gchick (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gchick) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} otw_news,@ 2007-06-04 23:49:00 |
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| Entry tags: | fanarchive:weekly summaries |
Summary of the original discussion
The purpose of this post is to summarize the discussion, questions, concerns, and comments in response to astolat's original call to arms here. That post will be closed to new comments after this is posted, but it will remain there for anyone who would like the full background on the fanarchive project.
A list of specific feature requests will be kept updated in the fanarchive community.
A list of volunteers who have offered either expertise or general support is here. You're welcome to add your name to the list, in addition to adding your comments to the general discussion.
Also please note the call for board members here. This requires a commitment, but it's a great service to the community!
The Main Issues:
The fanarchive non-profit organization, and the archive itself, were proposed as a response to the fanlib controversy, but the need for a large multi-fandom site that would be created and controlled by fans themselves has been recognized throughout this discussion as an overarching issue beyond that one site.
Based on the discussion, the proposed archive should serve a broadly-defined fannish audience, including:
- All fandoms, and a place for hard-to-classify fic such as crossovers and meta-fic, and potentially controversial material such as RPF.
- Open to all ratings, with an age-based ratings system. Legal advice should be sought to ensure that adult material is appropriately screened, but it should not be banned.
- Accessible on multiple devices including adaptive technologies, and friendly to international audiences, including multilingual interfaces, and welcoming to anime and manga fandoms.
- While vids, fanart, and other multimedia work may or may not be hosted there for both legal and bandwidth reasons, it should be possible to find and recommend them.
LiveJournal has been a home for a large and decentralized fannish community for the last few years, and the social features of communities, networking via friends, threaded commenting, and control over one's own posts (as compared to archives where one cannot edit, or where people other than the poster can), are seen as essential features for a new archive. However, a number of commenters are frustrated with the shortfalls of reading and posting fanfic on LiveJournal: the lack of searchability, the difficulty of finding one's way in unfamiliar or rare fandoms, the limit on post length. Also, note that the current discussion has only been open to LiveJournal users, so there may be other concerns with LJ-based fandom as well.
A number of other archives are been mentioned as possible comparisons, and a list of them has been collected here. Generally speaking, existing archives suffer from one of three problems as noted in the original discussion.
- In the eyes of many readers, the largest archives (FFN, AFFN, fictionalley) have quality-control problems. Finding good-quality fiction amidst the huge amount of content is impossible without some kind of recommendations, ratings, or wayfinding -- but on the other hand, active moderation or editing is too much of a burden for anything but a small site, and it presents legal issues as well.
- Smaller archives built on existing archive software such as efiction and auto-archive lack such essential features as searchability, recs, easy feedback mechanisms, and tools for managing long stories. In addition, those tools cannot scale to the size of the archive that we hope to build -- if fandom is as big as fanlib thinks we are, we need to be able to handle the traffic.
- Whatever the size of the archive, both readers and writers need more flexibility in their tools than is available in current archives, whether they're seeking a better reading experience (search, suggestions, multiple RSS feeds, alternate story layouts), a writing process (beta searches, challenges), or control over posting (lack of restrictions by rating or fandom, editability). This is a theme that runs through a large number of the feature requests.
Also, there are a number of web technologies that should be a natural fit for a user-created culture like this one. These aren't being used to their full advantage in current archives, simply because large archives have not been the focus of fandom as these techologies have developed. A number of Web 2.0 sites and features have been proposed:
- Tagging by both readers and writers: especially as a means to searching outside of fixed categories such as fandom or pairing. Note: there is no reason not to have both fixed categories and tags. Proposed models for tagging include deli.cio.us, flickr, and librarything.
- Recs: several recommendations systems have been discussed, based on thumbs up/down ratings, shared interests with other recommenders, and suggested/highlighted fics. In any case, many commenters feel that as the archive grows, there is a need to filter content. However, any screening of postings for quality is very controversial, as there is no agreement on what constitutes good fic.
- Content aggregation: It should be possible to post to multiple sites, to bring in content from other sites, and to read fic in the form one wants.
Concerns:
- Legal issues: The first principle is Get A Lawyer First, and that's being done. The most pressing worry raised in the discussion is age -- dealing with underage posters and readers; and with underage character content. All of this may be complicated by local laws. Other legal questions include whether the archive will accept fic from fandoms in which the original authors are opposed to it.
- Money: The proposed organizational structure is based on voting memberships in return for donations of either money or labor. During the original discussion, several financial questions were raised, including whether a large site could survive on donations, whether a subscription model with added features is acceptable, whether ads are necessarily a bad thing. In spite of considerable debate on those points, there is a strong consensus throughout the discussion that the organization should be not-for-profit.
Side Projects:
This summary has focused primarily on the fan archive, but there are several other projects that have been proposed in the course of the original discussion. These include:- A links database to aggregate fannish links at other sites. This has been proposed as a first step for the archive project, but it can also exist within it or in parallel with it.
- A historical archive to collect fic that has been available only through the internet archive or even pre-internet sources. Care should be taken to find authors and get their permission, and to ensure that the fannish history collected there is representative of multiple fandom communities.
- A Fannish Legal Defense Fund, modeled along the lines of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
(Finally, on a purely personal note, this has been an exciting discussion to follow, and I'm looking forward to seeing how all the energy poured out by all sides of fandom in this discussion can be made into great things.)
