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I. 2024 ELECTION COMING SOON
This year's election will take place from August 16-19. As there are 2 open seats and 4 candidates, the election will be contested. Voting instructions have been emailed to all eligible members. If you have not received your voting instructions by email, or if you have a different question, you can contact Elections.
Elections has posted candidates' answers to the Q&A questions on their website. Thanks to everyone who submitted questions to the candidates during the Q&A and the Candidate Chat on Discord! The transcript of that chat is available on the Elections site.
The Elections Committee asks all members of the public to be respectful towards all candidates and other volunteers when discussing or promoting the election. Please do not attempt to directly contact or harass candidates, their families, or their employers.
II. AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) stumbled into some issues at the beginning of the month with staging, the version of the Archive where new features and bug fixes are tested. Fortunately Systems was able to resolve the issue by the middle of the month. AD&T also ran into issues with their application monitoring service, which are still being worked through with the help of Legal, Volunteers & Recruiting, and Finance.
Once staging was in working order, AD&T put together a small release focused on improvements including text updates, CSS fixes, and changes to their linters and automated tests. They also posted release notes covering changes from February through May, and they coordinated with Support and Systems on announcing downtime in preparation for an Elasticsearch update.
Open Doors has made continuous progress across a range of archive imports. Meanwhile, they are developing their AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) documentation to get ready for working with fanzine publishers to import their fanzines' works.
Policy & Abuse received 2,386 tickets in June, bringing the total amount of tickets received in the first half of 2024 to 13,500 (for more information, refer to the pie chart). Additionally, some of their volunteers participated in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.
These categories reflect the subject of the complaint, and (with the exception of Offensive Content), do not indicate whether the report was upheld or rejected.
Support received 2,051 tickets in June, including a large volume of Fannish Next-of-Kin requests. Please have patience as they work through these! They also helped revise the new and improved Fannish Next-of-Kin FAQ page.
Tag Wrangling finished up another round of recruitment in July, made preparations to welcome their new volunteers, and worked on several sets of tag mapping for Open Doors. In June, wranglers handled more than 430,000 tags across over 66,100 fandoms—more than a thousand tags per wrangler!
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanhackers volunteers from Communications are looking forward to their online zine! The theme is Fandom and Friendship. Fanhackers welcome submissions in traditional format such as essays and papers alongside visual and multimedia work. Please tell your fandom friends about the project! Details on how to submit can be found on the Fanhackers website.
Fanlore held a Fandom in Color editing chat in their Discord server on July 29. You can also check out the month's highlighted pages on their Tumblr.
Legal has been responding to user queries, keeping a close eye on proposed legislation about copyright and free expression, and dealing with apps that have used OTW/AO3 trademarks in confusing ways and sites that have tried to profit from AO3 users' work.
Translation has concluded their latest recruitment round, welcoming a total of 16 translators across 12 language teams. Nearly all their teams have finished translating all platforms and news posts for this year's election—an amazing feat of hard work! They're working on getting the translated platforms uploaded and will then be posting information for voters up until the election itself.
On Twitter/X, Transformative Works and Cultures has just finished counting down their ten most cited articles since the beginning of the journal. Elsewhere, they’re disseminating a new call for papers for a special issue on Disability and preparing the upcoming publication of their annual general issue.
IV. GOVERNANCE
In July, Board successfully ran the third public Board meeting of 2024. There were 23 attendees and they received a total of 7 questions from participants, all of which were answered live during the meeting. Minutes from this meeting are available on the OTW website.
Board also finished reviewing Board Training and Recruitment related documents, researched and approved a new customer relationship management service for Board emails, and approved the Board Break & Hiatus Policy.
Board Assistants Team worked on a lot this month: ongoing projects, helping oversee the OTW Organizational Culture Roadmap, moderating a public Board meeting and more! This public meeting was the first test of asynchronous question procedures—a project researched by Board Assistant Project Specialists—and it went great!
Lots of work was cross-committee this month, including scoping and planning around external training resources, creating a template for volunteers to track their hours, and supporting various projects and policies.
Development & Membership has been catching up on shipping out donation gifts. If you've been waiting for a gift, be sure to check your email for a shipping notification (of the parcel, not fandom kind).
V. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for 3 committees and 1 subcommittee this month: Fanlore, Tag Wrangling, Volunteers & Recruiting, and Internal Complaint & Conflict Resolution.
From June 25 to July 23, Volunteers & Recruiting received 115 new requests, and completed 108, leaving them with 34 open requests.
As of July 23, 2024, the OTW has 907 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Chairs: wichard (Policy & Abuse), Kari Dayton (Webs)
New AD&T Volunteers: Bilka (Coding Volunteer)
New Board Assistants Team Volunteers: 1 Moderator
New Communications Volunteers: 1 Report Writer
New Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: Alecto Gaia, Kate G, xeno, and 1 other Moderator
New Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 Graphic Designer
New Fanlore Volunteers: 3 Chair Track Volunteers
New Translation Volunteers: Gloriosa, Marina Monto, RayboVeld, and 22 other Translators; 1 Volunteer Manager, and 1 Task Assistant
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor
Departing Committee Chairs: 1 Webs Chair
Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: dearjenna (Graphic Designer)
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: A.Heidi, Anh Pham, onwardorange, and 3 other Import Assistants
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: catchmeifyoucreon, catmisae, hematophage, Noelia, and 4 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: 2 Translators
Departing TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor
Departing Webs Volunteers: 2 Volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.