

    Read more

  • August 2012 Newsletter, Volume 62

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

    I. BEHIND THE SCENES

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

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

    II. A MONTH OF UPGRADES

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

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

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

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

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

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

    III. PAPERWORK

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

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

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

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

    IV. UPDATES

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

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

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

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

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

    V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

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

    New Committee Chair: Sherry Nehmer for Abuse

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

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

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

    Read more

Pages

Subscribe to OTW Sections