• Attention Fanlore Contributors (and Future Contributors)!

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 6 May, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Fanlore, Wiki Committee, Resources for Fans

    The Wiki committee of the OTW is pleased to announce the formation of a Fanlore community on Dreamwidth. We needed a place for people interested in the Fanlore wiki to congregate, talk about pages (cool ones, ones with issues and concerns, plus general "how do I..." type stuff), and just keep in touch with what is happening on the site. We've been looking at various options for a place to gather, and Dreamwidth's open ID option makes it attractive; you don't have to be a member, but can comment using a free open ID account. (Note: if you do want to be a member of Dreamwidth, some folks in the community have been donating invite codes.) The community is also syndicated on LJ, so you can also keep in touch with what's going on here.

  • Extra! Your Political Speech is now a "Viacom Property"

    By .fcoppa on Sunday, 3 May, 2009
    Tags: Activism, Intellectual Property, Takedowns, Legal Advocacy, Discussion

    Earlier this week, fan artist Glockgal discovered that all but one of the designs at her Zazzle store had been removed "because they "contained content in violation of Viacom's intellectual property rights." But the shirts contained not only original graphic designs, but political speech, protesting the casting of Asian or Inuit characters in the film of Avatar: The Last Airbender by white actors.

  • Writercon 2009 - A Q & A with TWC's Kristina Busse

    By .fcoppa on Sunday, 3 May, 2009
    Tags: Fan Conventions, Transformative Works and Cultures, Event, Fanfiction , OTW Sightings

    Kristina Busse, co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet and one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures, was interviewed in a Q & A for the upcoming Writercon 2009, a con dedicated to fannish and original writing. Kristina is going to be one of three special guests at the con, which takes place July 31 through August 2, 2009 in Minneapolis. For more information about Writercon 2009, check out their website or their LiveJournal community. Writercon describes itself as a con "about the writing and the shared love, not shipper politics or the plots of the shows, except as related to the fic.

  • OTW Annual Report, 2008

    By .fcoppa on Saturday, 2 May, 2009
    Tags: OTW Board, Report, OTW Sections

    The Board of the OTW is pleased to announce the release of our 2008 Annual Report, which went live on our Reports page yesterday. The 2008 Annual Report is available both as a downloadable .pdf and as .html. A big thank you to all our staffers, volunteers, and members for another successful year!

  • April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 28

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 29 April, 2009
    Tags: Newsletter

    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:

  • A Post-Membership Drive Update from our Development and Membership Team

    By .fcoppa on Tuesday, 28 April, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Development & Membership Committee, Financial Support

    Hello all!

    We're writing with an update on our March membership drive, at long last. It was a fabulous drive! We raised $11,142 from 396 donations: 222 members renewed their memberships, 167 new folks joined the organization as members, and the other donations were "just donations" which don't confer membership (voting rights.)

    The vast majority of our members are in the United States, with the United Kingdom coming in second. We also have a fair number of members in Canada, Germany, and Australia. Other countries represented on our membership rolls include Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Timor-Leste, plus we have a handful of donors whose location is "unspecified." Wow!

  • Geocities Closing

    By .fcoppa on Friday, 24 April, 2009
    Tags: Fannish Endings, Announcement, Open Doors

    Like many fans, we are concerned about the news that GeoCities is going to close at the end of the year, especially as many older sites and fanfiction archives are housed there. As the chair of Open Doors, which is dedicated to protecting at-risk fannish projects, I can assure you that we will work out some sort of gameplan; in the interim, if you have an archive or webpage there, or if you can put us in contact with any archivists located there, please contact Open Doors through the Open Doors contact page.

  • Retiring Our Amazon Widget

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 15 April, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Financial Support

    The OTW is retiring our Amazon widget; we ask you to please disable your "I heart OTW" Firefox extension if you installed it. Amazon no longer supports widgets or other Amazon Associate / nonprofit fundraising devices that don't have banners or ads attached, and the OTW prefers not to have any corporate advertising on its site. We will not be receiving any donations from the use of this widget: however, please feel free to donate to us early and often through the usual channels.

  • April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 27

    By .fcoppa on Sunday, 12 April, 2009
    Tags: Newsletter

    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.

  • TWC Guest Editor Catherine Tosenberger talks about Supernatural

    By .fcoppa on Monday, 6 April, 2009
    Tags: Transformative Works and Cultures, Media Mentions, Television, OTW Sightings

    Catherine Tosenberger, Guest Editor of a upcoming special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) on Supernatural, was interviewed by Suzette Chan for Sequential Tart, a feminist webzine about the comics industry. Read the interview to find out more about TWC, the OTW, and the epic love story of Sam and Dean.

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