Today, we're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Support staff - (deadline: 30 September 2013)

We also have one role still open for additional technical staff

• Web Developer Staff

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist volunteers -(at)- transformativeworks -(dot)- org in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Support Staff
The Support Committee handles communication between users and the various teams involved with the Archive of Our Own. We receive questions and ideas about all aspects of the Archive from users. The Support team helps to answer questions about using the Archive, diagnosing issues, documenting bugs for the coders to address, getting the most out of features like skins or challenges, passing on questions about tags to the wranglers, documenting requests for new or improved features, or getting answers about general policy.
Applications are due 30 September

Web Developer Staff: Web Developers are responsible for improvements to and maintenance of the primary web properties owned by the Organization for Transformative Works. S/he will participate in an on-call rotation of three Web Developers, implement new website features, and help determine priorities for future development efforts. Applications will be accepted until the role is filled.

We would like to thank everyone who responded to our previous call for Communications Graphics Volunteers and Tag Wrangling Volunteers.

Today, we're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Web Developer Staff - applications accepted until August 19
• Open Doors Staff - applications accepted until August 19

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

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist volunteers -(at)- transformativeworks -(dot)- org in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.
If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Web Developer Staff: Web Developers are responsible for improvements to and maintenance of the primary web properties owned by the Organization for Transformative Works. S/he will participate in an on-call rotation of three Web Developers, implement new website features, and help determine priorities for future development efforts. Applications are due August 19.

Open Doors Staff: Are you interested in helping other fans save their works be they in fanzines, vids, stories, meta, artwork? Enjoy coordinating projects and people to make things happen? Open Doors is looking for staffers to do this important work.

Open Doors is a dedicated committee of the OTW that is all about preserving fanworks in their many native formats with the goal of providing access to future generations of fans as well as the wider world via the internet and several library collections. This work furthers the OTW's goal to preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures.

How would you do this? The Open Doors staffer is often the contact between the fan with works to preserve, the OTW, and the final home for those works. There is the quiet joy of knowing we've added more linear feet of zines from the 1960s through today to a permanent collection at a university library open to anyone. There is watching the number of works in an freshly created Open Doors Digital Collection climb as we manually import stories from archives that run on old, sometimes broken code. There is knowing that history, like that contained in the Foresmutters project that has discussions that helped form some of the earliest fannish cultures is held on our servers.

We're not the loudest or shiniest committee at the OTW, but without the work we do, we would lose our history: our delicate archives that represent hours of work, the fanzines and other physical objects and more. If you're interested, click on through for a fuller description of what we're looking for and the time commitment. Applications are due August 19.

We would like to thank everyone who responded to our previous call for Support Staff. The chairs are reviewing applications and should be contacting people within the next two weeks.

Today, we're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Testing Volunteer - Closes May 27th
• Web Developer Staff - Closes May 27th

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

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist volunteers (at) transformativeworks.org in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

Note: We are continuing to work on a set of Volunteering Frequently Asked Questions that we hope to have posted within the next few weeks. If you have any questions about volunteering for the OTW, please let us know.

Testing Volunteer
The Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee (AD&T) is the guiding body that coordinates software design and development on behalf of the Organization for Transformative Works. AD&T is committed to developing high quality, accessible products that support the goals of the OTW while providing opportunities for professional and personal growth for its members. The main project concerning AD&T right now is the Archive of Our Own.

Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) is a subcommittee of AD&T responsible for testing bug fixes and new features before they go live, overseeing release and issue management tasks, and maintaining relevant documentation.

We are currently looking for motivated testers to join our team of volunteers and help us test new code before deploys. More information is available at the Testing Volunteer application. Applications are due May 27th.

Web Developer Staff
Do you have experience with Drupal and website management? Join our team of Web Developers! Web Developers are responsible for improvements to and maintenance of the primary OTW web properties. You will participate in an on-call rotation with other Web Developers, design and implement new features and fixes for the websites, and help to determine priorities for future web development efforts. More information is available at the Web Developer application. Applications are due May 27th.

OTW elections have always been a bit complicated given the challenges of both preserving voter privacy and ensuring that elections are fair with an entirely virtual organization. We've implemented procedures surrounding our election technology to assure that the results of the vote are verifiable, that there are multiple corroborating sources to disallow any possibility of tampering, and that we have created an audit trail. A lot of that work falls on the Webmasters Committee so, to better explain what goes into election planning, we thought we'd give voters a look at the work that this group does to ensure a successful election process.

The OTW Webmasters are quite busy in the weeks leading up to the election -- they apply updates, double-check software, and conduct rigorous tests of both the ballot and the ballot tallying. Then two weeks out before the election, the Elections site is locked down. All existing site accounts (including those belonging to all other staff) are deleted, leaving only two. Those two Web staffers then create the ballot according to the Elections Officer's instructions.

In the following week, the OTW Development & Membership committee delivers a list of eligible voters' email addresses to the Elections Officer. That list gets divided in half and each half is deposited into the elections Web staffers' vault spaces, a secure storage account maintained by the OTW and visible only to the individual account holder. Those two Web staffers begin to create the voting accounts using random.org to generate an 8-digit random number to use as an account name, which they pair with a voter email address. No list is created of these accounts, and no record of which number goes with which email is easy to generate. It's not impossible, just too much trouble for someone to do accidentally. All of these accounts are created as inactive, which becomes important in the next step.

One week prior to the voting period all of our voters get their informational email, which includes the account information created by those Web staffers, and a link that will lead to the ballot once it goes live. A basic outline of how the process will work is written by the Elections Officer, and the elections Web staffers enter that text as an automatic website message that is triggered when the accounts are activated.

The final week before the elections is when we follow-up on any emails that went astray and correct them before voting day. Email spam filters are a frequent culprit. The elections Web staffers also make any necessary edits or additions to the Elections site, since they are the only ones with access — such as elections-related news posts.

On the day the election opens, the elections Web staffers change the automatic account activation message to new text that announces that the ballot is open and contains all necessary voting information. Then, just before the ballot becomes active (it's on an automatic timer), they trigger the email message to all voters by deactivating all voter accounts and then reactivating them.

The elections Web staffers split the 48-hour voting period into eight-hour shifts, each taking three. Each shift means that the person "on call" is ready to troubleshoot any account access problems the Elections Officer contacts them about, and they also help to create an audit trail. At the end of each shift, the elections Web staffer on duty takes a screenshot of all ballot results as of that moment, zips the resulting images, and drops them into the Election Officer's vault space. All results are capped each time, meaning that any changes to existing votes would be apparent in the case of examination. Both elections Web staffers are on duty for the final few hours, and both make separate screenshot packages and deposit them in the vault.

Once the ballot has closed, the Elections Officer communicates the results to the candidates and to the voters and posts them publicly. If any candidate chooses to question the result, the screenshots made throughout the process in the web administrative interface would be examined and recounted, as well as potentially corroborated with information from the Systems committee.