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As we recently announced, the much-loved Sentinel Adult Fiction Archive, 852 Prospect, is moving in with the AO3! You can find details about the move in our announcement post; however, if you have more questions about the move, or if you're just curious about Open Doors, you can join our Open Doors team for an open house this week.

The open house will take place on May 25, 2012 at 01:00:00 UTC (see when this is in your timezone) in our Public Discussion chatroom. It will last approximately one hour. You can access the chat at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/eb4b6 - just click the link to drop by. Everyone welcome!

Welcome to our Events Calendar roundup! The Events Calendar can be found on the OTW website and is open to submissions by anyone with news of an event. These can be viewed by event-type, such as Academic Events, Fan Gatherings, Legal Events, OTW Events, or Technology Events taking place around the world.

• Jedi and Sith are likely to unite for Star Wars Day on the 4th of May. The date for this annual fandom celebration of the franchise is in part due to a pun on the date itself. Whether you're planning on hosting a marathon of the entire film series, immersing yourself in any of the 100+ video games, or picking up one of the several Expanded Universe novels, let us be the first to say "May the Fourth be with you."
• Comic book collectors and fans should mark their calendars for Free Comic Book Day on May 5. During Free Comic Book Day, held annually on the first Saturday in May, participating comic book shops around the world offer free comics to anyone who stops into their stores. Check the Store Locator to see if your local shop is participating and check with your shop's staff regarding any specific rules and guidelines.
• Geek Pride Day on May 25 is a celebration of nerd and geek culture that spans across several fandoms. The day commemorates the original release of Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977, Towel Day for fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Glorious 25 May for members of the Discworld fandom.

The OTW encourages anyone to submit an event that's not already listed, and to check out the calendar throughout the year!

It's party time! This April, we've been catching up on some fannish history with our April Showers promotion! For the month of April, we're highlighting fandoms past and present which are underrepresented on the Archive of Our Own and Fanlore - preserve your fannish history by uploading your old fanworks to the AO3 and documenting key fannish tropes and events on Fanlore.

We'd like to celebrate some more. So, it's party time!

AO3 importing party!

Saturday 14 April, 17:00 UTC to Saturday 15 April, 2:00 UTC (see the time in your timezone)

Got any works on other sites that you've been meaning to import or copy over to the AO3? Have questions about how to format or tag any of your works? Feel like cheering other people on as they do some posting? Join the AO3 staff in the OTW Public Discussion chatroom (click the link to access) to ask questions about posting, reminisce about old fandoms, and celebrate as more works are added to the AO3. We'll have a few invitations to share with people who don't yet have AO3 accounts, and we welcome everyone!

Fanlore editing party!

Saturday 14 April, 20:00 UTC (see the time in your timezone)

Keen to add your fannish memories to Fanlore but not sure where to start? Need your hand holding as you make your first wiki edits? Or keen to share your skillz as an experienced Fanlore editor? Join Fanlore staff in the Fanlore chatroom for an editing party! You'll be able to get help making your first forays into editing Fanlore, toss around ideas for new pages, and ask questions. Everyone welcome!

Get wet in the April showers!

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

Welcome to our first monthly Events Calendar roundup! The Events Calendar can be found on the OTW website and is open to submissions by anyone with news of an event. These can be viewed by event-type, such as Academic Events, Fan Gatherings, Legal Events, OTW Events, or Technology Events taking place around the world.

• Currently for April, we have the Fanwork Programming Development for Dragon*Con in the U.S. Dragon*Con is the largest multimedia, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film. There is an initiative underway to create programming devoted to fic, vids, podfic, zines, and fanart at Dragon*Con. The OTW is seeking OTW-related fans who might be interested in participating or in being a panelist. This year, Dragon*Con will be held Labor Day weekend (August 31 - September 3, 2012) in Atlanta, GA. Anyone interested can comment at an organizational community on Dreamwidth.
• In addition, April brings Yuri's Night: The World Space Party on April 12, celebrating, commemorating, and driving interest in the exploration of outer space.
• A more snarky holiday comes around on April 23, Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, which began in 2007. The holiday encourages the posting of fiction online for free to promote online and digital publishing. It takes place on the same day as World Book and Copyright Day, created by UNESCO in 1995 to champion reading, publishing and copyright.
• On the homefront, the Archive of Our Own and Fanlore have launched the April Showers promotion to encourage fans to upload their fanworks to the AO3, and fannish stories and information to Fanlore, particularly if the content is for underrepresented fandoms. Also of general importance, the OTW will begin its annual membership drive, which will be held from April 18-25. Expect to hear more about that in coming weeks!

The OTW encourages anyone to submit an event that's not already listed, and to check out the calendar throughout the year!

Here at the OTW, preserving fannish history is a central part of our mission! We're proud to be able to offer fans a place to host their works on the Archive of Our Own, and tell their own fannish histories on Fanlore. As of March 4, 2012, Fanlore has 18,481 articles which have undergone 351,020 edits by 6,151 registered users, while the Archive of Our Own recently passed 40,000 users, and more than 332,300 works have been posted on the AO3, across over 8,800 fandoms!

We're really pleased and proud to see so much fannish representation. However, we know that there are many, many wonderful fanworks out in the world which haven't found their way to the AO3 - for example Portal and the Alien movies have only 85 fanworks apiece on the AO3! There are even more fannish stories left untold on Fanlore - we'd love to see the fannish activity over The Hunger Games documented as it unfolds! Last year, we welcomed in lots more edits to Fanlore and works to the AO3 with our April Showers promotion. This year, we're hoping to do the same! This month, bring us fannish April showers by digging out those old zines, memories of past cons, archived personal webpages, tales of shipwars and fannish events, works on slowly-decaying archives, and more! Upload your old works to the AO3 and tell your tales on Fanlore.

Voting is now open in the 2011 OTW Board elections!

Voting will remain active for a full 48 hours, so you have until 12:00 UTC 18 November to cast your ballot. (What time is that where I am?)

To see the ballot and vote, you must be logged in using your voter account — that's a separate account from any other OTW-related accounts you might have, with a username consisting of randomly-generated numbers to make sure your vote is anonymous and secure. Your voter account username and instructions for how to set your password and log in are contained in your voter emails, so check your inboxes!

You can log in with your voter account here — please note that only a voter account will work there, so be sure you're using the username (string of numbers) from your voter email! If you have not received a voter email and you believe you are eligible to vote through a donation between 1 Oct 2010 and 17 Oct 2011, please contact contact the OTW Elections Officer.

Once you're logged in, the ballot can be found here, and you can read about our candidates here. Questions? Contact the Elections Officer.

You can read more about the elections process on the OTW Elections Website. A vote cannot be canceled or re-cast, so we encourage you to think carefully about your votes!

Additional text added at 15:31 UTC 16 November 2011 is bolded.

You can log in with your voter account here. Once you're logged in, the ballot can be found here, and you can read about our candidates here. Questions? Contact the OTW Elections Officer.

Our second OTW Board candidate chat is set to begin about an hour from now (find out what time that is in your location), and will be held in the OTW Public Discussion chat room, accessible at this link: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc. We're gratified by the active interest OTW members are taking in this election, and we're preparing for the chat to be a popular event. As we have so many awesome candidates and so many excellent questions, it’s going to be a challenge keeping this chat organized! Ira Gladkova, our OTW Elections officer and today's chat host, is sharing some details of how she will make this work smoothly for all.

We already have a queue of a over dozen emailed questions and expect to get a few more (Ira comments: You folks are AMAZING and it is so awesome to have this much participation!), and we also believe it's important to have time for live questions; this means that we know already that we will not get through all the questions during the live chat period. To address this conflict, we will alternate between live and email questions for as long as possible. If you are unable to attend, or would like to help us reduce "noise" in the chat room, please submit it using the OTW Elections contact form - that goes straight to Ira. The cutoff time for submitting questions is the end of the chat, at 9pm UTC/2100 UTC. Ira will announce within the chat when we are wrapping up, and remind people to submit any remaining questions they have.

All unanswered questions will be bundled together in groups of about 4, and Ira will send out a group of questions every 24 hours after the chat until we've run through them all. As before, the answers will be collected and posted along with the transcript. We’ll preview the first batch of questions at the end of the chat so the candidates will all see them at the same time.

For everyone attending who has a question to ask, we have a request! Please just say (I have a question!) in the chat at any time; Ira will keep a list and will call on you, so we can give the questions to the candidates one at a time.

And last but not least: As the chat happens, we will be posting a rough screenshot here, updated every 5-10 minutes. We hope that if we have any attendees who have trouble accessing the chatroom, this will give them the option of keeping up with what is being said, and allow them to submit questions via our contact form no matter what. That image will be linked here: click to view screencap (this will be updated on the original post on transformativeworks.org only), and an accessible text transcript will be posted within an hour following the close of the chat, along with the final screenshot.

More details about out elections candidates, as well as links to the initial chat transcript, can be found here, on the OTW Elections site.

Have you ever wondered about what it is tag wranglers do? Are you thinking about volunteering as a wrangler? Do you have a question about tags on the Archive of Our Own? Is your fandom in need of some temporary assistance? The Tag Wrangling Committee is hosting an open house! This is a drop-in session where you can ask us what's on your mind, or just have a chat about tags. We'll also have some AO3 invites to give away.

All are welcome! The chat will be held on Saturday, 15 October at 22:00 UTC (what time is that where I live?) in OTW's public chatroom on Campfire. The chatroom can be accessed at: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc

The Tag Wrangling Committee maintains and administers the curated folksonomy system within the Archive of Our Own, assuring accessibility, diversity of fannish expression, descriptive practices, and a high level of user ease.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day from everyone at the Organization for Transformative Works!

Celebrating women in technology is a subject close to our hearts: when the OTW came into existence in 2007, one of our major motivations was the desire to give fans control of the tools and infrastructure which support fannish creativity. The predominately female fannish communities from which the OTW emerged have a long history of mastering new skills and sharing expertise for fannish pursuits — the vidders of the 1970s were pioneering mashup techniques decades before they became trendy! — and we want to extend that skill-sharing to the creation of a fan-owned home that welcomes all fans.

The vast majority of OTW volunteers identify as female, and the amazing things our teams have achieved demonstrate that they all deserve to be considered tech heroines! Below, we highlight the work of our tech-focused teams and the individual voices of some of our staff and volunteers.

We have now scheduled two one-hour chats with the candidates, 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/e79cc

While we strove to vary the times and days to allow better global accessibility for our membership, combining six schedules in order to allow all candidates to attend posed a challenge. If you believe you may be unable to attend but have questions for the candidates, we encourage you to submit them via our contact form to our elections officer, Ira Gladkova, who will present them on your behalf. Transcripts of elections chats will be made available as both text and as screenshots on the elections website shortly following each event.

The dates and times of the chats are as follows:

• 17 October 2011 from 7pm to 8pm UTC (What time is that where I live?)
• 26 October 2011 from 8pm to 9pm UTC (What time is that where I live?)

The candidates' personal statements will be available on the OTW Elections website beginning 17 October 2011. You may in the meantime 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 journal accounts:

• Jenny Scott-Thompson at Dreamwidth; at LiveJournal
• Nikisha Sanders at Dreamwidth
• Betsy Rosenblatt at Dreamwidth
• Lucy Pearson at Dreamwidth; at LiveJournal
• Naomi Novik at LiveJournal
• Julia Beck at Dreamwidth

Links are behind text to reduce random googleability and to keep fannish and legal identities separate. We ask that you please do not associate those identities publicly.

Election voting will run from noon UTC on 16 November (What time is that where I live?) to noon UTC on 18 November (What time is that where I live?). Voting is restricted to current OTW members; this includes anyone who has made a donation of US$10 or more between 1 October 2010 and 17 October 2011. To renew your membership, visit http://transformativeworks.org/how-you-can-help/support.

Further information can be found on the OTW Election website.