• Fanlore Chat Now Open!

    By .fcoppa on Saturday, 4 April, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Fanlore, Fan Conventions, Wiki Committee, OTW Sightings

    The Wiki committee is pleased to announce the opening of a permanent chat room for the Fanlore community. You don't need to be a member of OTW to get into the room. It's open to everyone and can be accessed from the Main Page of Fanlore. Best of all, it's open 24 X 7, so it's always there for you to come in and chat about edits and articles with other fans at any time, day or night.

    FYI -- There will be a log of the chats kept, but it will be purged on a periodic basis.

  • OTW board chair Naomi Novik on NPR

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 25 March, 2009
    Tags: DMCA, Announcement, Intellectual Property, Books, Fannish Practices, OTW Sightings

    March 25, 2009 - Our own Naomi Novik appears on today's broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered, in a a story called Will E-Book Anti-Piracy Technology Hurt Readers? The aired program, as well as a shorter print version, is now available at the NPR website. Naomi is speaking against the DRM [Digital Rights Management] protection on e-books that mean that they can't easily be transferred from Kindle to Laptop to iPhone. Naomi notes that: "The biggest danger to most authors, to most storytellers, is not that somebody is going to steal your work and pass it along — it is that nobody is ever going to see your work."

  • Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

    By .fcoppa on Tuesday, 24 March, 2009
    Tags: Open Source , Event, Women in Technology

    Please join the OTW in celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

  • Thanks To Everyone!

    By .fcoppa on Thursday, 19 March, 2009
    Tags: Spotlight

    Thanks to everyone who participated in the OTW's recent membership drive: by posting about the drive or about the org, by sharing one of our awesome lolcats, and most especially by donating. It will take a few days for the last promised donations to clear, and then your humble DevMem team will take a few days off to decompress, but we hope to post soon with some nifty statistics and graphics so that you can share our glee.

  • Last Day of the March Membership Drive!

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 18 March, 2009
    Tags: Announcement

    OK, the truth is: you can actually sign up for membership (and donate) to the OTW all year round. But like public television and radio, OTW holds membership drives at fixed times during the year so that we're not constantly pestering you for money. Tomorrow is the last day of our March membership drive; after that, this site will be a free fannish space until October. So here's our last plea for cash!

    If you're not a member of OTW, please become a member! If you're already a member, renew your membership! Non-profit spaces like the OTW are one of the ways we fans can push back against the increasing commercialization of the internet and fight the attempted commercialization of our communities. Ten bucks is enough to get you a year of membership and voting rights in our organization.

  • Job Search: Fanlore Graphics

    By Please leave a name on Tuesday, 17 March, 2009
    Tags: Volunteering

    Job: Fanlore Graphics

    Description: Fanlore is looking for someone to design some small buttons suitable for sidebar display, in 100x100, 64x64, and 128x128 sizes, as well as various "badges." (Badges are about 210 px wide, and vary in height, but are generally rectangular.)

    You can see the Fanlore wiki here. You are not tied to our color scheme, but we do want all the graphics to have a unified look, and be easily recognizable as part of Fanlore.

    How to Volunteer: Email your designs to wiki@transformativeworks.org. Please submit one square and one rectangular sample of your proposed design.

  • Special TWC issue "Games as Transformative Works" released!

    By .fcoppa on Sunday, 15 March, 2009
    Tags: Announcement, Gaming, Transformative Works and Cultures, Roleplaying, Journal Committee

    The second issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) has just been released! The March 15, 2009, special issue, entitled "Games as Transformative Works," is edited by Rebecca Carlson and combines TWC's general interest in fan works and fan cultures with a focus on games. Anthropology is the issue's dominant disciplinary approach, but literary and cultural studies also frame the discussion. Although several essays address the role of production, the voices of the fans and the gamers themselves remain ever important.

  • March 2009 Newsletter, Vol 26

    By .fcoppa on Friday, 13 March, 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:

    The Abuse Committee has hit the ground running, and we've begun creating a tracking system that adheres to OTW confidentiality requirements. Over the next few months, we'll be working to develop a set of Abuse policies and procedures that will balance transparency and confidentiality.

    ADT/Archive:

    AD&T spent most of the last two weeks on our recent deploy of new code to the Archive of Our Own. We're now on revision 1110!

  • Second Annual Membership Drive

    By .fcoppa on Wednesday, 11 March, 2009
    Tags: Announcement

    Dear Friends,

    Welcome to the OTW's second annual membership drive, which begins today!

    In March of 2008, we officially opened the doors for membership in the OTW. If you joined the organization last year, we hope you'll renew your membership this week! And if you haven't yet joined, we hope you'll take this opportunity to do so, and/or to make a donation to help support the OTW.

  • Scans_Daily TOSed off Livejournal: If Only Someone Owned The Goddamned Servers

    By .fcoppa on Tuesday, 3 March, 2009
    Tags: LiveJournal, Takedowns, Discussion

    We are saddened by the fact that yet another female fannish community has been disrupted by being TOSed off a commercial social networking site. In its original conception and use, scans_daily was about highlighting and discussing the slashy and other elements in mainstream comics most interesting to female fans, who are often a voice shut out of discussion of comics elsewhere. The community frequently hosted important review and interpretation of mainstream media, even if it did use excerpts of copyrighted work. To destroy this kind of discussion in the name of preventing piracy is exactly the kind of act that ISPs and social networking services like Livejournal protest when, for instance, copyright holders demand that they be shut down because some fraction of their users are using their infrastructure to share pirated content.

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