Archive of Our Own

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with petricores, who works as a Support volunteer.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I volunteer with the AO3 Support Committee, which is the team responsible for handling feedback and requests for technical assistance from AO3 users. In a nutshell, we answer a lot of questions and requests sent by users from all over the world.

Support work is highly collaborative work; we don’t have all the answers all the time, so we regularly rely on the expertise and information supplied by our coders, sysadmins, tag wranglers, and translators, to name a few.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Out of an abundance of superstitious caution, I will refrain from characterizing a “typical” week – you just never know! Our queue of Support inquiries can go from perfectly ordinary with your run-of-the-mill “I can’t log in” tickets, to a hundred reports of the same error flooding in at once (like the DDoS attack from July). Waking up and checking our volunteering tools to find such incidents is like running towards the tree on Christmas morning to check your presents, but a bit less joyous.

Special occasions aside, I typically spend a few hours per week, usually on evenings or weekends, claiming Support requests and drafting replies to them. I also beta and provide feedback on email replies drafted by other Support volunteers, and help the Accessibility, Design & Technology Committee (AD&T) with testing fixes or improvements to the Archive’s features.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I applied for the role and had my interview in spring 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic had shut everything down overnight. I was very lucky that the pandemic lockdown led to me having a lot of leisurely time on my hands, and as a result I was spending more time on reading/writing fics. When I saw the volunteer position posting, I figured why not apply and try it out? It’s funny, even though I created my AO3 account in 2013, I did not learn what the Statistics page is until I started training as a Support volunteer.

As luck would have it, I absolutely love what I do in Support. It has been a very rewarding experience. I could not have anticipated the increased amount of traffic and popularity that the Archive experienced from 2020 onwards, particularly among users from non-Anglophone countries. Even after 3 years I still think it’s so exciting and cool that I can help both English-speaking users and users who share my mother tongue to gain more out of their experience using the Archive as a bilingual person.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Due to the nature of the Archive and OTW’s operations, most of our activities must take place via text-based communications. I find the constraints of text-based communication to be the biggest challenge both when troubleshooting issues with AO3 users and when collaborating with other OTW volunteers.

I lean on my fellow Support volunteers heavily for beta reading and/or giving me suggestions on making my drafted reply easier to read and follow (especially if I need to give instructions to the user on what troubleshooting steps to try), especially since they are likely confused or frustrated already.

In a similar vein, learning people’s different communication styles within the OTW is also a key part of learning how to do this job well. As I said earlier, there is a lot of collaboration that goes into what Support does; as a volunteer, I’ve definitely had to train myself to get better at observing other volunteers’ communication style and adapting my own communication, and I do my best to communicate effectively to the specific audience via text.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I read, I write, I browse, I kudos, I squee, I comment, I re-read. I re-read stuff a lot.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

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.

In the past few weeks, the Archive of Our Own's Support Committee has been receiving a number of requests for assistance with an app that creates a paywall block after more than one hour of daily reading. We have no control over this (or any) mobile app, and do not approve of any paywalling of AO3 content. This is not the first time users have had problems with unofficial apps. For various reasons, the Archive is not developing a mobile app, so any app you may find available is unofficial and might even pose a security risk to use.

The AO3 site is always free to use through a web browser on any and all devices, including mobile devices. One of our core tenets is protecting fans and fanworks from commercial exploitation, so we don’t have ads or charge anyone to use the AO3, and we don’t approve of other people charging you money for AO3 content.

Because we haven't developed a mobile app ourselves, we are okay with individuals creating unofficial apps, provided that these apps clearly state they are unofficial, refrain from using our logos, and do not charge users for their usage. Forcing people to pay to use those apps is a violation of the AO3 Terms of Service section 1.D.5.

Please let other fans know that we are not connected to any apps they may find, and we are unable to assist them should they have issues with them. Remember AO3 is always available for free on your browser!

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.

The Common People Warehouse, an archive for Marvel Comics fanfiction of The Common People genre, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3). In this post:

• A bit of background explanation
• What this means for creators who had work(s) on The Common People Warehouse
• And what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

The Common People (TCP) was a genre of Marvel Comics fanfiction created by Kielle and Phil Foster and focusing on the ordinary people of the Marvel universe. In order to preserve and keep TCP stories available for old and new fans, the TCP Warehouse is being transferred to AO3. The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with sevenall to import the TCP Warehouse into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. We will begin importing works from the TCP Warehouse to the AO3 after December. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) on The Common People Warehouse?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work. All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors. Please contact Open Doors with your TCP Warehouse pseud(s) and email address(es), if:

1. You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the archive collection.
5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your TCP Warehouse account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the archive mod to confirm your claims.) Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:

• importing your works to the AO3
• adding your works to the new collection The Common People Warehouse

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of The Common People Warehouse on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We're excited to be able to help preserve The Common People Warehouse!

- The Open Doors team and sevenall

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on 26 December. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

I. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

The new Board members are settling in nicely and have held the first public meeting of this term. They've begun answering non-live questions in their public Discord, and minutes for this meeting will be available soon on the OTW website.

In addition, our organizational culture firm has completed its initial survey and is interviewing volunteers. Relatedly, Strategic Planning has been working with Volunteers & Recruiting on a guide to inclusive recruiting practices to share with committees as part of the Recruitment strategic goal.

II. AT THE AO3

Open Doors completed imports of What Makes the Desert Beautiful, a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fanfiction archive focused on the Nick and Greg slash pairing, and The ARC, a fanfiction archive for the TV series Primeval.

Accessibility, Design, & Technology deployed their latest release, which focused on improvements to downloads, including how PDFs are generated. Relatedly, Systems resolved some issues with download errors and made fixes to their internal monitoring. Systems' work towards Debian Bookworm continues; some internal systems are already running it, and some parts of AO3 are expected to be running it soon. Systems also introduced some new tooling to the OTW's Infrastructure as Code setup – the Archive's Cloudflare configuration is now maintained using Terraform, which makes it safer to test and deploy new rules!

In October, Policy & Abuse received 1965 tickets, while Support had a total of 1994 tickets. Support's monthly totals continue to decline slightly, but they are still getting quite a bit more messages monthly than the usual average. They continue to work on digging out from the backlog of tickets and appreciate your patience!

Elsewhere, Tag Wrangling began testing the new procedures for updating canonical tags that are not associated with any specific fandom, which hopefully will begin to reduce the backlog of support requests related to such tags. They wrangled more than 470,000 tags in more than 61,000 fandoms, which works out to more than 1,100 per active wrangler!

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

This month, Fanlore has been updating their Tumblr layout and reviewing engagement for the last year, while Translation brought their side of the membership drive to a close with 28 participating teams. Communications is testing an OTW News by email service, which we hope to provide in different languages.

November was a very full month for Legal! This month, Legal dealt with a large number of overreaching and invalid DMCA takedown notices that had been sent to Bing. These notices resulted in a number of pages being delisted from Bing without legal justification, which made it harder for Bing users to find material on the AO3. Legal is working on longer term solutions to keep this sort of thing from happening. Legal also responded to a number of user queries regarding copyright and trademark issues surrounding fanworks.

IV. GOVERNANCE

Finance filed the 2022 tax return and are in the process of finalizing the 2022 audit. Filing and reports will be available on the website soon.

Also, Development and Membership was at Y/Con in Paris in November! One Fanlore volunteer was there talking about fanfiction and online communities. Check out our social media accounts for photos – or tag us if you were there! Next up: getting ready for the 2024 event season.

V. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

From 23 October to 24 November, Volunteers & Recruiting received 183 new requests, and completed 164, leaving us with 75 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 24 November 2023, the OTW has 897 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Directors: Anh Pham (President) and Zixin Zhang (Secretary)
New Committee Chairs: Alex Johnson (Strategic Planning), cosette (Webs), dazyndara (Board Assistants Team), Paula (Support), and therealmorticia (Board Assistants Team)
New AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Fiona (Chair Trainee) and telescopicpoems (Chair Trainee)
New Communications Volunteers: Eskici (Recruitment, Training & Documentation Assistant)
New Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 Membership Data Specialist
New Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Import Assistant
New Systems Volunteers: Brian Austin (Systems Volunteer) and C. Ryan Smith (Systems Volunteer)
New Translation Volunteers: AndreaK, Joohee Lee, Junij, Marte Bergundhaugen, Nachali, Reilly, Sil, Teelee, Zara Miller, and 6 other Translators
New TWC Volunteers: Khaliah Reed, and 2 Symposium Editors

Departing Committee Chairs: Ridicully (Webs)
Departing Communications Volunteers: Eskici (Chair Assistant role only)
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 5 Social Media & Outreach Volunteers
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 2 Technical Volunteers and 2 Import Assistants
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Birdie, El, equestrianstatue, Fern, Fu, Sanctuaria, and 19 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Åse, Cel, Dan Ph, Monica Gomez, Sara N, and 6 other Translators

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.

As some readers know, 2023 had some unexpected events and the OTW needed to keep fans in the loop as to what was happening with our site stability and what steps we were taking to come back online. When this occurred, many fans did not realize that there were social media accounts they could follow to get more information.

During that time, some bad actors decided to take advantage of fans by pretending to represent us while soliciting donations during the time when our actual donation form was not accessible.

The best way to check whether a social media account is official is to visit the ‘Where to Find Us’ page at the OTW website. This lists our live accounts across all platforms. If you're subscribed to an account purporting to be us that does not appear on this page, you are not following an official account.

Official vs. Unofficial Accounts

Many people choose to subscribe to OTW news either through their social media accounts or through feed readers. It is important to check, however, if those accounts are actually ours.

On occasion, fans will set up unofficial social media accounts, either on the same platforms we use or in spaces where we have no accounts. Unofficial accounts sometimes make that status clear and sometimes they don't.

Similarly, fans on various platforms have set up RSS feeds of our news posts. These feeds are automated accounts and there is no one running them. The information may also only be available temporarily, and while they include official news, you can't reach us there.

Contacting Us

Official accounts are run by the Communications Committee. While we receive comments and questions on those platforms, these accounts are not always moderated and the platforms themselves may restrict our responses in different ways. To ensure that we receive your question or comment, it is therefore always best to get in touch with us through our contact form. Questions or comments regarding the Archive of Our Own should be sent to the Support team.

If you're not sure who to direct your question to, try Communications, and if we don't have the answer we will forward your message to the OTW team who can help you.

The OTW can be contacted in 46 languages, something which is also facilitated by using our contact forms.

Coming Soon

The Communications Committee is currently doing internal testing for a free service where you can receive our news posts directly in your email inbox. We hope to make an announcement early next year, offering details about how the service will work.

Spread the Word!

It is tremendously helpful to the OTW when fans help us to share information, either about our organization and projects or particular news releases. So please, help us reduce misinformation and boost relevant content by pointing people to our official accounts.

You can also let other fans know what sorts of information they can find at our website, and that they can reach us through our contact forms. And if you come across unofficial accounts which are not listed as such, do let us know.

Thanks for your help!

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.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Mel Stanfill, who volunteers as a journal editor for our journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC).

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

If we think of the part of the OTW's mission about preserving the "fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity," then what Transformative Works and Cultures does as an academic journal is foster gaining greater understanding of that economy, values, expression, community, history, and identity (and more) by studying it in a scholarly way.

Back when the journal was founded, there was no venue that really specialized in publishing about fan culture or transformative works--people could write about it in various other media studies or internet studies types of journals, etc. but that was dicey because there was much less recognition that this was a valuable field and object of study. So by publishing 37 issues over the years, particularly the peer reviewed articles (though there are also other genres like Symposium essays and Book Reviews that we publish), we've both contributed to making that knowledge available (particularly, providing access, which is of course another aspect of the OTW) and also helping form a foundation for people to get published elsewhere too by helping broader academia recognize this area of study.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

It's not very glamorous, I'm afraid. I do the initial editorial review of new articles that come in to see if they are ready to go to peer review. When we have something ready to go out, I assign anonymous academic peer reviewers (meaning that the reviewers don't know the identity of the author whose work they review, and the author doesn't know the identity of the people who reviewed them) based on the subject matter of the essay.

If some reviews have come back I collate them into an email to the author and emphasize key points for their revision. And then once articles have been revised to the point that the peer reviewers say they are ready to accept, I send them to the production staff who handles things like copyediting, layout, etc. And then there's a lot of email: from people curious about the journal, reminders for peer reviewers, communicating with guest editors, troubleshooting problems that come up, etc. And I share all of that work with my co-editor Poe Johnson.

You first got involved in the OTW by guest editing issue 15 of Transformative Works and Cultures in 2014. Years later, how did you make the leap to becoming coeditor?

I guess it depends how you count getting involved. I did publish with TWC before that back in 2011. But in terms of moving into a volunteer type role, the special issue was it. And then, how did I get the job? Well I applied when there was a solicitation. But why did I apply? The flippant answer is that former editor Kristina Busse, who is a colleague of mine, had joked a couple of times over the years that she was going to make me take over after her. But when the role actually came open, I applied because I've been invested in the field of fan studies for more than 15 years at this point, going back to starting graduate school in 2006 (before, even, with applying to grad school).

So I've been publishing in it and supporting new scholars and helping the field grow, and trying to push the boundaries to consider topics that weren't really studied when I first took them up, like whiteness and labor. Applying to edit the journal was putting my money where my mouth is, in a way, taking on the labor of building the field at a bigger scale. And when I was considering that, I thought about who was somebody who both had a different perspective and interests than me but shared that value of wanting to help the field be the best it could be, and I thought of Poe. And he was interested and we applied and we were picked.

What has been your biggest challenge since becoming TWC coeditor?

In terms of hours spent, the Chinese Fandom special issue that we have coming up in December 2023 has hands down been the hardest thing, because of the challenges of finding peer reviewers who are knowledgeable. Part of the reason to do the issue in the first place was because there's kind of a bifurcation where the existing work in that area mostly isn't happening in fan studies or in US-based journals at all, so it's great that we're doing it. But we don't have a ready group of people qualified to review it, so there has been a lot of cold emailing to try to make that happen.

Honorable mention goes to the ways fans sometimes try to drag the journal into fandom fights. That has been particularly contentious about the question of fandom antis, with people trying to use our publications to score points in fandom fights or showing up in our inbox to demand we justify why we published something or explain peer review. We like to be read by fans, but it's hard sometimes when there's such a disjuncture between how scholarly publishing works and the everyday stuff fans are doing.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I'm a fan fiction writer and reader when I have the time. And I hang around on Tumblr. As a professor I work pretty long hours so I don't get to do it as much as I used to, but I do like to when I can.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

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.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS UPDATES

The new Board of Directors members have been hard at work! They’ve finalized a contract with an organizational culture firm who will be beginning work soon. This is the first major step to improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at the OTW. Board has also selected the first chairs for the Board Assistants Team committee, a new group who will assist Board with administrative and scheduling tasks.

In addition, Board held a closed meeting to vote on officers for this term, so please welcome Anh Pham as President and Zixin Zhang as Secretary! Our Treasurer, Yuechiang Luo, will be continuing in her role. Finally, the next public meeting will be held Sunday, November 12th at 1:00-2:00 AM UTC (what time is that for me?). Board will be modifying the usual structure and rules to make this one go more smoothly; more info on that can be found in the Board Discord server.

II. AT THE AO3

Open Doors announced the new import of fanworks from print zines as part of the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP), in partnership with fan-run preservation project Zinedom. The FSHP is still finding its feet in many ways, but is making good progress, and it’s wonderful to see readers welcoming these older fanworks! Open Doors also completed the import of Echoes from the West, a digital archive for Saiyuki fanfiction. October has been a particularly busy month for Open Doors, which hopes to bring you news of more completed imports soon.

It was an exciting October for Tag Wrangling, which is completing preparations for the first few rounds of testing for No Fandom wrangling procedures. Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) provided an extremely welcome bug fix involving the autocomplete when fandoms were renamed—and an even more welcome update to the Tag Search, so now wranglers can sort by use count. In September, wranglers handled more than 449,000 tags across over 60,400 fandoms – an average of more than 1,100 tags per active wrangler!

Support received a total of 2,007 tickets in September—down from the previous two months but still quite a bit above its usual average. Meanwhile, Policy & Abuse received 2,560 tickets in September and is excited to welcome its new recruits, and Systems continued to work with Support and AD&T on resolving some lingering issues with user sessions.

III. MEMBERSHIP AND OUTREACH

Development & Membership held its semiannual membership drive in conjunction with Communications and Translation, who translated the news posts into 28 languages. We’re very grateful to the 6,773 donors from 74 countries who donated a total of US$192,743! Before the drive, Finance also released an update on the OTW’s 2023 budget.

Elsewhere, Development & Membership’s table at World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu, China, was a success! Photos were shared on OTW's social media – tag us on your own photos!. We hope you grabbed some cute stickers or exchanged amazing fanwork recommendations. Stay tuned for our next adventure - it may be nearby 👀

Finally, Communications released a report on the OTW’s 16th anniversary survey, which got 78,258 responses! Make sure to check out the survey report if you haven’t read it yet.

IV. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

Fanlore celebrated an audio-themed month, Podtober, highlighting fannish podcasts, podcast fandoms, and podfic! It held a fun and friendly Podtober-themed editing chat in its Discord server and continued to feature audio-themed articles on social media for the rest of the month.

Legal also has great news: in October, the Copyright Office approved OTW Legal’s petition to the U.S. Copyright Office to renew the “vidders’ exemption” to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. This exemption allows creators to rip material from DVDs, Blu-Rays, and streams in order to make high-quality fair uses of that material in noncommercial videos such as vids and OVAs. The exemption renewal process happens every three years, so let’s hear it for three more years of wonderful vids and OVAs! Also in October, Legal met with allies regarding pending copyright policy issues.

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

From 26 September to 22 October, Volunteers & Recruiting received 133 new requests, and completed 162, leaving us with 54 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 22 October 2023, the OTW has 922 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Directors: Zixin Zhang, Qiao Chu, Kathryn Soderholm, Jennifer Haynes, Anh Pham
New Fanlore Volunteers: Megs Fretty and Silarona (Graphic Designers)
New Open Doors Volunteers: ArcadianMaggie, Belea, Hesandi, AuroraT, Amanda Hartley, Xochitl Kuu, Kayla G, Kira Q, and 4 other Administrative Volunteers
New Policy & Abuse Volunteers: Chrome, PS, Aster, Dae, JanB, xenosimp, Intyalote, and 2 other Volunteers
New Strategic Planning Volunteers: Adriftthen, powerchords, and 1 other Volunteer
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: peaandsea (Senior Volunteer) and 1 other Senior Volunteer
New Webs Volunteers: 2 Volunteers

Departing Committee Chairs: Kate Sanders (Strategic Planning)
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: petricores (Social Media & Outreach)
Departing Finance Volunteers: Nikki Bird (Financial Analyst)
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Import Assistant
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: alandwithnoname and 2 other Volunteers
Departing Support Volunteers: JR and Maine
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Alora, alandwithnoname, and 2 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: makepeacelovejoy (Volunteer Manager) and 3 Translators
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Webs Volunteers: 1 Volunteer

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.

Our October Membership Drive has ended, and we are glad to announce that we have added 6,113 members in the last few days! Contributions have been made from 74 countries for a total of US$192,743.11.

Although the membership drive has ended for now, you can still become a member at any time of year. And by joining before June 30, 2024 at 23:59 UTC you will be eligible to vote in our annual OTW Board of Directors elections in August next year.

As our Development & Membership team is already hard at work mailing out your thank-you gifts, we want to say how meaningful your support has been for the many years we’ve been here, whether financial, through volunteering, or by sending us encouragement. This year has brought unexpected difficulties, but we’re glad to have come through it together.

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.

After the Archive of Our Own (AO3), Fanlore, and our donation form went down due to the DDoS attacks in July, many fans responded by donating in the following months. We greatly appreciate both your generosity and your desire to respond to the attacks with this show of support. We received a 35% bump in donations in July and August of 2023 compared to July and August in 2022.

That's why, during our usual October membership drive, we want to encourage you to become a member of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) — the nonprofit organization behind AO3 and Fanlore, among other projects — and continue to be involved. Our drive donation banner on AO3 will thus be tracking new members and not money raised.

What is OTW membership?

You can become an OTW member with a donation of US$10 or more. Membership will allow you to vote for candidates seeking to join the Board of Directors—the OTW's governing board. You have until June 30, 2024 to become a member if you would like to vote in next year's election, which will be held in August.

• In order to become a member, you must select "Yes" to the question at the end of the donation form.
• You cannot become a member by donating US$1 ten times: it must be at least US$10 in a single donation.
• While employer matching cannot be used for membership, fans in the U.S. might be able to double their contributions that way. (Contact your HR department to find out if this is an option for you!)

Being an OTW member is not the same as having an AO3 account.

Your OTW membership has no connection to any account you may have at AO3 or any of our other projects, and an OTW membership does not provide access to any online space. This was a deliberate choice made by the OTW early on, to ensure that your reading history, works you've created, and edits you've made on Fanlore aren't tied to your wallet name or payment information.

But besides being able to vote in the OTW Board elections, you get cool merchandise if you've been a member for multiple consecutive years.

And speaking of cool merchandise, here are some new thank-you gifts that donors can receive:

AO3 pin is 1.5 inches/3.81 centimeters long

Contracted Unified English Braille sticker reading "I [heart] my fandoms" is 3 inches by 2.5 inches/7.62 by 6.35 centimeters

These thank-you gifts start at US$40. You can also set up a recurring donation and save towards the gift of your choice. Instructions on how to set this up will be included in your donation receipt.

Find out more

If you have any questions about membership and donation, either check out our FAQ or contact Development & Membership.

We appreciate all your donations, volunteering, encouraging messages and fun memes. And for those who would like to help spread the word about our membership drive, use #otwmembers in your posts! That will help us spot your messages and signal boost.

Thanks for your support and we hope to have more of you join us!

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.

Are you fluent in a language other than English? Do you have an interest in preserving fannish history, wiki editing, or writing help documentation? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Fanlore Policy & Admin Volunteers - closing 1 November 2023 at 23:59 UTC
• Translation Volunteers - closing 1 November 2023 at 23:59 UTC

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Fanlore Policy & Admin Volunteers

Fanlore's Policy & Admin volunteers are responsible for dealing with all the behind the scenes stuff to ensure that Fanlore runs smoothly. We respond to questions and complaints; shape Fanlore's policies, tutorials, and guidelines; and assist Fanlore gardeners and other editors. No extensive experience is required—just a strong interest in documenting and preserving fandom, good communication skills, and a willingness to work with a team and further Fanlore's mission. Join us!

Applications are due 1 November 2023

Translation Volunteers

If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you're fluent in a language other than English, if you’re passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!

Translation volunteers help make the OTW and its projects accessible to a wider global audience. We work on translating content by the OTW and its projects from English to other languages, such as site pages, news posts, AO3 FAQs and AO3 Support emails. (However, we do not translate fanworks.)

We really need volunteers who speak Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, Estonian, Filipino, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish and Welsh—but help with other languages would be much appreciated. If you're interested in starting a team for a language we don't have yet, you're very welcome to!

(Please note that our Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Hebrew, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese teams are not accepting new members at this time.)

Applicants will be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.

Applications are due 1 November 2023

Apply at the volunteering page!

If you have further questions, please contact us.

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.

On September 5, 2023 the OTW launched a user survey to coincide with its 16th anniversary. The purpose was to identify locations used by fans for fandom activities so as to better understand where they might be encountering and sharing news. In compliance with our Strategic Plan's Vision Statement, we also used this survey to establish a baseline of fans' familiarity with the OTW and its projects.

The survey asked between 16 to 35 ticky box and radio button questions (depending on what answers were given) and was open for 16 days, closing on September 21. During that time the survey was accessed 90,607 times. This may indicate that some people visited the form several times, either to start and stop a survey response or to read the opening page.

Our survey platform designated the consent form as Q1, so survey questions began with Q2. Of the 79,222 respondents to the consent form, 78,258 said Yes (98.78%) they consented to take the survey and 965 (1.22%) said no, at which point those users did not continue with the survey.

The survey report covers the following:

1) How many responses there were to each question
2) What number and percentage of respondents chose each answer, and
3) How many people skipped the question.

Below are a few examples of responses from the report:

Q2: How long have you been active in online fandom spaces?

78,258 survey takers received this question.
77,358 answered it.
1,865 exited the survey at this point.

Less than a year - 1,964 (2.54%)
1-2 years - 6,563 (8.48%)
3-5 years - 20,369 (26.33%)
6-10 years - 25,105 (32.45)
11-15 years - 13,040 (16.86%)
16-25 years - 8,690 (11.23%)
26-30 years - 1,257 (1.62%)
Over 30 years - 370 (0.48%)

Q26: Have you ever downloaded a fanwork from Archive of Our Own/AO3?

67,544 survey takers received this question.
67,475 answered it
69 exited the survey at this point.

Yes - 46,574 (69.02%)
No - 20,901 (30.98%)

Visit this link to access the rest of the report.

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.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Anh, who recently became a member of our Board of Directors.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

Disclaimer: since being elected to the OTW Board in the summer of 2023, what I do now in September 2023 is quite different from what I did as an OTW volunteer previously. I imagine it will be an ever-evolving process, even after October.

I am a Fanlore Social Media & Outreach volunteer. Fanlore is an OTW project – a wiki with a mission of fannish history preservation that anyone can easily contribute to, run by fans and for fans. Our Social Media & Outreach team works with our in-house Graphic Designers to promote Fanlore on social media, particularly Tumblr and X/Twitter. I am also an Open Doors Import Assistant, whose tasks revolve around helping Open Doors volunteers with archive imports, such as searching AO3 for duplicate fanworks or manually posting fanworks from an archive backup to AO3.

As I've mentioned before, I'm also one of the newly elected OTW Board members; training for the Board is still ongoing so I'm learning the ropes. From what I've seen so far, Board members take turns handling email duty – making sure that incoming emails are properly categorised and labelled depending on content and urgency – and sometimes we need to vote on certain requests. We also have meetings with committee chairs. The Board typically holds public meetings on Discord four times per year, with one specifically being after the election for Board turnover. At the moment of writing this, we are in the process of setting a date for our October meeting. I'm looking forward to attending, this time as one of the sitting Board members *wink*!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

For Open Doors, depending on the period, we may receive both urgent and non-urgent tasks. On Sundays, my schedule is usually free enough for me to join one of our work parties – Open Doors folks agree to be online at the same time and chat while doing our tasks. During these parties, folks may ask for help with one thing or another; sometimes it's just all chatting. At other times, I may help with searching for duplicate fanworks on AO3 when I'm available, typically on Monday evenings.

For Fanlore, we have several different rosters and deadlines for dividing tasks amongst volunteers. I often collect all the tasks I need to finish in a week and tackle them all in one or two evenings. In contrast to Open Doors tasks – which I can do sporadically in my free time – I find myself tackling Fanlore tasks more productively if I have a clear objective and deadline.

My typical week as a volunteer since September looks kinda like this, in no particular order:

• Follow policy discussions on the internal chat tool
• "Chat" with my friends about the OTW 🐧
• If my schedule permits, attend the Fanlore meeting – complete some Fanlore tasks; attend one of the Open Doors work parties – complete some Open Doors tasks
• Continue Board training
• Socialise with my OTW friends, and help with tag translation on VoldeChat

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually mentioned this in one of my candidate posts for the OTW 2023 election. I had wanted to volunteer for the Organisation since 2020, but the positions that interested me often caught me when I was in the middle of something. For example, I skipped at least 4 Tag Wrangling calls for volunteers because I was in the process of: being laid off, moving to the other side of the country, applying for new job(s), or more recently, running for Board!

Then, in 2022, Fanlore's call for volunteers went out, and I really wanted to add OTW volunteering to my resumé. Welp, it all started because I wanted to show off some internet hobbies and volunteering (for a nonprofit founded in 2007 that has always been remote-work-based) on my job application. I also had a vague idea about trying to join the OTW Board of Directors in the future, preferably after one to two years of volunteering, so that I could give back to the Organisation. A letter of reference written with the official OTW letterhead™ signed by committee chairs had sounded cool af for my down-to-earth job application package, because fandom is such a big part of my life. Adding the OTW Board of Directors would have made it certified BAMF.

But life seldom works the way we imagine. Never would I have predicted that my plans would come to fruition so soon, with my original timeline out of the window since May. If my life was a 'time travel ruin-it' fic, I'd go back in time and smack my-2022-naive-self for even thinking that running for the OTW Board of Directors election was 'cool'. Spoiler alert: it’s not, it’s not cool at all.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Nightmare. And I don't mean it metaphorically, or rhetorically, or poetically or theoretically or any other fancy way. I had a nightmare about/during the OTW election, no joke. People would tell you that this is just volunteering work: you can commit what you can, how you can, and you can leave whenever if it's too much, et cetera. But my lack of sleep is real, my exhaustion is real, my stressful weeks of watching something I've grown to love go up in flames – as long-standing problems within the Organisation reached a boiling point over the summer – is absolutely real. I've seen fellow volunteers, some of them my friends, share the same suffering. It baffles me that as a registered nonprofit for more than a decade, the OTW still lacks several necessary systems to protect our volunteers.

Again, I'm still learning the ropes around Board work, but I can sense the path to rebuild trust within the Organisation – between volunteers and people in leadership positions, as well as trust from outside user bases and members toward the OTW – is going to take time, effort, and be long and challenging. I also want to echo my previous discussion about Board work and how much a singular Board member can accomplish regarding structural changes within the OTW.

Fortunately, I'm not working alone; there are fellow volunteers and newly elected Board members who are trying to achieve change. I hope that, by being on the Board, I can help inspire and facilitate positive changes, plus maintain discussions and movements surrounding worthy causes, such as the racism issues within the OTW and improvements regarding transparency in both internal and external communication.

What fannish things do you like to do?

My friends often joke about me being a person who enjoys suffering creatively, several times over. I started drawing fanart in primary school, and I posted my first fanfic on a Manga-Anime forum when I was a teenager. I also dipped my toes in fan translation when I was in high school and started learning how to make fanvids/fansubs when I was a freshman in university.

Sadly, procrastination is my best-frenemy, so the only thing I can brag about nowadays is my privated-since-2015ish WordPress blog with nearly 1 million views, where I posted all my fan translations of C-novels and fanfic. I still translate fanworks on occasion, but I'm a byelingual – when you speak (more than) two languages but slowly lose vocabulary in all of them – so I either orphan-ed or anon-ed my translated fanworks on AO3.

I love crossover and crack/rarepairs, so I mostly create fanworks for these out-of-nowhere ships that nobody ships but me and two other people on [insert the social media platforms I use but stay between me and Cthulhu].

I love Fanlore though, especially the part about building and expanding Fanlore articles about my favourite characters and ships, or on very rare occasions – favourite fandoms. One thing I have to confess: I've 'spite-edited' certain article(s) on Fanlore 120+ times because it's about something I love and I want to prop it to the sky and back. Now, I just realised that apparently my flickering self-restraint and my spiteful energy are the two major forces behind my motivation, and sometimes obsession, with certain things, welp.

Also, in case I haven't made myself clear, I obviously love love LOVE reading fanfic. Please shower me with your crackiest crossover/rarepair fic recs, thank you. I and my Cthulhu bookmark keeper will be apocalyptically grateful.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

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.

Would you like to wrangle AO3 tags? Can you read and translate from Spanish or Portuguese to English? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Tag Wrangling Volunteer - closing 18 October 2023 at 23:59 UTC [or after 110 applications]
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Portuguese) - closing 18 October 2023 at 23:59 UTC [or after 30 applications]
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Spanish) - closing 18 October 2023 at 23:59 UTC [or after 30 applications]

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive, whether that's Bakugou Katsuki/Todoroki Shouto romance, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter with angst, G-rated Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam fluff, or Jeon Jungkook & Kim Taehyung | V Are Childhood Friends.

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role, we’re currently looking for wranglers for specific fandoms only, which will change each recruitment round. Please see the application for which fandoms are in need.

Wranglers need to be fluent in English but we welcome applicants who are also fluent in other languages, especially af Soomaali (Somali), Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Filipino, Italiano (Italian), Polski (Polish), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), Русский (Russian), Українська (Ukrainian),ไทย (Thai) and 中文 (Chinese - we welcome all dialects)—help with other languages would be much appreciated!

Applications are due 18 October 2023 [or after 110 applications]

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Portuguese)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive, whether that's Bakugou Katsuki/Todoroki Shouto romance, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter with angst, G-rated Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam fluff, or Jeon Jungkook & Kim Taehyung | V Are Childhood Friends.

If you're a fluent Portuguese speaker who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Portuguese (we welcome all dialects!). The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Portuguese into English.

Applications are due 18 October 2023 [or after 30 applications]

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Spanish)

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive, whether that's Bakugou Katsuki/Todoroki Shouto romance, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter with angst, G-rated Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam fluff, or Jeon Jungkook & Kim Taehyung | V Are Childhood Friends.

If you're a fluent Spanish speaker who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role we’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Spanish (we welcome all dialects!). The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Spanish into English.

Applications are due 18 October 2023 [or after 30 applications]

Apply at the volunteering page!

If you have further questions, please contact us.

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.

Last year, the OTW Open Doors Committee announced several changes to its Fan Culture Preservation Project, including the creation of the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP). The FSHP is a partnership with fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.

Since unveiling the project, Open Doors has been hard at work streamlining its workflows for the FSHP and trialing them on zine fanworks. While Open Doors has not yet begun working with any publishers to import entire fanzines, its FSHP volunteers and import assistants have been busy scanning, transcribing, and importing fanworks whose creators had previously given permission to Zinedom to import them to AO3.

Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.

As of September 2023, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:

• Alpha Continuum
• Archives
• As I Do Thee
• Before the Glory
• Computer Playback
• Energize!
• Enterprise Incidents
• Fantasia
• Fantazy
• Farthest Star
• Fesarius
• Final Frontier
• Folk Songs For Folk Who Ain't Even Been Yet
• Galactic Discourse
• Interphase
• It Takes Time on Impulse
• K/S Relay
• Kraith Collected
• Maine(ly) Trek
• Matter/Antimatter
• Menagerie
• Metamorphosis
• Neutral Zone Outpost
• Obsc'zine
• Off the Beaten Trek
• One Trek Mind
• Organia
• Pegasus
• Pure Maple Syrup
• R & R
• Relay
• Risk
• Stardate
• Syndizine
• Ten-Thirteen
• T'hy'la
• The Holmesian Federation
• The Other Side of Paradise
• Paladin
• The Paladins Affair
• The Price and the Prize
• The Sensuous Vulcan
• The Weight Collected
• Warped Space
• Zebra Three
For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the previous announcement post. If you'd like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee. We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips. Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers! - The Open Doors team

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on October 23. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

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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.

I. MILESTONES!

The OTW got to celebrate its 16th anniversary month with a new milestone at its Archive of Our Own project! On September 18th the 60,000th fandom was canonized by Tag Wrangling. That fandom is Kołysanka | Lullaby (2010) which comes to us courtesy of Fandom Kombat. In August, more than 550,000 tags were wrangled, which works out to more than 1,250 per active Tag Wrangler.

OTW's anniversary was also marked by a survey which was accessed 90,607 times. The survey ran from September 5 - 21. The Communications Committee is at work creating a public report on the results, which should be released in October. The committee also completed work on the OTW's 2022 Annual Report.

II. AT THE AO3

Open Doors announced the import of Between the Lines a JAG fanfiction archive. They also completed the import of the Weir/McKay Fanfiction Archive, a fanfiction archive for the Stargate: Atlantis ship Rodney McKay/Elizabeth Weir.

Policy and Abuse received 1876 new tickets in August and Support tickets remain very high – 3198 tickets in August, which is nearly twice what they receive in an average month. We appreciate your patience as the Support team works on these!

III. MORE PROJECT NEWS

TWC released No. 40, a general issue, on September 15. The next issue of TWC, No. 41, is a special issue titled “Chinese Fandoms”. It will appear on December 15th, 2023.

Fanlore's Stub September editing challenge was a big success! 38 participants completed at least one task, and 23 completed all five. Join in to their audio fandom themed month, Podtober, this month!

Legal joined allies in opposing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the U.S. and urged users to do the same! In addition to the U.S. laws discussed above, Legal has also been paying close attention to the UK Online Safety Bill, which passed recently. The UK Online Safety Bill—under the interpretations of that bill that they believe are reasonable and likely—will not affect the AO3, but is likely to make life difficult for some other fan spaces when it goes into effect. Our Legal team will continue to watch enforcement actions and trends carefully to see how authorities interpret the bill.

IV. GOVERNANCE

Board has continued to be busy training incoming Board members! They have approved a few Finance requests this month, and are gearing up for an upcoming Board meeting. Board has also begun talking with a potential DEI consulting firm, and are excited to continue moving forward with this project.

Meanwhile Strategic Planning is in the process of contacting chairs and leads to check their progress as the OTW is getting close to the 3 month deadline in the current strategic plan.

Development and Membership is setting up for the October Drive. They have new gifts in the works and can’t wait to show everyone! While they did not have any events this past month, October is Worldcon: the World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu, China! Our local volunteers will be representing the OTW there with a table, and have stickers based on Chinese Fandom slang. If you are attending, please tag the OTW in your photos!

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

In addition to recruiting externally for the Strategic Planning committee this month, Volunteers & Recruiting started work on the OTW's 2023 Still Willing To Serve campaign and finalised selection of a conflict management tool. The committee also contacted the first batch of external HR companies, and are currently scheduling the first round of meetings.

From 25 August to 25 September, Volunteers & Recruiting received 201 new requests, and completed 166, leaving us with 123 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 25 September 2023, the OTW has 924 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Committee Chairs: Joanna Pernick (Fanlore) and Noah A (Fanlore)
New Communications Volunteers: hheyhalley (Graphics Volunteer)
New Open Doors Volunteers: Bella Irvine (Import Assistant) and one Open Doors Chair Assistant
New Systems Volunteers: Albert Pedersen
New Translation Volunteers: Parul Hunnargikar, Veronika Kathi, Anna Zervos, Maria G., and 3 other Translators

Departing Committee Chairs: Rebecca Sentance (Fanlore)
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Synnie
Departing Communications Volunteers: 1 Chair Assistant
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Social Media & Outreach and 5 Graphic Designers
Departing Legal Volunteers: 1 Intern
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Bella Irvine (Administrative Volunteer)
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 12 Volunteers
Departing Support Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Systems Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Dhobi ki Kutti, Autumn, ladymarianor, Lisette, gecko, and 14 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Ridicully (Volunteer Manager) and 4 Translators
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 1 Volunteer

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.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Brian Austin, who volunteers as a coder for our Accessibility, Design & Technology committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I’m a coding volunteer with the AD&T (Accessibility, Design & Technology) committee. We’re responsible for writing the software that runs AO3, including adding new features and squashing pesky bugs. We also test changes to the Archive’s code before they go live to users to make sure what we’ve written does what we expect it to, and doesn’t have unexpected side-effects.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Most often, I will either be writing code or testing changes before they go out to the production version of the Archive.

When I write code, either to add new features or fix old bugs, I start by looking through the AO3 Jira backlog for issues that are high priority, involve familiar parts of the code, or just sound interesting. Once I’ve found something to work on, I’ll tinker around on my laptop until things are ready for another volunteer or community contributor to review and incorporate their feedback.

For testing, I start in the same place: Jira. I use a filter to find issues that need to be tested before they go out to the Archive and go through the steps issue writers have created to test the changes. Exactly what this looks like depends on the changes; one recent example involved creating a work with loads of pipes (|) to make sure the word count doesn’t include them.

I sometimes review code as well, both to help when the more senior folks are super busy and to learn more about how Rails (the web framework the AO3 uses) works.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I started out as a community contributor after a suggestion from a friend (the same one who got me into fanworks). At the time, I was looking to contribute to an open source project and do something a little bit different than the code I wrote at work.

After about a year of writing code as a community contributor – and submitting a design proposal for a feature I really wanted – Accessibility, Design & Technology co-chair sarken messaged me to ask if I would like to join in a more official capacity. I had been wanting to get more involved, so it was an easy decision!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

In some ways, writing code for the AO3 is a bit different than in a corporate setting. For example, “spinning up a new service to do X” is not as easy when you can’t push a button in AWS and “magically” get more computing resources or another database. That has an impact on how some features get designed, but so far it’s been a fun way to push myself to think differently.

What fannish things do you like to do?

Read lots and lots of fanfic! I’ve bonded with several friends by sharing different fics, and I may have a slight problem with subscribing to many WIPs. I read works across several fandoms, but most consistently works that take Obi-Wan Kenobi and give him a big metaphorical hug because, wow, Legends is rough to that poor soul. Check, Please! also has a special place in my heart for getting me into fandom in the first place.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

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.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has been much in the news lately, and OTW Legal has been receiving inquiries from understandably concerned users. We thought it would be worthwhile to provide some information on KOSA and also a rash of other bad internet bills that have been proposed around the U.S. It’s been, unfortunately, a busy summer – and now that Congress is back in session it’s time to take action!

The tl;dr is that the OTW and AO3 are not currently implicated by KOSA and many of the other bills because of our nonprofit status (most of the proposed laws only apply to for-profit institutions). This means the operations of the OTW and the AO3 wouldn’t be directly impacted by these bills. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t reason to be concerned just generally about these bills and the internet environment they would create, so, if you’re in the U.S., you can contact your elected representatives. More information below!

KOSA

KOSA is presented as a bill “to protect the safety of children on the internet,” but that’s not what it accomplishes. Instead, the bill would basically make “covered platforms” liable if they fail to design their platforms to prevent users under the age 18 from exposure to a wide amount of content designated as harmful to children. The AO3 is not a covered platform under this bill, but lots of platforms relied on by kids and fans are for-profit and would be affected by KOSA.

There are a number of concerns about the bill:

First, the content that must be kept away from minors is often vaguely defined. This will inevitably lead to censorship as platforms will err on the side of blocking information to avoid liability.

Second, because platforms only have to avoid exposure to minors, this encourages platforms to verify the ages of all of their users – conduct that would detrimentally affect the ability to be anonymous or pseudonymous online.

Third, it isn’t actually the platforms who get to decide whether the content is harmful to kids; rather, the bill would leave this decision up to the Federal Trade Commission and the individual states. Given that many states have begun advancing theories that information about racism, sexism, sexual and gender identities, and reproductive health is all harmful to children, this could result in widespread censorship of such information under this law.

Sponsors and supporters of this bill have stated publicly that they see it as an anti-LGBTQ+ measure and that if it passes,they intend to use it to discourage online communication that would help young LGBTQ+ people.

Finally, it’s likely that the censorship this bill encourages would affect not just minors but all internet users, as age verification is notoriously difficult online and covered platforms might therefore strive to be cautious and censor all such information to avoid liability.

OTW Legal has directly communicated its opposition to this Bill to Congress. But there is more you can do. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more detailed information about this bill. It also explains how you can oppose it. Teen Vogue also has a good write-up of the bill. You can also read the text of the bill for yourself.

Other Bad Bills Around the Country

This summer has unfortunately been a really active one for states quickly passing a number of troubling internet laws, and there are still more in the pipeline. There are also some other bad proposed federal laws floating around. Many of these laws are briefly summarized below. If you’re a resident of one of the states below, you can also make your voice heard to your state representatives. Bad Internet Bills has a lot of great resources to help you get involved in protesting these bills. Further information is provided below.

1. Federal EARN IT Act and STOP CSAM Act: The EARN IT Act isn’t really new, in that it first showed up in 2020. It wasn’t popular and it was dropped but now it’s back. The bill claims to be about the sexual exploitation of children, but it is worded broadly in such a way as to threaten online privacy and encourage censorship of marginalized communities. In this way, it is very similar to the STOP CSAM Act. Both bills would impose liability on websites for containing certain material, even without that websites’ knowledge, the acts will encourage the same sort of over-policing and censorship that KOSA would promote, probably aimed at speech about reproductive health, gender identity, and sex and sexuality. Also, since the liability could be imposed even when the websites didn’t know any material was there, it encourages websites to proactively scan all content, creating an atmosphere of surveillance on internet platforms and driving platforms out of business if they can’t afford to do that kind of monitoring. Here, too, OTW Legal has communicated our opposition to these bills, but you can help. You can read more about the EARN IT Act’s problems; the STOP CSAM Act’s problems from the EFF; and you can read the texts of both bills. There is also some information on how you can oppose the EARN IT Act and the STOP CSAM Act.

2. Federal RESTRICT Act: You may have heard the RESTRICT Act referred to as a “TikTok ban.” Among other things, it provides the executive branch with broad powers to take actions to mitigate national security risks posed by internet services with any ties to foreign adversaries. While the OTW and AO3 do not fit the definition for such a service, fans may be interested in the statute because of the free speech implications on their continuing use of TikTok, for instance. Because the statute is vaguely worded to permit executive prohibition in poorly defined circumstances, its future impact beyond TikTok could be great. Find out how to oppose the RESTRICT Act.

3. Federal Cooper Davis Act: This act would require social media platforms and other providers of internet services to report to the government certain transactions suspected to involve fentanyl, methamphetamine, and other counterfeit controlled substances. The reporting requirements, which would include user identity and location, kick in when the platform has a reasonable belief that a controlled substance transaction might be planned. In theory, this sounds good. In practice, though, this raises privacy concerns and also encourages platforms to monitor user communications to avoid possible liability for failure to report. Such monitoring would likely place disproportionate attention on the communications of people of color and other marginalized communities. You can find out how to oppose the Cooper Davis Act.

4. New Jersey A5069: New Jersey is considering a KOSA-like bill prohibiting practices by social media platforms that cause harm to children. While the law would not affect the OTW because of its nonprofit status, it carries similar harmful implications as KOSA. The bill has passed the New Jersey Assembly but is still under consideration in the New Jersey Senate. If you are a New Jersey resident, you can voice your opposition to the bill by contacting your state senator..

5. Maryland’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act: Maryland is considering a law that would require businesses providing online services not to do anything detrimental to a child. As has been noted, such a vaguely-defined term can be wielded as a censorship tool that stifles online communication. It doesn’t apply to nonprofits like the OTW. If you are a Maryland resident you can contact your representatives about this bill.

6. California’s SB-680: This proposed bill is similar to KOSA, in that it makes social media platforms liable for designing services that cause harm. Again, this law would not affect the OTW because it doesn’t apply to nonprofits. The bill is currently being debated and has not yet passed. If you’re in California, you can voice your opposition to the bill by contacting your local representative.

7. California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act: This bill passed last year but has not yet gone into effect. Similar to the Maryland bill described above, it requires businesses providing online services not to do anything detrimental to a child. Like Maryland’s bill, this bill does not affect the OTW as it does not apply to nonprofits. The bill, has been challenged in court.

8. Utah’s Social Media Regulation Acts: Utah has recently passed a bill that requires social media companies, starting next year, to enact age verification on all accounts, require parental consent for minors under the age of 18 to be on social media, provide parents or guardians full access to all social media accounts held by a minor, and block access by minors to social media between 10:30pm and 6:30am, among other requirements. Obviously this bill has a number of troubling implications, and it can be interpreted to apply to the AO3 (although we would argue that it shouldn’t). The bill has already been passed but Utah is accepting input so that may be something concerned users can participate in.

9. Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act: This recently passed bill would require social media companies, starting next year, to require parental consent for any user under the age of 16. Like the Utah bill, there are arguments that this bill, if passed, could apply to the AO3. (The bill text starts at the bottom of page 622).

10. Arkansas’s Social Media Safety Act: Arkansas has recently passed a bill that requires social media companies, starting in September, to require age verification and the consent of a parent or guardian if the account holder is a minor under the age of 18. The OTW is not covered by this bill as a nonprofit. However, it has the same troubling implications as the other age verification bills. A trade association for internet companies including Meta, TikTok, and Twitter has sued in federal court to block this bill from going into effect. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a brief in support of blocking the law. (Read more about the lawsuit.)

11. A bill was proposed in Texas requiring age verification and the prohibition of any minor under the age of 18 being allowed to have a social media account. The bill did not define “social media platform” and so it was unclear who would be covered under this bill. The bill was introduced and referred to committee, but it was not acted upon before the legislature adjourned. Therefore, it has not been passed. We will continue to monitor if the bill becomes active again. (Read the text of the bill.)

You might be wondering why the OTW doesn’t do even more itself to actively oppose these bills right now. As a nonprofit, there are severe limits on how (and how much) the OTW is allowed to engage in lobbying. What we can do is encourage people to oppose these bills by voicing their concerns to their elected representatives! When appropriate, the OTW also participates in amicus briefs, which are briefs in support of positions in lawsuits that would benefit fans and fan creators.

If these bills do pass –- and we hope they don’t! -– we would look for opportunities to work with allies to file amicus briefs and launch other challenges to them. You can read more about OTW Legal’s work, including amicus briefs we’ve filed 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.

Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Enjoy coordinating projects and liaising with people? Still guiltily--or not so guiltily--love the first fanwork that opened your eyes to fandom?

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Open Doors Administrative Volunteer - closing 20 September 2023 at 23:59 UTC [or after 30 applications]

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Open Doors Administrative Volunteer

Open Doors is a committee dedicated to preserving fanworks in their many formats, and we’re looking for volunteers to support this goal. The work we do preserves fan history, love, and dedication to fandom: we keep fanworks from offline and at-risk archives from being lost, divert fanzines from the trash, and more.

Our work is largely centered on long-term projects. Each archive import involves completing over 100 detail-oriented steps, and our administrative volunteers take point on multiple imports at once. During waiting periods for one’s archive imports, there are plenty of opportunities for other tasks to claim, such as resolving creator requests, keeping our documentation up-to-date, and assisting with internal projects.

If you want to preserve published fanzines and offline and at-risk archives, are self-motivated, enjoy complex projects with long timelines, and have availability on at least two days a week, the role of Open Doors administrative volunteer may be a good fit for you! If you're interested, click on through for a fuller description of what we're looking for and the time commitment. For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within 3 days of submitting your application.

Applications are due 20 September, 2023 [or after 30 applications]

Apply at the volunteering page!

If you have further questions, please contact us.

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.

With ChatGPT's rapid growth since its launch in late 2022 and many other text, graphic and video AI generative services gaining popularity, AI and copyright has become a heatedly debated topic. The U.S. Copyright Office is now seeking public comment to assess the need for legislative or regulatory steps in copyright law issues raised by the rapid development of AI.

Four main areas surrounding the use of AI systems are currently for public comment, some of these are more closely connected to fannish activities and have a direct impact on AO3 users.

1. Using copyrighted materials in training AI models, specifically, whether permission from copyright owner is needed, in what form (opt in or opt out), and if compensations is necessary; what type of system for permission and remuneration is feasible, whether records should be retained to identify training materials used, and if they should be available to copyright holders; if requests are not honored, what remedies should be available.
2. Whether materials generated using AI systems are copyrightable – namely what level of human involvement may be considered sufficient control over the output material for it to be considered human-authored.
3. Potential liability for infringing works generated with the use of AI systems: how the liability should be apportioned between the developers of the system and the user who provided the prompts.
4. How to deal with attributes not traditionally protected under copyright law, such as human likeness and artistic styles.

The comment period remains open until October 18, 2023, for written comments and November 15, 2023 for reply comments. Detailed instructions note that short written comments are limited to 5000 characters, longer comments can be uploaded in various formats. Please note that all information and files provided in the submission process will be publicly available.

Visit the comment form to have your say!

Given that the feedback being sought concerns an organization the OTW is not affiliated with, comments have been disabled on this post. Decisions made by the U.S. Copyright Office could impact the OTW and AO3's approach to AI generated works in the future. We thank concerned fans who wish to articulate their opinions on the matter directly with them.

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.

I. 2023 ELECTIONS CONCLUDED

Elections completed its work in August with the 2023 election successfully closed. Congratulations to our new Board members! They wrapped up with a statistics report on voting activity.

Board is excited to see the election conclude, and delighted to welcome its new members! The current directors are preparing to dive right into training them to take up their new roles.

II. AT THE AO3

Accessibility, Design & Technology has been focused on coding and testing bug fixes, infrastructure updates, and site improvements. They've had five deploys in August, ranging from single-issue updates to entire grab bags of fixes. The change log for all deploys between April and June was also posted. As always, they have been working with Support and the Policy & Abuse team on tickets requiring database insights.

Policy & Abuse received 1674 tickets and Support had a heavy ticket month in July, with 2362 tickets, mainly a lot of troubleshooting after the DDoS attacks and Cloudflare implementation. Please have patience with our volunteers as they work on digging out from under this influx!

Open Doors announced the import to AO3 of Snow Lands (a fanfiction and fan comic archive for The Lion King). They also posted about archivists now having the ability to automatically add a found work to the archive’s collection, following recent changes to the collection invitation process. Creators will be notified when this happens, and can withdraw their works from a collection at any time.

Tag Wrangling welcomed a new class of wranglers. This is an exciting time, as they are ramping up in preparation for testing new procedures for wrangling tags not associated with any fandoms. In July, more than 460,000 tags across over 59,000 fandoms were wrangled!

Systems has continued to monitor Cloudflare’s performance and make adjustments as necessary. The protection side of things is mostly tuned in at this point - we haven’t needed to touch it at all! They’re working with AD&T and Support to improve on some lingering errors from the switch over. Systems is continuing to look at getting the Archive upgraded to Debian Bookworm, and have received 2 new virtualization servers which they are in the process of getting up and running.

III. APPEARANCES AND ACTIVITIES

Webs has been keeping things updated and working on getting delivery of emails from several of our sites to work properly again after the DDoS protections threw them out of whack for a while.

Legal responded to user queries and worked to oppose U.S. legislative proposals that would be bad for fans. Otherwise, Legal’s August was full but largely internal, and included working with law enforcement concerning last month’s DDoS attack and ransom.

Communications welcomed its new site moderators Meilinda Lopez at Facebook and Abby at Instagram! If you use these platforms we encourage you to follow our accounts there.

Fanlore's themed month for July, Fandom in Color, was a big success! They're now in the midst of planning Stub September which will have a dinosaur theme this year! You can get more details about the challenge on their Twitter or Tumblr accounts.

Development & Membership – 今年OTW参加了在北京举办的GA05同人展！在展会上，我们带来了宣传材料与主题贴纸，并与大家分享了OTW志愿工作的体验。参展的大家非常热情地参与了推文活动，把喜欢的同人文写在便利贴上，贴满了整个推文箱。此外，我们使用了OTW捐款赠礼中的AO3标签主题扑克牌，和参展的大家玩了抽梗挑战的活动，静待大家用自己抽到的梗创作的同人作品（记得在微博上圈我们哦）！

On August 12 and 13, OTW participated in the GoldenAge Fan Convention in Beijing! Flyers and OTW-themed stickers were available at our con table, and OTW volunteers shared their experiences. Fans wrote down their favorite fics on sticky notes that were prepared by the volunteers, and the sticky notes we collected covered the entire rec board! Additionally, the OTW card deck (one of our thank-you gifts) was used for a prompt-creating challenge.

The OTW also appeared at several other conventions in August: Guangzhou’s ComicCup Convention, and LeakyCon and Fan Expo, both in Chicago.

IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting worked with a few committees to close out previously held recruitment drives and induct their new volunteers. From 24 July to 24 August, Volunteers & Recruiting received 244 new requests, and completed 214, leaving them with 86 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 24 August 2023, the OTW has 960 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Alma J., Alora, Aprilcake, Astraea, Beforeastorm, boop, c0ldspark, Ciara, Crafty, Daelyn, Doves, Gab, Gheyn, Haritika, heartbreakordeath, Indes, ise, Jamie B, Ju5t, JR, lasttai, leftsidedown, Lilith, Lisette, Lulu M, magma, Meg N., Miraii, Monnie, Morrow, Overlookedfile, President Hades, qkind, Rhonda H., Robyn Rose, sarajaksa, Tacky Tramp, Tammy, TashaK, and Yvelyn and 1 other Tag Wrangler
New Translation Volunteers: Laure (Volunteer Manager), Jaewon Choi, Vien, Alaia, Tatiana Cunha, Teodora M, Laura Sinele, Shubhi Tandon, MissLiterature, Belfrownys, and 8 other Translators
New TWC Volunteers: Tanya D. Zuk and 1 other Assistant Editor
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Allison Petrosino, Jessica Myers, Rachel B and 3 other Volunteers

Departing Directors: Alex Tischer (Director and Secretary), Antonius Melisse, and Natalia Gruber (both Directors)
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing Elections Volunteers: lee e (Public Relations Specialist)
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: Callmesalticidae (Policy & Admin), 1 Graphic Designer, and 3 Social Media & Outreach Volunteers
Departing Finance Volunteers: 1 Financial Analyst
Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Evan, Laila, RowanFae, Saturnina, Teg, and 23 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: NataliaKamaeva and 2 other Translators

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.