From the OTW Content Policy committee:

Here are the draft Terms of Service for the Archive of Our Own, as well as some FAQs we've developed in internal discussion and with the assistance of valiant focus group members.

Some things to note:

1. All together, this is pretty long. We've split it up into two posts and hope that makes it easier to read. Readability feedback is appreciated.

2. This is a draft. We're posting it to get as much input as possible. Very little is set in stone, and many links have been left inactive pending decisions about the organization and layout of the Archive.

3. If there's something you don't understand, please ask. We will try to clarify, and possibly add to the FAQ.

4. If there's something you don't like, it would be really helpful if you'd suggest alternatives.

5. Members of the Content Policy committee will be available to answer questions. Please remember that anonymous comments must be signed in order to receive a response.

( Terms of Service: Sections I-III )

( Terms of Service FAQ (1-7) )

Note: The second half of the Terms of Service draft may be found here. Please feel free to leave feedback either here on LJ or via email (content@transformativeworks.org).

Note: The first part of the Terms of Service draft, including introductory statements, may be found here. Please feel free to leave feedback either here on LJ or via email (content@transformativeworks.org).

( Terms of Service: Section IV )

( Terms of Service FAQ (8-46) )

( Tags and Warnings )

Welcome to the second July issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

( Committee Updates! )

Job: Volunteer XHTML/CSS Coder

Works With: Naomi Novik -- Accessibility, Design, & Technology.

Description: Do you know HTML and CSS, either really well or want to learn more? Do you like building websites? The OTW is looking for more front end coders! Come and work with our irresistibly enthusiastic team as we bring the Archive of Our Own to life! You'll learn how to create accessible sites compliant with the latest Web standards and best practices, how to use the incredibly cool Scriptaculous Javascript tools and embedded Ruby in your webpages, and how to work with web application coders.

Skills Required: HTML and CSS knowledge and a deep-seated urge to write clean and readable web code. General comfort with software tools and picking up new things from tutorials.

Experience with accessibility and Web standards, and any experience with XHTML, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, or Perl is all a plus. No visual design skills or graphics tools necessary (though they certainly don't hurt), as our front end layout is being created by our user interface designers, so the job will primarily be to implement a design, given pictures of what it should look like.

Estimated Time Involved: 5 hours/week on average.Because of the investment in setup and training time, we ask that you be
willing to give us a year if at all possible!

Other Information: Ideally you will be working with the same setup as the Volunteer Ruby Coders, in which case there will be a steep setup process just to get all the software tools installed on your system and working. However, unlike with the Ruby on Rails coders, this is not as critical, because if this setup isn't feasible for you, you can just create static html and CSS files and hand them over to the Ruby on Rails coders to be integrated into the application. Although that way you don't get the really great fun of seeing your webpages live and working with the database code instantaneously as you write them. *g*

How to Volunteer: Send an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org or post a comment here. All comments on this post are screened in order to protect the privacy of volunteers providing personal information.

Please include the following information:

Your name (you may provide your real name--please consider what you feel comfortable using inside and outside the organization):

Your email address:

Relevant experience and credentials (fannish and/or real life):

Computer system (hardware -- CPU, RAM, disk space -- and operating system
with version):

Amount of time per week you can contribute:

Length of commitment you can make:

(Optional) What you are particularly interested in working on (if you have a preference):

Your time zone*:

Please put "XHTML/CSS Coder" in the subject line of your email or LJ comment!

Deadline for Application: Ongoing

*For chat scheduling purposes, so the committee can schedule online meetings at a time that's convenient for everyone. You can find your time zone here. Example: GMT -05:00

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by commenting on this post (all comments are screened) or sending an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org

Welcome to the first July issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

( Committee Updates! )

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

–femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Job: Swag Researcher

Works with: Development/Membership

Description: We’re planning to offer some spiffy limited-edition OTW swag during our fall donations drive, and we need YOU to help us research various details: what we should make, how we should make it, what it will cost, how we can ship it to OTW members worldwide.

Estimated time involved: This begins as a short-term job: a few hours per week over July and August. If you find that you love working with DevMem and you’re interested in continuing to help us live up to our swag-selling potential, the job could turn longer-term.

Other information: DevMem meets weekly via chat; it would be great if you could join us briefly at our meetings to talk about this!

How to volunteer: Send an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org or post a comment here. All
comments on this post are screened in order to protect the privacy of volunteers providing personal information.

Please include the following information:

Your name:

Your email address:

Any product creation experience, fannish or real-life (getting t-shirts made for your company or for a con; printing bumper stickers for some awesome cause; distributing coffee mugs to a worldwide network of ninjas; etc)

Please put “Swag Researcher” in the subject line of your email or LJ comment. Please do not include attachments or embedded links.

Send us your information by: 11:59PM GMT on Monday, July 14th, 2008 Closed

All volunteers will receive an email confirming their information has been received. If you do not receive an email by 11:59PM GMT on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008, please contact us.

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by commenting on this post (all comments are screened) or sending an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org

The Wiki Committee is posting to otw_news for a couple of exciting reasons:

Firstly, we've got around to properly naming this project! The OTW wiki will be known as Fanlore. Our future url will be fanlore.org, and we fully expect to be casually referred to as “the Fanlore wiki” or “Fanlore”. We're extremely happy with our name; it embodies some of the foundations of the policies we've been working on for the wiki over the past 6 months.

Speaking of policy: our second piece of news. We'd like to invite volunteers to help us beta test the Fanlore wiki policies by working with them first hand; helping us not only with the initial population of Fanlore prior to soft launch, but also to hone the admin side of things and shape the wiki's interface.

The job listing itself can be found on otw_news here. Follow the link to get more information about what this position involves and what we'd need from you, should you be interested. We're looking forward to working with you!

- The Wikimittee

Job: Wiki Beta & Population

Works With: Wiki Committee

Description: The Wiki Committee is seeking volunteers to help with the exciting new Fanlore wiki! We need your help both to look over and beta-read our policies and guidelines, and to make sure they work in practice. We’re planning for Fanlore to hit the ground running when it soft launches, which means we’d like to fill it up with some tasty material before going live.

During this stage, you’ll be working closely with the Wiki Committee – helping us to polish up the policies, providing your feedback, helping the technical folks on the committee to build in features that will enable and support future contributors and readers alike to best make use of Fanlore.

You don’t need to have prior experience with wikis – after all, a variety of experiences in testers with result in better feedback! All you need is to be willing to learn, both by exploring on your own and by engaging in any training or instructions provided. We’re after folks who:

• Are excited to strenuously explore the Fanlore wiki and its policies
  
  
• Will give feedback on the way the policies, guidelines, structure and technology do or do not work for them
  
  
• Can participate in group discussion (via a chat room format) of their experiences and opinions
  
  
• Have time for this over the next couple months and are reliable about responding to email requests.

Estimated Time Involved: At least 5 hours per week for 1 month.

Other Information: If you’re interested, there will be opportunities to stay on the Fanlore wiki in an ongoing role, which will probably require approx 3 hours per week, depending on what you sign on for. Note that there will be more variety in the roles available in the future: you may wish to focus on outreach, on gardening, or only on adding more material from your own fannish community. If you’re interested in an ongoing involvement beyond the initial beta-testing, feel free to drop volunteers an email at any time. Otherwise, information about the different roles and positions available will come out as we get closer to the launch date.

How to Volunteer: Send an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org or post a comment here. All comments on this post are screened in order to protect the privacy of volunteers providing personal information.

Please include the following information:

Your name (you may provide your real name or your fannish name--please consider what you feel comfortable using both inside and outside the organization):

Your email address:

Any prior experience working with fannish histories or wikis (of any topic)?

Any particular area of working on a wiki that you’re more interested in (be it technical, policy, content, or particular content)?

Please put "Wiki Volunteer" in the subject line of your email or LJ comment. Please do not include attachments or embedded links.

Send us your information by: 11:59PM GMT on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 CLOSED

All volunteers will receive an email confirming their information has been received. If you do not receive an email by 11:59PM GMT on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008, please contact us.

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by commenting on this post (all comments are screened) or sending an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org

Transformative Works and Cultures, the online academic journal associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, is looking for your meta.

The Symposium section of the journal is a section of concise, thematically contained essays. These short pieces provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures. These essays will not go through academic peer review but will be reviewed by the editorial team. We're looking for 1500 to 2500-word essays on any aspect of fandom, transformative works, online culture.Images, music and video can be included.

Symposium pieces will be more polished than a meta post, less detailed than an academic paper: we're imagining them as an archive of fannish and academic meta debates of issues relating to fan cultures, saved for posterity. We hope to continue and expand the work of Lucy Cereta's Fanfic Symposium, which has been doing that for many years.

Here's the full Journal call for papers for your information. Please note that although TWC is a part of OTW's umbrella organization, we are not an organ of OTW. We have editorial independence and are happy to consider pieces that criticize the OTW organization. And we are very much looking for submissions from non-academics.

We are still accepting submissions for the September issue, and we need those by the end of the month. Our loose theme for this issue is online scholarship, the Organization for Transformative Works, and the relationship between criticism and theory from inside and outside the academy, but we're open to more or less anything.

Email us on symposium@transformativeworks.org if you'd like to talk about your ideas.

Alexis Lothian
Julie Levin Russo
Cole Banning
Symposium editors, Transformative Works and Cultures

Welcome to the second June issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

( Committee Updates! )

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org. –femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn Community Relations Committee

Welcome to the first June issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

( Committee Updates! )

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

–femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Don't forget, we're wrapping up otw_onlinecon this week! All activities are still open (including plenty of requests for icons.)

Our final challenge is Stories EXTREME, and it could use a bit more participation to reach hoped for levels of hilarity. (*hintshints*) Go take a look!

Spotlight on . . . coders

Infrastructure is the network of assets "where the system as a whole is intended to be maintained indefinitely at a specified standard of service by the continuing replacement and refurbishment of its components."
-- "Infrastructure," from Wikipedia

~ ~ ~

Many of you reading this post are familiar with the OTW's origin story -- or perhaps have your own version of it. (My personal version is that LJ pissed me off; some cool people did something about it; voilà!) But before we focus on the people writing the code for the archive, let's briefly review some of the events leading up to their decision to volunteer.

I'm no historian (nor do I wish to be), but as far as I'm concerned, everything came to a head almost exactly a year ago when Astolat posted a call to arms in which she said, We need a central archive of our own. She began brainstorming about how such an archive would work, others chimed in, and in a matter of days, stuff happened.

(Xenacryst wrote up a good summary of the sequence of events, if you'd like more detail.)

A year later, the plan for the archive is more formalized; the OTW website recently unveiled a very cool road map for the archive that includes many of the original ideas -- and many new ones as well.

How did we get from there to here, with the public launch scheduled for sometime in the next three months? I won't trace the precise trajectory because it's already been done, both in the OTW's annual report and in the OTW's birthday post, but as far as the coders are concerned: after much discussion by many people involved in what became the OTW, two possible programming languages were decided on and a "deathmatch" was held to determine which of the two, Ruby or Python, would be used to do the coding. Ultimately, Ruby was selected, and then more volunteers were invited to participate.

In an attempt to understand who the volunteers were, why they volunteered, and what they are doing, I sent out a series of questions, and a number of the volunteers were kind enough to respond to my email. I found their answers pretty exciting; exciting enough that, after my term with ComRel ends, I'd like to volunteer to assist with coding as well. But on to the coders!




( Spotlight on . . . )

Written by Mirabile Dictu, with help from ComRel.

Remember folks, otw_onlinecon is still ongoing!

I just opened our 24 hour Open Fandom Chat room on AIM - come on in at any time today! Details are in that link.

Other events:

HodgePodge Challenge

Blast From Your Fannish Past Challenge

A Panel on your personal fannish history - come in and tell us how you came to your current fandom, and what fandoms you were in along the way!

Icon Requests! - A place to request and fulfill requests for icons - anyone can volunteer to make an icon for someone.

Drunken Bar Conversation Topics and/or Birthday Challenge

In case you missed it buried in our Birthday post or in the Newsletter, otw_onlinecon is open for business on LJ, IJ and JF! We're celebrating fandom and we want as many of you to participate as possible.

We hope you'll check out the two challenges we have currently:

Hodgepodge Challenge
Blast From Your Fannish Past Challenge

Panels, Events, and more challenges will be coming over the next week. Feel free to spread the word to your friends. After all, the more, the merrier!

Welcome to the second May issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

( Committee Updates! )

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

–femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Today, May 20th, the Organization For Transformative Works celebrates its birthday - we're one year old! On May 20th, 2007, otw_news was created (originally named fanarchive), and our first call for volunteers was issued.

We thought to ourselves, hey, what can we do to celebrate? We're a year old! We've come so far, and done so much in that short amount of time that we honestly feel its amazing, and we hope you do as well. Sometimes, it can seem like progress is going at a snail's pace, but when you take a closer look at just how much we've gotten accomplished, it's pretty awesome.

So, we thought it'd be fun to put together a small timeline of our bigger accomplishments this year, and invite everyone to take a look at everything we've managed thus far.

( Happy Birthday, OTW! )

*steps back* Looking at that? I think we all have good reason to celebrate! This post and its comments section are intended to be OTW's 'official' birthday celebration post, but we also wanted to celebrate what's brought all of us together.

Fandom! We love fandom! And to that end, your faithful Community Relations committee has decided to put on OTW's first online convention. By online convention, we're talking - a couple of panels and discussions, a couple of neat events, but mostly - challenges! Fun fannish challenges intended to let people from across different fandoms come in and celebrate fandom's awesome.

The convention is going to get underway tomorrow, and we'd love, love, love to have a lot of participation and interest. We'll be hosting the con on LJ, IJ and JF, so if you'd like to come check us out, we're going to be found at otw_onlinecon. (We'll have the same name on all three journals, so you can join/watch wherever you do your primary posting.)

And like I just said - this convention is going to be a celebration of *fandom*, so absolutely anyone is welcome to participate, whether you're an OTW member or not. If you're in fandom, we want you there.

As many of you know, the Organization of Transformative Works launched membership to the org at the end of March in six different languages.

As the Membership committee has previously reported, OTW now has over 400 members from 14 different countries and together, we have raised over US$12,000. Thank you so much for your support! This means we can start the process of purchasing dedicated, co-located servers for our various projects, including the Archive of Our Own.

While the membership drive itself is over, it's never too late to join OTW. Please see the linked entry at the beginning of this entry for more information.

OTW and the Community Relations committee have some fun things planned for the following few weeks; watch this space!

And finally, thanks to our Finnish volunteer translator, we are very happy to be able to bring membership information to you in Finnish.

(If you would like to join our current team of volunteer translators, please email the Volunteers committee - volunteers @ transformativeworks.org to find out more!)


Jäsenyys

Olet ehkä joskus halunnut lukea suosikkitarinasi tai silmäillä tuttua suositussivua ja napsauttanut linkkiä vain huomataksesi, että sivu on kadonnut. Arkisto menee nurin, sivun omistaja päättää poistaa kaiken fanisisällön -- ja lukemattomat videot, tarinat ja yhteisöt menetetään.

Mutta mitä jos olisi olemassa arkisto, jota ei rahoitettaisi mainoksilla? Arkisto, jota rahoittaisi fanien tukema ei-kaupallinen järjestö, jonka pysyvään ylläpitoon voisi luottaa? Tällainen visio meillä on Meidän Arkistostamme, monien fandomien arkistosta, jossa kaikenlaiset tarinat olisivat

turvassa sattumanvaraiselta tuhoamiselta ja jossa sinun ei koskaan tarvitsisi pelätä, että luomuksesi tuottavat voittoa jollekulle toiselle.

Meidän Arkistomme on projekti, jonka ympärille Organization for Transformative Works - OTW (Transformatiivisten teoksien järjestö) syntyi. Me olemme ei-kaupallinen järjestö faneilta faneille.


( Viimeisten kymmenen kuukauden aikana olemme rekisteröityneet ei-kaupallisena järjestönä... )


( Jäsenyys: UKK )

Welcome to the first May issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Note Before the committee reports get rolling, I just wanted to note that we haven't been able to access our otw_news account on GreatestJournal for over a week now. GJ has been phasing out its services for the better part of a year, and - unless one of you reading this has more current information - it looks like GJ has finally reached the end of its existence. Although posts can no longer be mirrored, the Community Relations committee is leaving its mirror site as a historical record - and just in case at some future date, GJ returns from the Great Beyond.

( Committee Updates! )

What details would you like to know? Please give ComRel a helping hand and let us know! Email us at comrel @ transformativeworks.org.

–femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Join the Jedi Council! (oh, okay: Join our Ruby on Rails Coding Team!)

We've worked out a bunch of tutorials, our initial team is zooming along, and we are ready to recruit some more help!

If you have experience coding, or have the time and willingness to learn, please join us! The things you'll learn:

• - Working with version control and a team of fellow programmers and testers
  
• - Using the awesomely cool Ruby on Rails programming framework
  
• - Working with databases
  
• - Creating a secure, scalable web application

And most cool of all, you will be helping us build an amazing open-source archive system for yourself and your fellow fans, while you build your own skills and resume. \o/

A note: If you're in school and looking for a cool summer project, we can work with you to make this an internship, possibly even for credit depending on what your school expects for these.

What you need:

• - A chunk of time at the start to get through setup
  
• - Either willingness to learn and a bunch of time, or previous coding experience
  
• - Comfort with basic (web-browser-based) chat
  
• - Comfort following long step-by-step tutorials and installing sometimes-complex software
  
• - The software does not require any particular os and includes:
  Subversion client
  Mysql 5.0
  Ruby and Rubygems
  Rails
  Aptana RadRails IDE
  (Don't worry, it's not as scary as that might look!)
  
• - To be happy to help fellow coders when you can
  
• - To be willing to ask for help when you need it :D
  
• - A Google Account (a gmail.com or googlemail.com address is enough, or you can sign up for one), which you are willing to use for OTW work.

What you *don't* need:

• - Experience with any specific tools or programming language
  
• - A lot of consistent time -- it is okay to come, take an assignment and do it, do something else for a few weeks, come back and take another, etc. (Note, however, if you don't have coding experience, this gets harder -- it is much better to be doing a little bit each and every week than letting long gaps happen before you do some work, in terms of learning.)

How to Volunteer: Send an email to volunteers@transformativeworks.org or post a comment here (comments are screened for privacy). Give us your name and your Google Account email, and let us know you are interested in joining the coding pool.

Please give us an idea of your background and experience, and how much time you have available -- this will let us determine whether you are a Padawan, a Jedi, or a Jedi Master. :D

You will be added to our mailing list, and we'll start you off on our tutorials!

Send us your information by: This is an ongoing project, and there is no deadline. Please feel free to volunteer at any time!

ETA. May 2nd: Edited to add software requirements.