Organization for Transformative Works News

Announcing: OTW's GeoCities Rescue Project

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:44:38 GMT

As we reported earlier this year, GeoCities, which hosts many fannish resource pages and archives, announced that it will be closing down at the end of the year. They've now announced a more specific date: October 26, 2009.

In response, the Open Doors Committee of the OTW would like to announce our GeoCities Rescue Project.

If you are the owner of a fanfiction archive or resource, meta or other fannish page on GeoCities and you are looking to house your fiction or other content, the OTW can help! Open Doors is teaming up with the Archive of Our Own and Fanlore to preserve as much material as possible.

Fanfiction: We're offering AO3 beta accounts to fanfiction authors currently hosted on GeoCities --both single author and multiple author archives are welcome--so that you may preserve your fiction. If you are not the author, owner or site administrator, you can still document and memorialize parts of a fanfiction site on Fanlore, but we need an authorized person for an AO3 account. Contact Open Doors for more information!

Resource sites: If you are the owner of a fannish resource site, we recommend a page in Fanlore with a summary of the information and purpose of the site along with screencaps of the entry page and/or other key pages to convey the feeling of the site. We have volunteers who can help you set up a Fanlore page documenting both the content and feel of a GeoCities page. Even non-owners of a resource site can document and memorialize a site on Fanlore. Contact Open Doors for help or for more information!

For either a fic or a resource site, please include the URL of the site you wish to archive/preserve, and an email address. If you are the administrator of a multi-author site, please include email addresses for each hosted author (if possible).

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Archive News #3 - How is the Archive developing? + More about tags!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:14:21 GMT

Welcome to our third Archive news post! These regular posts are a venue for us to answer some frequently asked questions about the Archive of Our Own.

Please leave your questions about the Archive in comments and we’ll answer them in upcoming posts. (This is a space for more general questions – if you have specific comments about the design or usability of the Archive please send feedback on the Archive site itself, so it goes into our bugfix and design process).

Questions about the Archive Roadmap, Tags, and Warnings...right under the cut!

How far through the Archive Roadmap are the coding team?

You can view the AOOO Roadmap on our website. We've completed the basic work up to version 0.6, although we want to make some major revisions to Searching and Browsing, and we are also enhancing our Bookmarks.

When will you add the big features which are still outstanding?

Search and Browse
This is already in place, but we're doing some intensive work to make it faster, stronger and better. We expect to finish our redesign by August 2009.

Bookmarks
Bookmarks are already in place, but we want to refine and add some features. We expect to finish our redesign by August 2009.

Collections and challenges:
We're in the process of designing this feature, with the help of all the lovely people who contributed their thoughts on scenarios. We hope to have it fully designed and coded by October 2009 but are aware this is a big piece of work. In the best case scenario, we hope to run a pilot this year, but either way, we should be able to start accommodating larger archives around New Year’s this year.

Subscriptions
This is scheduled for development during July-October 2009, when we will be welcoming an intern from Darmstadt University, Germany, who will be leading the design and coding for this area.

Will the Archive host fanworks other than fic?

Yes! The OTW supports all forms of fan creativity, and the Archive will ultimately host fanart. We're in the very early stages of planning how we'll host fanvids, which will probably be their own project rather than part of the AOOO. Thankfully, we can take advantage of existing and developing open source solutions for hosting online video: we won't have to build a vid archive from scratch.

What does it mean for a tag to be 'common'?

If you've ever clicked on a tag, you may have noticed that the page that comes up tells you 'This is (or is not) a common tag' - see the tag John Sheppard/Radek Zelenka for an example. 'Common' tags are used as options in our search filters (the ones your see on the right hand side of the page marked 'filter your results'. This allows us to avoid having multiple different versions of a tag all showing up in the filters at the same time - so you don't have John/Radek as well as John Sheppard/Radek Zelenka. The filters still find the alternate versions, because they're all connected to the 'common' (aka 'canonical') tags behind the scenes. (See our previous news post on tags for a bit more information about this.)

I have used my tags multiple times, but they're not marked 'common' - why not?

It may be that your tag has been connected to another tag - for example the tag John/Rodney has been merged into the Rodney McKay/John Sheppard tag.

If your tag is a freeform tag, for example kink_bingo, santa and and roadtrip, you might find that it has not been marked common or connected to any others. This is because our tag wranglers haven’t wrangled it yet, as we’re still working on the best way to use freeform tags in our filters. Once we figure out the best way to handle these, then we'll incorporate them into our search and browse so that you can easily find fics tagged in a particular way. However, this has a big potential impact on performance since there are a lot of these tags. We're currently rebuilding our search and browse interface in order to improve performance while enhancing choice and control on the part of the reader. In the meantime, our tag wranglers have been holding off on marking most freeform tags common and focusing on dealing with fandom and characters.

How can I search for fics with tags that haven't been marked common?

Our search box searches all fields, so you can search for anything you like in there. In response to popular demand, our latest code update adds some new tag functionality - clicking on any tag will now bring up works which use that tag. We hope to bring some more power to tag searching in the revamp of our search interface, but in the meantime we think it should be reasonably easy to find what you are looking for.

I'm not sure how to tag my crossover / rpf / other fic.

We mentioned in the last post that we're still figuring out the coding logistics for crossovers and real person fiction. However, this work relates entirely to things which will happen behind the scenes, so please don't let it delay you in posting fic to the Archive! Just tag your fics in the way that feels right to you, and let our tag wranglers deal with any headaches that may arise. The one thing we do ask is that you be generous with your tagging information - for example, giving characters' full names makes life a bit easier for us.

How are you planning on organising the fandom tags for Books and Literature? They seem a bit inconsistent.

It's true that the canonical tags for Books and Literature do not follow one consistent pattern - books fandoms vary a lot in the way they are referred to (book title, author name, series), so it's almost impossible to use a 'one size fits all' approach.

Our official standard is to use 'Book / Series name - Author name', for example Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis. However, this standard is still evolving, and there are some complexities relating to fandoms such as Georgette Heyer which don't fit neatly into this form. We're working on some code that will make it easier for us to manage tricky fandom names like this, and we'll likely make some changes to introduce more consistency in the future, but for now we're focusing on having tags which will be meaningful and familiar to our users rather than on a single unified form. If you're wondering how to tag your own fic, then please do use a format that seems sensible to you rather than worrying too much about the 'right' way from our POV.

When you wrangle tags, how do you deal connections between tags which aren't exact equivalents?

As we mentioned in our previous post, our tag wrangling process connects up tags which are synonyms, such as SPN and Supernatural. Some of you have pointed out that some tags may technically be synonyms, but the individual terms carry levels of nuance. For example, Alternate Universe and Alternate Reality are used interchangeably by some people, but others make a distinction. We currently don't have any way to add nuance to our tags relationships - we're working on ways to categorise tags as 'related but not identical', but we haven't come up with the right code yet. In the meantime, we take these on a case-by-case basis - as a general rule we won't mark tags as synonyms if there is the potential for confusion.

I want to add more warnings to my work than your standard warning tags allow.

When our Content Policy team decided on our warnings policy, they wanted to ensure that authors could give (and readers could get) as much information as they wanted about stories. This is one of the main purposes of our freeform tags - you can add as much information to your story as you see fit, and readers can add their own additional descriptions and tags if they choose to bookmark the fic. One of the key themes which has emerged in the recent debates on warnings is that many people just want more information about stories generally. Our freeform tags not only let you add other warnings to your own story, but also to label your stories with themes, kinks, or other story elements readers might want to know about and to tag other stories on the archive with the information you find most relevant.

Our standard warning tags, which include "choose not to warn", "choose not to warn for some content", and "none of these warnings apply", were designed to help the reader decide about whether or not to seek out additional information about a story through the tag system, rather than as a comprehensive list of all serious warnings. We want to keep the number of core warnings low because those warnings are enforceable: if a story contains major character death, and is labeled "none of these warnings apply," a reader can report that story to Abuse, who can contact the author and, if necessary, change the story's label to "Choose not to warn for some content." The same applies for graphic violence, underage, and rape/noncon. The bigger the list of core warnings, the more difficult they are to enforce (not even taking into account the even greater difficulty of defining categories such as "dubcon"), especially given that our policy is to defer to authors' judgment in close cases.

But if you're someone who prefers not to have too much information about a story before you read, fear not! You may already have noticed that logged-in users have an option to hide all warnings by default (you set this on your preferences page, and when it's enabled you can still reveal warnings on a case-by-case basis). We're planning to add the same option for tags, so that if you prefer surprise!alien spiders--or even surprise!incest--you can have it - watch out for this new feature in a future site update.

As the latest discussion on warnings reminded everyone, it's hard to find a solution that works for everyone - but we think the model we have developed is a good balance.

We hope this post answers a few of your questions! Please leave other questions and comments here. We won’t always answer comments on this post directly – we’ll put your feedback into our pool of things to answer in future posts.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Archive News #2 - Tags

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:49:42 GMT

Welcome to our second Archive news post! These regular posts are a venue for us to answer some frequently asked questions about the Archive of Our Own.

Please leave your questions about the Archive in comments and we’ll answer them in upcoming posts. (This is a space for more general questions – if you have specific comments about the design or usability of the Archive please send feedback on the Archive site itself, so it goes into our bugfix and design process).

This week we're looking at something quite specific: the way tags are used on the Archive. This is a bit more detailed than a lot of the posts we plan to have in this slot, but as tags work a bit differently in the Archive than on other sites you may use and we've had a lot of questions on them, we thought we'd do a special feature.

Where are tags used on the Archive?

Tags can be used on works (ie your fics) and on bookmarks. For the rest of this post, we'll mainly be discussing the way tags work on works (bookmarks are a bit simpler).

For the purposes of the archive, almost all the metadata on works - that is Category, Warnings, Rating, Fandom, Characters, Pairings, and what is shown as Tags (when you enter them on the work form they're known as 'Freeform tags') - is treated as a tag. So, all the bits in the grey header box on a work are tags:

The advantage of doing it this way is that it should be easier for people to search on any field they wish. If you click on a tag, then you will be shown all the works using that tag. Tags are also used to populate our search filters, which help you drill down through all the available fics.

What format do tags have?

They can have spaces - so you can put Harry Potter rather than Harry_Potter.

They can be 42 characters long - we may allow longer tags in the future, but we have to have some limit on the length, or our database might melt.

They can't have commas - tags are comma separated at input, so if you include a comma, then the database assumes you're making a new tag (apologies to fans of 'At Swim, Two Boys' and other comma-loving fandoms).

What's so special about the Archive tags?

The tags are a bit more organised than you'll find on sites like Delicious. For those of you who are metadata-inclined, we're using a sort of hybrid of folksonomy (user-defined tags) and classification. What this means is:

In most fields, our users can enter any tag, in exactly the form they want it.

Behind the scenes, our team of tag wranglers classify and make connections between tags, building a structure which adds extra meaning and helps make tags as useful as possible to all users.

The reason for this is to ensure maximum flexibility for authors, and maximum ease of searching for readers.

What else do tag wranglers do? How do the tag relationships work?

Our tag wranglers work to ensure that tags give our users as much meaningful information as possible, by hooking up related tags and clearing up ambiguities. The full details of how tags work behind the scenes and what tag wranglers do with them are fairly complex. However, some of the most important things are as follows:

* Some tags are marked as 'canonical'. These are the tags that are the most meaningful when viewed alone. So, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester would be canonical, while Sam/Dean wouldn't. All the other versions are connected to this tag. Only canonical tags are visible in our filters, so you won't see every tag you ever used in there, but since the canonical versions are hooked to all the others the filters still search every possible version of a tag.
* Some tags are 'ambiguous'. These are the tags which could mean more than one thing. For example, the tag Dean could refer to Dean Winchester in Supernatural, Dean Forester in Gilmore Girls, or a whole host of other Deans. We are planning to introduce a special behind the scenes tag category called 'Ambiguity'. In this case, the tag wranglers will mark the tag as ambiguous but also hook it up to all the possible canonical tags it could refer to.
* Tags are given relationships which put them in context. So, character tags John Sheppard and Rodney McKay 'belong' to the fandom tag Stargate Atlantis.

Some tags appear with 'freeform' or 'character' after them. What's that all about?

Each tag belongs to a category - Pairing, Character, Fandom, etc. Tag names must be unique, so if a tag already exists in one category, then when it is used in another category, the Archive will automatically add the name of the category.

For example:
* Buffyfan1 puts 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' in as a fandom tag. A new tag is created.
* Buffyfan2 puts 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' in as a character tag. Oh noes - this tag name is taken and can't be reused! So, the Archive changes it to 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer - character'.

Result:
* XanderGirl5 can click on 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer - character' and find all fics which feature Buffy as a character.
* The Archive has unique tag names and so the database does not melt.
* Everyone is happy.

People might use all kinds of crazy tags! Do I need to search for every possible variation of a tag?

Nope. Thanks to the work of our tag wranglers, different tags which mean the same thing are marked as synonymous. So, some authors will mark their fic Harry Potter/Severus Snape, others will put Harry/Severus and still others will put Snarry. Behind the scenes, the tag wranglers hook all these together so the Archive knows that if you search for Snarry you also want fics tagged with the other possible ways of describing the pairing.

My tag has been categorised wrongly! What should I do?

From time to time, there's a chance the tag wranglers will make a mistake when they wrangle your tag. Maybe you only write Death Note fic based on the anime, and yet your fic is coming up when you search for Death Note (manga). Our tag wranglers are only human, and they don't know every fandom in existence, so what's obvious to you might not be clear to them. If you notice a mistake, then please let us know via the Archive Feedback Form.

How can I make sure the tag wranglers don't make mistakes with my tags?

Be generous with your taggings! The more information you put in the easier it is for tag wranglers to make sense of what you meant.

Give full names (first name, family name) for characters and pairings, unless that's not appropriate for some reason (i.e. 'Angel' from AtS and BtVS just goes by the one name).

If your fandom could be ambiguous - for example, you write Death Note fic for the anime only, not the manga - then add more detail. You can put Death Note (anime) in the Fandom field, or just add anime in the freeform tags.

What about RPF?

The Archive of Our Own is RPF-friendly! However, RPF is one of the most difficult areas for tag wranglers, since the way people classify their fandoms varies a lot. Do we use fandom name? Network name? What about general groups of people, like “Canadian Actors”, or historical figures?

We've come up with a concept for dealing with this, but we haven't finished building it, so please bear with us.

What about crossovers?

We love crossovers too! However, we don't have specific tags for crossovers, since crossovers are just fics with more than one fandom.

Please just enter each fandom in your crossover in the Fandom field, separated by commas. Don't separate with slashes, as this creates a tag which we can't wrangle into our search structure. Feel free to add Crossover as a freeform tag, though.

Can I become a tag wrangler?

Yes, probably! We will always need tag wranglers to keep the Archive tags in line. We are looking to add more diverse fandoms to our teams, so while we won't take on everyone who applies (some fandoms are already well-represented) we'd love to hear from anyone who thinks they can help. If you've noticed a fandom languishing unwrangled for a while, it probably means that we have nobody with expertise for it - if you could fix that, please let us know! Anime, manga and comics are currently particularly under-represented.

Some known bugs with tags

We think we've fixed all our known bugs with tags, but there are a few which were extremely noticeable / annoying, so we're listing them here. If you've encountered some other weirdness, do let us know via the feedback form.

Filtering not specific enough in some cases - e.g. filtering for Stargate Atlantis also brought up fics for SG-1. This was caused by the way tag relationships were working for fandoms with common characters. This should be fixed as of our deploy in late May.

'No fandom' showing up as a possible fandom in the filters. This was caused by our need to mark tags which don't belong to a specific fandom (for example, schmoop). It showing up in the filters was a bug, and should be fixed as of our deploy in late May.

We hope this post answers a few of your questions! Please leave other questions and comments here. We won't be answering comments on this post directly - we'll put your feedback into our pool of things to answer in future posts.

Mirrored from original post on the OTW blog.

Notes from the Open Video Conference, Day Two

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:28:37 GMT

Summary of a couple of panels on Day 2:

Automated DMCA Takedowns and Web Video: Scott Smitelli, a professional sound designer and editor, is the fellow who wrote Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System, in which he tried to test out the limits of YouTube's fingerprinting system for audio. Conclusions: the software is mainly interested in the first 30 seconds of a song, and can be thwarted by pitch or time alterations of over 6% (which may be unhelpful to the musically sensitive among us, but there you go.) Kevin Driscoll and others from YouTomb discussed the January Massacre: the massive increase of takedowns in December, 2008 and January, 2009. On a graph, it looks like takedowns have dropped off since then, but that may be deceptive: in fact, it seems like things are being detected so fast (within ten minutes) that YouTomb can't keep track of them, or to put it another way: takedowns are low because stuff's never getting UP in the first place. A suggestion: that it would be great if every takedown left a webpage with a card saying, "This has been taken down," because in many cases, people are not aware of what they can't have. Oliver Day, also from YouTomb, told a chilling story: the original filmmaker who shot the clouds that were used in the Anonymous anti-Scientology ads had his original footage taken down--not in deference to those ads, but in deference to a Huffington Post anti-Giuliani parody of those ads. As Day put it, "The power is with the powerful": even though the original filmmaker's footage was there first, it was assumed that he was infringing the Huffington Post, and not the other way around.

Who Owns Popular Culture? Remix and Fair Use in the Age of Corporate Mass Media: This was the panel hosted by Jonathan McIntosh and featuring animator Nina Paley (of Sita Sings The Blues, Neil Sieling from the Center for Social Media, political remixer Elisa Kreisigner, Karl Fogel from questioncopyright.org, and OTW Board Member Francesca Coppa. The panel largely discussed what the policing of online video and the over-enforcement of copyright means for artists, remixers, and those interested in free speech. Nina Paley answered the question literally, by providing a list of who owns popular culture--or in her case, literally, the songs, mostly from 1927-28, that she used in Sita Sings The Blues, while Elisa Kreisinger evoked many the important visual artists, from Duchamp to Koons to Kruger to Lichtenstein to Warhol, for whom remixing and recontextualizing pop culture was a key artistic move. (She also showed her remixes of the Queer Housewives of New York City.)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Notes from the Open Video Conference, Day One

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:39:28 GMT

Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, and head coder Elz spent the day at the Open Video Conference in NYC today. The conference is primarily about building architecture for online video as well as open source software more generally, so you can see why we were interested. (We're keeping a close eye on the emerging technologies that might make a Vidding Archive Of Our Own more feasable and efficient.)

Some highlights from today's programming:

Independent Video Platforms: Representatives from various independent video spaces, mostly dealing with issues of social justice or alternative media, showcased their sites. (My favorite was India's Pad.ma, a beautifully designed digital archive designed to contextualize its footage and work in both high-bandwidth and low bandwidth situations.)

Emerging P2P Technologies: This was a glimpse into a wildly exciting and very near future: streaming from bitorrents. The guys at P2P Next are working on something called the Swarmplayer, which allows you to stream from torrents, which means that you can create a YouTube like video archive with none of the server or infrastructure costs. Imagine a video archive where you can stream or download or both, and where having a popular vid doesn't kill your bandwidth, it increases your download speed. Imagine being able to watch anything currently being torrented through streaming, on-demand. (You can test Swarmplayer now, though you can only watch two videos; the researchers say we can expect a full version to be released in November, 2009.)

How to Make a Political Remix Video: Political remixer and friend of the OTW Jonathan McIntosh has been showcasing fan vids on his site, politicalremixvideo.com. Now he's made what he calls a vidding-influenced political remix video critiquing Twilight, Edward Meets Buffy (Twilight Remixed), which he premiered at the conference. Vidders, he'd love to hear what you think, so check out the video (embedded below, or linked on blip, which provides higher quality; vidders might check out blip as a replacement for YouTube or iMeem.)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Job Search: Experienced XHTML/CSS Code

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:43:52 GMT

Job: Experienced XHTML/CSS Coder

Description: We're now much further forward with the Archive, and we're badly in need of some front end skillz! The illustrious lim wrote the main style sheets for the Archive, but now that those are in place, we have many other front end jobs. The lovely Flamebyrd has been doing sterling work on some of these, and we're jazzed about the fact that Hope recently joined us to work on skins for the Archive, but there's a lot of work to do and we've yet to perfect our cloning technology. So, we're looking for people to work on some of the following:

* Reviewing the design of the site for accessibility and making improvements as necessary. We already know we have some issues in this area, particularly when it comes to ease of enlarging text, and we really want to get it right.
* Reviewing our coding standards and making sure that we have fully standards compliant code.
* Implementing cross-browser compatibility for the site, which is currently only Firefox compatible.
* Finetuning the styling for different parts of the Archive, especially in areas which have been built since the main body of work was done on the CSS.
* Lots of other smaller jobs - you can see some of these in our list of current frontend issues.

Estimated Time Involved: As much or as little as you are willing to give us! We understand real life means people are not always available and you may need to dip in and out at times.

Other Information: Ideally you will be working with the same setup as the Ruby Coders, in which case there will be a bit of a setup process 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.

How to Volunteer: Use our contact form to send us 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:

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

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

Please put "XHTML/CSS Coder" in the subject line.

Send us your information by: Ongoing

All volunteers will receive an email confirming their information has been received; please give us up to five days to reply.

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by using our contact form.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Announcing: The Fan Culture Preservation Project!

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:56:33 GMT

The OTW is pleased to announce that we will be partnering with the University of Iowa to create a Fan Culture Preservation Project.

The Special Collections department at the University of Iowa already has a strong interest in zines, and is making a concerted effort to collect zines and other artifact of fan culture (con programs and flyers, for instance) in order to preserve them and make them accessible to wider popular and research audiences. Iowa is home to a huge (250,000) collection of science fiction and fantasy zines and APA zines, as well as a collection of Riot Grrrl and Underground Music Zines. Media fandom is not as well represented, and they are eager to collect many aspects of fan culture, including all types of fanfiction.

The first major donation brokered by OTW is the Fanzine Archive, a collection of over 3,000 classic zines previously housed in Santa Barbara--over 62 boxes! The OTW was able to help the retiring archivist, Ming Wathne, save and protect this valuable collection. Special Collections is currently in the process of sorting and boxing Ming’s zines. Soon after that is finished, titles in the Fanzine Archive collection will be listed in a finding aid on the Special Collections website. We are currently helping other long time fans donate their collections to the library.

OTW and Iowa are eventually hoping to explore ways to digitize some of these materials, so that fans who want to see them will have access, even if they can't get to Iowa. (We are only talking about works where we have legal clearance; both the University of Iowa and the OTW are concerned about fan privacy first and foremost.) The Special Collections department at the University of Iowa is also willing to photocopy materials for a price of about $.25 cents a page, according to their standard procedures.

Moving? Apartment getting too small? If you have zines you no longer want (or more than you can manage!) but want to know they'll find a good home, please contact the OTW. We can arrange for postage to be paid and for UPS to come to your house to pick up the boxes. You might also consider leaving your collection to the Fan Culture Preservation Project or making arrangements through a friend.

Please help us preserve this important part of fannish history!

ETA: Hey, if you're in the area, check out the Star Trek exhibition curated by our FCPP partners at the University of Iowa! Where Many Have Gone Before: Re-launching Star Trek, on display until July 1, 2009.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

June, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 30

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:39:46 GMT

Get updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees: right under the cut!

Abuse:

Abuse has been hard at work getting boilerplate texts written to efficiently handle user complaints and concerns. We are combing through drafts to ensure we are clearly communicating with users regarding areas of difficulty and the terms of service.

ADT/Archive:

AD&T are busy negotiating with a co-location facility to work out our requirements and costs - Network ports! Power consumption! We're about to spend a lot of money so we want to spend it wisely (thank you so much for supporting us in making this dream a reality).

The draft Open Beta plan is getting fleshed out and we're busy making a list of features we have to finalise. I feel a blocking Open Beta list coming on...

One of the most important features will be an Invitation Code system. We know we have to manage adding new users carefully, we don't want to open up the Archive for use then have it burst into flames! There will be codes for existing users to hand out, and a sign-up queue so you don't have to rely on knowing someone with an account. We're finalising the design now and will start coding it shortly (many thanks to Denise from Dreamwidth for letting us look at how Dreamwidth does it).

Thank you for all the suggestions for Collections & Challenges. The submissions are now closed and we are busy collating your feedback to incorporate into our proposed design - we may not be able to use every suggestion but we will try very hard!

Our next code deploy will probably be another small one with a bunch of fixes - we're currently aiming for the weekend of the 4th of July.

Board:

The Board continue to work on the upcoming colocation and open beta of the archive in terms of money, resources and personnel, as well as setting general org-wide goals.

Communications:

Communications has set up the Fan Culture Preservation Project page and will be announcing a GeoCities Outreach project in the near future. We're also putting together a "For The Media" page and planning events to celebrate our coming Server Colocation!

Content Policy:

No report.

Development:

Development and Communications are collaborating on a merchandising committee for the Fall, '09 fundraising drive; stay tuned.

Documentation:

Our AD&T liaison Amy has been hard at work supporting the move forward to the next stage of the Archive of Our Own. In addition to wrangling meeting minutes and keeping all the training and design documentation straight on the wiki, she's been collating your feedback about Collections and Challenges and putting it into a format our designers and coders can work with. \0/

Elections:

Elections is compiling instructions and information for the revised, in-house election software that OTW's Webmasters are working on, as well as draft text for their forthcoming website.

Finance Update:

The sharks of FinCom are circling slowly around bank options, evaluating the benefits of short-term investment CDs in the event of a budget surplus this year and preparing recommendations for the Board on a move to a different level of checking account. We've also been working with various committees to nail down budget projections for the remainder of the year, and supporting Systems in the move to purchase servers, as well as paying the regular bills.

In more exciting and less numerical news, we're also celebrating the engagement of our darling Cat Meier and flailing over just how we're going to manage to turn a mutual love of sharks, Excel sheets and Alec Hardison into an appropriate wedding gift.

Journal:

The TWC team is working hard to put together issue three of our academic journal, which is scheduled for September 2009.

Legal:

Legal continues to provide confidential advice and opinions within the org. We could tell you more, but then we'd have to kill you.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee is proud to announce the Fan Culture Preservation project: if you have zines or other (nondigital) fannish artifacts you don't want anymore and don't know what to do with: please call us! We are partnered with the Special Collections department of the University of Iowa, and we can help arrange for your zines to be housed and preserved. (We can also help you arrange a bequest!)

We are currently finalizing a Geocities Outreach plan; if you, or someone you know, is in danger of losing an old Geocities fan fiction or information site, and you don't have any other way to preserve it, please contact Open Doors. We can help!

Systems:

Systems is planning a 'help us with colocation' recruitment drive; watch this space!

Translations:

No report.

Vidding History:

We are currently working on a page of fair use resources for vidders. Francesca Coppa will also be presenting on a fair use panel at the Open Video Conference in NYC, June 19-20, 2009.

Volunteers:

The Volunteers committee could welcome quite a few new coders and testers to the Org. \o/ We've also been working with Translations in reviewing our management tools in order to adapt them to the needs of the language teams.

Website:

We recently worked with Open Doors to create a page for the Fan Culture Preservation Project. We're making progress on our big summer project, the Elections subsite, and we've been squishing bugs and smacking down spammers on the side.

Wiki:

The Wiki committee continues to make policy decisions and oversee the general running of Fanlore.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

'Coming Through the Rye': Lawsuit Over 'Catcher In The Rye' Sequel

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:35:28 GMT

Fanfiction writers and other makers of transformative works might be interested in the lawsuit brought by the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger and his lawyers against writer J.D. California, who has written a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," which tells the story of Holden Caufield as an old man. Unlike fanfiction, "Coming Through The Rye" is a commercial work, but it'll still be an interesting case to keep an eye on. Read more about the case at CNN, with a more thorough legal overview courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

TWC Editor Karen Hellekson Talks About Research Ethics on fandomresearch.org

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:25:12 GMT

Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, has a guest post on Fandom Research, a new blog which aims to be "a clearing-house for surveys, questionnaires, theses, dissertations, and other research pertinent to the active field of fandom studies." Karen's post is called, "Fandom research methods," and deals not only with academic standards like those of university or college institutional review boards (IRB) or The Association of Internet Researchers but also about fannish community standards for personal privacy: when its appropriate to quote, whether a LiveJournal or blog post is "public" or not, etc. Aca-fans and other fandom researchers and fanthropologists should check out both the post and this site.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

New Feature! Archive news post #1 - The basics

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:11:22 GMT

Hello from AD&T!

Since the OTW began, we've been working away busily on creating the Archive of Our Own, buoyed up by tons of support from fandom. Now that we've been working on it a while, we know that people have questions. So from now on we'll be running a twice-monthly news post specifically about the Archive, answering some frequently asked questions. We'll answer a handful of questions each post, to keep it manageable for us and you.

Please leave your questions about the Archive in comments and we'll answer them in upcoming posts. (This is a space for more general questions - if you have specific comments about the design or usability of the Archive please send feedback on the Archive site itself (so it goes into our bugfix and design process).

Your questions and answers for this session:

What is the Archive of Our Own?

(Most people reading will know this already, but just as a refresher before we start.) The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfiction and (long-term) other transformative fanworks: i.e. it is free to use and does not make any money. It is multifannish, and built on open-source archiving software designed and built by and for fans. It will be hosted on servers owned by the OTW, and therefore not vulnerable to a commercial hosting company deciding they don't like our stuff.

Sounds great! Why can't I create an account?

We're currently in closed beta and account creation is strictly limited. This is because we're still busy working on the core software for the Archive and acquiring the hardware which will host it. While we're in closed beta, everything about the Archive will change rapidly and things may break. We need to keep user numbers extremely low so our servers don't crash and we're not overwhelmed by feedback on the many bugs that still exist.

You can enjoy a lot of the features of the Archive without an account - please come and enjoy some of the stories already posted. We currently have over 4500 stories in 480 fandoms, so there's plenty to choose from! You can leave comments on fics without an account, and if you supply a valid email address you'll be notified when there's a reply.

We are adding new users very gradually, drawing from our pool of people who leave feedback about the experience of using the Archive. So, if you're really keen to get an account, leaving feedback about the Archive site there (not here!) is a good way to start.

I'm really keen to see the Archive come out of closed beta - why is it taking so long?

There are a few reasons why we've been in closed beta for what might feel a relatively long time:

We don't own the servers yet! Buying and setting up colocated servers which can handle the kind of traffic we anticipate takes time and money. Our current server setup can only take a very small number of users. However, we're happy to report that our latest membership drive raised the money we needed to do this, and we're now almost through all the work required to turn the dream into a reality - more news on this very soon! \0/

We have a small team working on the project. The OTW is entirely volunteer-run, which means that everyone involved has other major commitments which prevent them from working constantly on building the archive (although some of our coders pretty much are working constantly, because they are amazingly dedicated!) This is a big difference between us and commercial sites, who can pay full-time staff.

The Archive is custom-built. We wanted it to meet the needs of fandom as it is now and as it might develop, so rather than just copying the features of existing archives (for example, the Automated Archive software built by our own Naomi Novik) we started with a list of dream features and tried to design from scratch. We think this will make a better archive in the long run.

We want the archive to serve all fans. We're working hard to make it as accessible as possible to all users, and to provide an infrastructure which can support multiple languages. This is a massive undertaking, so it takes time to get it right.

How can I help things move faster?

You can volunteer to join our teams! We always need more people to help work on the archive, not just as coders (although we would love to have more coders) but also to work on testing, documentation, translation, and so on. You can read more about volunteering to work on the archive at How you can help. If you're interested in helping, but you're not sure what you would do, then let us know your strengths and we'll figure out which team would be the best fit for you. If you want to code but have no experience, then don't be put off - we welcome beginner coders and are keen to offer training and support.

You can become a member or donate. The more secure our finances are, the easier it is for us to support our servers.

You can test the archive informally (i.e. without joining our official team of testers) by reading fic and trying out the other features, then leaving your feedback. This means we will pick up bugs quicker and will build the archive how you want it! (This also increases the chance of you getting a beta account, as we draw our beta users from the pool of those who have left feedback.)

When will you start open beta and how will I be able to get an account?

We can't make any firm promises for this yet, because we still have a few important things to complete (although now we know we can buy our servers, it's definitely on the horizon \0/). We're tentatively looking at moving to open beta at the end of the summer (northern hemisphere!) Accounts will still be invitation-only at that point, so our servers don't get swamped, and we're working on a plan for making sure that invitations are available to as wide a range of the fannish community as possible. So, watch this space! (And if you have thoughts on how you'd like to see invitations work, then feel free to share them with us.)

We hope this post answers a few of your questions! Please leave other questions and comments here. We won't be answering comments on this post directly - we'll put your comments into our pool of things to answer in future posts.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Roundup for Vidders

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:36:02 GMT

A few items of interest to vidders:

1) As many vidders have noted, iMeem is no longer supporting embeds, and YouTube continues its policy of random takedowns. (Remember that you can dispute a takedown if you believe your vid is a fair use!) A lot of vidders are therefore looking at other streaming services. Markus Weiland did a good comparison of the terms of service of many of the competing sites (including Blip, Dailymotion, Kyte, Vimeo, and others) in his article Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared. Worth a look if you're thinking about a new home for your vids.

2) This may possibly make fan vidders squinty-eyed: Swanswan caught that a male artist is exhibiting something that looks a heck of a lot like a fanvid at the Glucksman Contemporary Art gallery at the University of Cork. Swanswan aptly summarizes the issue: "I don't know whether to forward this on to the OTW and say look! Other people making vids and calling it art, awesome!! Or look! Some random dude does what we've been doing for decades and all of a sudden it's art?" Hey, it's totally art! And it was art when we did it 30 years ago, and it's art when we do it now! (And I'll bet we do it better!)

3) You might be interested in the upcoming Open Video Conference, June 19-20 in New York City. This conference plans to tackle a range of issues surrounding online video -- from codecs to content, to fair use, and beyond. "Open Video" is a growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video, which encourages and invites remix, collage, and repurposing (including vidding.) Featured speakers include: NYU's Clay Shirky, Harvard's Yochai Benkler, Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, DVD Jon, Free Press' Josh Silver, EFF's Corynne McSherry, and many more. (OTW's Francesca Coppa and political remix vidder Jonathan McIntosh are scheduled to present some work there too.) For the full agenda, go to: http://openvideoconference.org/agenda/. Register at http://openvideoconference.org/registration/.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

A Shout Out To OTW's "Groundbreaking" Open Source Project from the O'Reilly Radar

Wed, 20 May 2009 22:50:54 GMT

The OTW gratefully acknowledges this shout out from Nat Torkington of the O'Reilly Radar. We agree that's something unfortunate about the "macho meritocracy" of conventional programming. OTW: a few small commits from our coders, a giant leap for female coders everywhere!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

May, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 29

Wed, 20 May 2009 22:22:01 GMT

Join us in celebrating our unofficial 2 year anniversary: our first "fanarchive" LJ post went live on May 20, 2007. WOOT!

Find out what your favorite OTW projects and committees are doing: more info right below the cut!

Abuse:

No report.

ADT/Archive:

AD&T has been researching co-location facilities and getting quotes on hardware, which is starting to look excitingly detailed. These are the first steps towards actually buying and owning our own servers! We have also started working on the features we'll need to go to Open Beta!

We're currently hard at work on a bunch of projects:

Enhancing our invitation system, we'll need this when we start taking on a lot more users
Improving our administration interface
Improvements to tag wrangling - we're working to fix the 'SGA and SG-1 in the filters' problem.
Adding a FAQ and a posting interface for Release Notes and Bug Updates - this is so we can communicate better
...and of course a bunch of smaller bug fixes

We're also still looking for suggestions on Collections and Challenges. We need as much input as possible so we can build something awesome. Head over to Collections and Challenges. It's Design Time!, the Livejournal post or the Dreamwidth post and share your ideas. Submissions close on 30th May so please, tell us what you know!

We have a small deploy planned for the weekend of the 30th - this will mostly be bugfixes - details in the next set of Release Notes that get emailed to Beta testers.

The testing team who worked on r1278 were amazing! We re-tested almost the entire Archive (which is now a mammoth task). A big thank you to the dedicated and brave people who volunteered to help right in the middle and were fabulous.

We've been training up the lovely new coders who joined us recently, who are making great progress! We've spiffed up our training materials and our reward has been lots of enthusiasm and activity - we've just seen our first archive code commit from the lovely Amelia, who joined us a few months ago. The new training materials make it even easier to learn to code with the OTW, so if you've been pondering joining us, now is a great time to jump right in!

Board:

The Board has approved funding for colocation servers and is working on structuring the OTW's finances to grow with the ongoing costs of a much bigger Archive. We hope to formally announce a timeline and a series of festivals to celebrate our colocation!

Communications:

Communications is working on several projects; a "for the media" page for the tw.org website, the Open Doors "Fan Culture Preservation Project" press releases, some outreach ideas for Fanlore.

Content Policy:

No report.

Development:

Members of Development will be forming a subcommittee with members of Communications, Web, and some specially recruited volunteers to research OTW merchandise for future drives. Stay tuned!

Documentation:

Documentation has no new news, but continues to document everything it can find.

Elections:

The Elections committee will be running the voting and tabulation for the fall election in-house. We're working closely with Webmasters now to set up the infrastructure to do just that.

Finance Update:

Fincom closed the books on 2008 with the completion of the 2008 financial statements, which were released in conjunction with the OTW annual report, which is now available on our web site. We've filed the organization's 990 return, and will post that soon to our reports page soon. We've also been paying the OTW's bills and catching up with other OTW committees to finalize the 2009 operating budget.

Journal:

May 15th marked the deadline to submit contributions for the third issue of the TWC academic journal. The TWC team is now busy going through the editorial process; issue three will be out by September 2009.

Legal:

As ever, Legal Committee continues in its role of providing advice and support to other OTW Committees. Recently, we consulted with Content regarding the application of a specific clause in the Terms of Service, and we have advised the Web team and the Board on various glossary and license issues. We also continue to respond to queries from the public as they arise, and have this past month commented on some specific speech and copyright issues referred to us by the membership.

Open Doors:

Open Doors is still working with Webmasters and Communications on our project page, and we're now workshopping a press release.

Systems:

Systems has been working with the various committee chairs to test the exportation of certain project pages to the zen server.

Tag Wranglers:

The Tag Wranglers continue to be quite busy in the Beta Archive. We’ve brought on new volunteers to help us with a wider variety of fandoms. In the next few months we look forward to the coding of the next generation of behind-the-scenes wrangling tools which will allow us greater flexibility to handle a few of the issues we’ve come against. Meanwhile, the fandoms already wrangled are working well with filters and browse.

Translations:

At the beginning of this month we waved our committee member logovo goodbye (who is probably glad to have her life back :P), and as a parting gift, she recruited her own successor, hele. We give a our gratitude for a wonderful time to logovo, and an excited welcome to hele!

We are working on standardizing the translation process to facilitate the volunteers’ work. The committee is also testing the admin side of the new translation interface, with sights on being able to include translators in the testing soon. The teams continue to work tirelessly on translating the website, and keeping the translated versions of the website up to date (no mean feat!).

Vidding History:

Members of Vidding History and Legal went to DC to on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Extended coverage of our panel is at our blog post here.

Volunteers:

Volunteers continues to work managing staffers and other personnel as well as maintaining our various corporate home systems and software.

Website:

As part of our Elections subsite project, we're currently testing software that enables multiple sites to be run from a single Drupal installation and database.

Our fabulous chairperson, Jinjur, will be handing out OTW buttons at Wiscon (May 22-25).

Wiki:

We've opened up a Fanlore community on dreamwidth for anyone who wants to get involved with editing the wiki, along with adding a news page to keep everyone updated on the latest changes.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Attention Vidders and Other Fannish Remix Artists

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:32:11 GMT

American University’s Center for Social Media and AU's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, in collaboration with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, have launched a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.

The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, explains the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video (which was worked on by OTW's very own Rebecca Tushnet). Like the code, the video identifies various kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. Of particular interest to vidders and fannish remix artists might be: "commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material", "use for illustration or example", "use to launch a discussion", and "recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works."

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

United We Stand: Glockgal's Avatar Zazzle Site Restored

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:02:44 GMT

The OTW belatedly joins in celebrating the restoration of Glockgal's Avatar site on Zazzle. As you may remember, Glockgal's store was TOSed ostensibly for violating Viacom's intellectual property rights, even though Glockgal's items were mostly textual expressions of her critique of the all-white casting of the new live-action Avatar film. Viacom was quick to assert that they support fair use and only take things down when they aren't creative or political; they also invited Glockgal to submit a DMCA counternotice. The OTW was happy to help Glockgal formulate and direct that counternotice, and we have been so delighted to see people from all around the internet banding together to take a stand against unfair takedowns. This (relatively speedy!) victory is a victory for all of us and proof that banding together and defending our rights works.

The takeaway? If someone is infringing YOUR free speech or fair use rights, SAY SOMETHING. TELL SOMEONE!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Archive of Our Own: Collections and Challenges. It's Design Time! Please Help!

Sat, 09 May 2009 23:58:13 GMT

Greetings and Salutations! Calling all challenge mods, archivists, and people with vivid fannish imaginations! If you've run a fannish challenge or exchange, moderated a challenge community, edited a zine, or put together a themed rec list, we want to talk to you. If you've participated in a fannish challenge and/or have ever thought in detail about how to run a challenge, please also help us out!

We're in the process of developing the design for two essential pieces of functionality on the Archive of Our Own Roadmap, Version 0.7: Collections and Challenges.

As part of that design work we need to know how it's going to be used and understand what different people want from it.

To make this easier we're writing up a series of different scenarios describing how a person might use Collections or Challenges and we ask you to contribute. We want short stories describing ideal scenarios and we want them from the perspective of different people - moderators, writers, readers. Go wild!

Examples under the cut. Please leave a comment below; members of ADT (Accessibility, Design, & Technology; the Archive team) will be watching and collecting scenarios. (Please don't worry if your idea contradicts someone else's way of doing things! The AO3 needs to be able to work in multiple ways! And feel free to build on or respond to each other's ideas.)

Collections:

Samvara is a keen fan of the Supernatural fandom and is particularly stuck on stories where Sam Winchester grows wings, she has an account on the AO3 and creates a Collection called SamOnHigh. She writes the blurb for the Collection giving guidelines on joining the Collection explaining she loves, loves loves Sam with wings but is willing to accept stories where any other Winchester has wings so long as Sam does too. Samvara messages every author on the AO3 with a winged Sam story that she can find, inviting them to join the Collection and promotes it shamelessly on the interwebs. One day someone tries to add a story where Sam grows tentacles but Samvara removes it from the Collection and messages the author explaining that even if he can fly, it's still not really WINGS now is it. They never speak again :( Eventually Samvara gets a debilitating disease and decides to put her energies into something else and makes one of her co-moderators of the community do all the work as she vanishes off to learn rock polishing in the desert.

Challenges:

Before Samvara gets all diseased she also decides to run a wingfic writing challenge and publishes a manifesto encouraging all writers to consider this magnificent idea, submit story ideas (prompts) and sign up to write. The prompts are visible to everyone and some have to be removed because they didn't understand it was a SPN wingfic writing challenge and keep trying to insert Legolas - this spurs some heated emails and several other wingfic challenges get launched. Eventually Samvara reaches her goal of 50 prompts and 50 sign-ups and randomly allocates the prompts to writers. The due date for the stories is in 3 months and she writes the odd encouraging message reminding people of the deadline. She also has to change some of the prompts and match them up with new writers who didn't like their initial prompt or were unable to continue writing.

People start posting their stories about a month in and Samvara gloats over them lovingly until the due date is reached (which she had to extend by 10 days) and then she makes the new additions to the Collection visible but keeps the authors anonymous for another 14 days.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

OTW Represents Vidders And Other Remix Artists at DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings

Sat, 09 May 2009 23:25:29 GMT

OTW board members Rebecca Tushnet (chair of Legal) and Francesca Coppa (chair of Communications and Vidding History) and TWC review editor Tisha Turk went down to Washington DC on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Rule 1201 of Copyright Law prevents the circumvention of copyright protection systems (e.g. makes it illegal to rip DVDs or to hack your cellphone) but also requires the copyright office to hold hearings every three years to find out of this prohibition is adversely affecting anyone. In 2006, the copyright office granted an exemption to film studies professors, because the case was made that these professors need to rip DVDs to make high quality clip compilations to teach their classes. This year, there were a number of new proposed exemptions, including: educators beyond film studies professors (including K-12 teachers), documentary filmmakers, and vidders and other noncommercial remix artists.

The OTW previously submitted a reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed exemption for vidders and other remix artists. Tushnet, Coppa, and Turk went down to support this comment with live testimony. As you might have seen across the internet, the other side--MPAA, studios, the people who make encryption technology, etc--suggested that instead of ripping, professors, remixers, documentary filmmakers and others make clips by filming a flat screen with a camcorder.

For more information:

* Audio files/podcasts of the hearings are available at the U.S. Copyright Office's website and mirrored by the EFF on iDisk. (Our statements are part 2, the Q&A is part 3.)

* Rebecca Tushnet liveblogged the hearings: read the part about noncommercial remix.

* Wendy Selzer of Chillingeffects.org posted about the hearings and also livetweeted them.

* Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University also blogged the hearings.

* Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has made a YouTube video summarizing the issues and focusing on the OTW and Rebecca Tushnet ("She's Awesome"). He also blogged his legal analysis.

* Rashmi Rangnath weighs in at publicknowledge.org.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Attention Fanlore Contributors (and Future Contributors)!

Wed, 06 May 2009 03:54:55 GMT

The Wiki committee of the OTW is pleased to announce the formation of a Fanlore community on Dreamwidth. We needed a place for people interested in the Fanlore wiki to congregate, talk about pages (cool ones, ones with issues and concerns, plus general "how do I..." type stuff), and just keep in touch with what is happening on the site. We've been looking at various options for a place to gather, and Dreamwidth's open ID option makes it attractive; you don't have to be a member, but can comment using a free open ID account. (Note: if you do want to be a member of Dreamwidth, some folks in the community have been donating invite codes.) The community is also syndicated on LJ, so you can also keep in touch with what's going on here.

Please spread the word about the community, and about Fanlore itself. While some areas of fandom (and some individual fandoms) are well covered in the wiki, others are badly under-represented. We will be doing outreach to some of these under-represented areas, trying to get help and expertise, but please help us spread the word. If you know people who have been nervous about Fanlore or afraid they were "doin' it rong" (offhand assurance: you really can't do it wrong), please tell them that there's a place they can go to ask questions, either technical or content-based. Membership is open; everyone is welcome!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Extra! Your Political Speech is now a "Viacom Property"

Sun, 03 May 2009 02:47:54 GMT

Earlier this week, fan artist glockgal discovered that all but one of the designs at her Zazzle store had been removed "because they "contained content in violation of Viacom's intellectual property rights." But the shirts contained not only original graphic designs, but political speech, protesting the casting of Asian or Inuit characters in the film of Avatar: The Last Airbender by white actors.

Apparently, you need permission from Viacom to say: "Aang can stay Asian and still save the world" or "The Last Airbender: Putting the Cauc back in Asian" or "The Last Airbender: Brown/Asian/Colored Actors NEED NOT APPLY". These design were entirely textual, and obviously political: Glockgal called her store Racebending.com and contextualized its products as a form of political activism: "Stop Hollywood White-Washing of the upcoming movie The Last Airbender!" Glockgal is now selling some of the designs with "CENSORED BY VIACOM" plastered across them--but since when does Viacom own political speech about its products?

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Writercon 2009 - A Q & A with TWC's Kristina Busse

Sun, 03 May 2009 01:19:54 GMT

Kristina Busse, co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet and one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures, was interviewed in a Q & A for the upcoming Writercon 2009, a con dedicated to fannish and original writing. Kristina is going to be one of three special guests at the con, which takes place July 31 through August 2, 2009 in Minneapolis. For more information about Writercon 2009, check out their website or their LiveJournal community. Writercon describes itself as a con "about the writing and the shared love, not shipper politics or the plots of the shows, except as related to the fic. It's about how fan fiction is literature, and it's about showing that it's as worthy as any other genre of writing."

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

OTW Annual Report, 2008

Sat, 02 May 2009 03:11:22 GMT

The Board of the OTW is pleased to announce the release of our 2008 Annual Report, which went live on our Reports page yesterday. The 2008 Annual Report is available both as a downloadable .pdf and as .html. A big thank you to all our staffers, volunteers, and members for another successful year!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

April, 2009 Newsletter, Vol 28

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:05:11 GMT

Welcome to our second April newsletter! Progress reports from all your favorite committees and OTW projects are right under the cut!

Abuse:

We're busy designing our process of receiving complaints from users and responding to them and have been putting together a way to handle the non-English-language users of the Archive with Translation -- who are deserving of SO MANY kudos -- which we're looking forward to releasing soon!

ADT/Archive:

Accessibility, Design, & Technology are in the process of preparing for another code update on the Beta Archive of Our Own and are currently poking the changes on our Test Archive. We should be deploying the new changes on the first weekend of May. Changes include:

The new Translations interface which Elz and Cal have been slaving over.
Being able to filter by Pseuds which is Enigel's baby.
Changes to the way works display by the beautiful Zooey - we're pulling 'Warnings' out and making them more visible.
We're also pulling the default Archive font we're using as not enough people's systems default load Candara as pretty as they should :(

Jennifew is heading up the MASSIVE task of regression testing the ENTIRE Archive after the Rails upgrade - every page is subtly affected. We're looking forward to inflicting all this on our faithful Beta testers so we can pick up the next round of (inevitable) bugs.

Finally, Our beautiful Amelia has been contacting people about co-location, we don't have anything firm back yet but we have three different proposals we're waiting on details for.

Board:

As a whole, the Board has continued to work on large org-wide issues of structure and personnel, as well as supporting and shepherding along forthcoming projects like server colocation, the Fan Culture Preservation Project, and our Elections subsite. Board member Rebecca Tushnet also gave the keynote speech at the Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property Symposium at American University School of Law co-sponsored by the OTW.

Communications:

The Communications team continues to strategize outreach. We recently added a Where To Find Us page to the "About The OTW" section of transformativeworks.org, so please come and join us on Facebook, MySpace and other venues. We have also been working to support the OTW at cons.

Content Policy:

Content Policy is preparing the additions to the ToS for posting on the AO3 website at the next scheduled code update in early May, at which point there will be a further two-week comment period before the ToS additions become effective.

Development:

After the March membership drive, members of DevMem took a few days off to bask in the knowledge that nearly 400 people donated during the drive and that we now have members in 17 nations around the world! (See our recent blog post for more information about that.) Since then, we've been working on generating documentation for civicrm, the open-source software we're now using to keep track of members and donations. We also sent a delegation to Muskrat Jamboree, a fan con in Boston in early April, where we hosted an informational panel about the org.

Documentation:

The Documentation committee has been working on our formatting for minutes and other internal documentation. We’ve continued to set up infrastructure and line ducks up in a row, setting up liaisons with more committees to streamline the documentation process and provide more direct support.

Elections:

Elections is considering options for vote tabulation, both entertaining bids for outsourcing and consulting with Webmasters about the logistics of running the voting ourselves.

Finance Update:

The Finance Committee has been running the numbers for our 2008 Annual Report: stay tuned!

Journal:

Karen Hellekson represented the Academic Journal group at the OTW informational panel held at Muskrat Jamboree on April 3, 2009. She spoke about the fan connection and urged fans and acafans to consider submitting, and she handed out the journal's most recent general call for papers (available here: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/8).

Catherine Tosenberger, the guest editor of forthcoming TWC No. 4, special Supernatural issue, was interviewed by Sequential Tart. The interview was published on April 6, 2009 (available here: http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1364). She spoke not only about SPN but also put in a great plug for TWC!

TWC has been accepted for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/). We will be inputting article metadata to facilitate dissemination of content.

Legal:

OTW staffers Kristina Busse, Francesca Coppa, Casey Fiesler, Karen Hellekson, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet all presented papers at the IP/Gender Conference at the American University School of Law on April 23-24, 2009. The event was co-sponsored by the Women in the Law Program, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, the Program on Information and Intellectual Property, and the Organization For Transformative Works.

The Legal Committee continues to provide advice and support to other Committees and the Board as needed, consulting recently on the issue of a possible legacy to the OTW. As always, we welcome queries from the public, and we attempt to respond to them promptly, as they arise.

Open Doors:

The Open Doors committee continues to work on setting up the Fan Culture Preservation Project website; we are also working on a gameplan to help preserve fan sites which will be destroyed when GeoCities goes down later this year.

Systems:

No report at this time.

Translations:

Apart from our usual translating gig we were figuring out how to restructure our teams this month, and we're also trying to streamline our translation procedure a bit. We hope this will make both our administrative work and the translators' experience a lot smoother.

We have also been staring over Elz's shoulder in fascination as she continues to code the Archive's translation interface for us; we're very excited to get to testing it soon-ish (in fact, we're in the process of setting it up! whooo!)

Last but not least a shout-out to our fabulous translators: in addition to our Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, German, Czech, Finnish and Italian teams we could also welcome Japanese and Danish to the fold this month! <3

Vidding History:

Francesca Coppa, Tisha Turk, and Rebecca Tushnet will be heading to Washington DC on May 7th to testify at the Copyright Office in support of the EFF's petition for a DMCA exemption for fair use remix artists, including vidders. More information about the upcoming hearing is here: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/hearings/2009/#may7

Vidding History members Coppa and Turk also presented vidding-related academic work at IP/Gender on April 23-24, 2009.

Volunteers:

No report at this time.

Webmasters:

We've posted the full text of OTW's reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed DMCA exemption for vidders. It's accessible in PDF or HTML format from the Test Suite of Fair Use Vids page.

More recently, we've been in discussion with Elections and Systems as we take the first steps toward setting up an Elections subsite. This will be our main project for the next few months.

Wiki:

We're still at work cleaning out policies and bugs, as well as trying to fruitfully incorporate new feedback received on the workings and content of Fanlore. Outreach is still a main goal of ours for this year, with new links forming with the RPG and filking communities recently (Francesca, thank you for the help!)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

A Post-Membership Drive Update from our Development and Membership Team

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:23:18 GMT

Hello all!

We're writing with an update on our March membership drive, at long last. It was a fabulous drive! We raised $11,142 from 396 donations: 222 members renewed their memberships, 167 new folks joined the organization as members, and the other donations were "just donations" which don't confer membership (voting rights.)

The vast majority of our members are in the United States, with the United Kingdom coming in second. We also have a fair number of members in Canada, Germany, and Australia. Other countries represented on our membership rolls include Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Timor-Leste, plus we have a handful of donors whose location is "unspecified." Wow!

Most of our donations were in the US$25 range, though many folks gave less and many gave more. (We are grateful to all of our members and supporters, regardless of the size of anyone's donation.) We're thrilled that more than two hundred of our current members renewed their memberships, and over the moon to have a hundred and sixty-seven new members! One of our tasks now is encouraging those who didn't renew their membership to do so.

If you joined the organization during our first year and have not renewed your membership, we'd love to know why and to figure out whether there's anything we can do to entice you to support the OTW again. If you are a member who didn't renew, we'd love to hear from you! Please drop us a comment on this post, or use the handy contact us form, and let us know what we could be doing better.

(Actually, whether or not you're a member who didn't renew, we'd love to hear from you. We'll do our best to answer all comments and emails, so please reach out if you have questions or suggestions for the folks in Dev/Mem!)

All in all, we are thrilled with how this drive went. Most of the money we raised will go toward the cost of colocated servers for the Archive of Our Own; the tech folks are busy researching server options, and we in DevMem are delighted to be able to tell them that we've raised this much money toward "owning the goddamned servers" at last. The rest will go toward assorted organizational costs and into the bank, for when we need it for the ongoing costs of maintaining those servers! And other costs as well, of course.

If you didn't donate during the drive, never fear; you can donate, or become a member, at any time during the year. Our next big push for donations will come in October; until then, we'll be hanging back and working on other Dev/Mem projects. Many thanks to all who donated!

- The Dev/Mem Committee of the OTW: Carla, Elizabeth, Monica, Rachel, Shoshanna, and Vera

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Geocities Closing

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:19:21 GMT

Like many fans, we are concerned about the news that GeoCities is going to close at the end of the year, especially as many older sites and fanfiction archives are housed there. As the chair of Open Doors, which is dedicated to protecting at-risk fannish projects, I can assure you that we will work out some sort of gameplan; in the interim, if you have an archive or webpage there, or if you can put us in contact with any archivists located there, please contact Open Doors through the Open Doors contact page.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.