Archive of Our Own ^beta

As yesterday's post discussed, the OTW has many ongoing costs that allow us to do the variety of work needed to keep our projects running. One of our largest expenses is for hardware and hosting.

Our most costly project, the Archive of Our Own, accounts for many of our hardware and hosting expenses, although these expenses affect other OTW areas as well since our projects overlap in terms of what they use. The following information, which our Systems Committee provided to the OTW Board earlier this year, gives an overview of some recent and upcoming expenses.

Project Growth

The Archive is growing at around 100,000 page views per day per week, and the number of pages served is roughly doubling every 10 months. With our previous equipment, we lacked the redundancy to take significant machines out of service for routine maintenance. Additionally, we needed servers for infrastructure such as backups and email, and for rendering works as pdf, epub and so forth, so we have been undertaking new expenses to correct this.

The following purchases have been made in the past few months.

Phase 1: A new server for test and infrastructure at a capital cost of $13,882; also a temporary new virtual server at an estimated expense of $20 a month to build and test the configuration for the new incoming email server we’ll bring up after Phase 2. We are also doubling our bandwidth at a cost of $3,000 a year; due to our rapid growth we cannot predict when upgrades are needed, but the need could arise suddenly as it did in 2012.

Upcoming Costs

Just over a month ago, the Archive passed its 200,000th registered user. Since then we have added over 13,000 account holders with many more times that number accessing the Archive daily. These are additional expenses we will be undertaking in the following months.

Phase 2: We need a new machine to run virtual machines (including Fanlore and our incoming email server) and to replace our NAS (network attached storage server), enabling us to move the previous NAS to a third datacenter. This will provide us with limited geographic redundancy and decrease our risk of losing access in the event of natural disasters or network interruptions. This will be a capital expense of $11,568 with an additional $1,200 per year.

Phase 3: A separate rack in our datacenter is needed. We plan to buy a second system which would be capable of holding the Archive database and running it as the production system -— a capability we currently lack. We will additionally buy two new servers that generate pages for the Archive. This is a capital expense of $39,915 and an additional $10,920 ongoing per year.

Phase 4: We need a new dev system to allow developers who do not have home systems capable of developing for the OTW to do so on our own systems. This would be a capital expense of $13,882.

In total, to buy all the equipment listed in Phases 1-4 we would need to spend about $73,948 and an additional $18,384 a year with around $500 in shipping costs. These prices are based on current quotations and are therefore subject to change.

Support the OTW!

As you can see from the above, there are significant costs in providing our services. But along with our growing costs we have been getting increasing contributions from fans. This is where you come in!

All our projects are entirely funded by donations to the Organization for Transformative Works: we don't run ads on any of our sites or charge people to use them. If the OTW's projects make your fandom experience a little better and you have some money to spare, please donate to the OTW to help keep us thriving! A donation of US$10 confers membership in the OTW and the right to vote in organizational elections. At higher donation levels there are some awesome thank-you gifts to choose from.

Thank you to all our donors, past, present and future! We appreciate your support!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Since it was founded six years ago, the OTW has developed several major projects which have affected the fandom experience of thousands of people. The AO3 alone has over 200,000 registered users, and around 300,000 unique visitors a day. Some of those users are also utilizing archives preserved by Open Doors, and many more visit Fanlore or read and reference content from TWC's fourteen issues. Both the OTW and individual fans also depend on advice provided by OTW's Legal Advocacy project.

As our projects continue to grow in terms of questions answered, pageviews served, and new features developed, our costs continue to grow as well. Earlier this year we gave a detailed breakdown of the AO3's expenses. In this post, we'd like to share some details about the expenses of running other projects and the OTW as a whole.

Communication and storage costs

Some of our volunteers work on specific projects such as the AO3 or Fanlore, while others provide services to the whole organization, such as fundraising or human resource management. Because the OTW only exists online, we save money on office space, furniture, and some utility and telecom costs, while our volunteers provide their own equipment. But they still require software and online platforms to interact, preserve privacy, develop information, and keep records. These costs are rolled into the OTW's overall expenses and affect all of our projects.

$110 per month for Basecamp and Campfire provides the OTW with the following needed services:

* Committee meeting spaces with variable permission settings
* Spaces for meeting with the public in 'open houses'
* Searchable transcription storage
* Creation and storage of group-editable documents
* Committee-level file storage
* Planning software
* Group calendars
* Archived messaging software for cross-committee information sharing and discussion
* In-house contact directory
* Committee-level and all-organization level activity dashboards

$40 per month pays for an internal server that houses the following software and platforms:

* A wiki that organizes all our internal documentation
* Our committee mailing lists
* Ticketing software used by our Systems Committee to keep track of problems submitted
* Our volunteer database
* Our password vault (for individual staffer, committee, and cross-committee level accounts)

Project Expenses

The Archive of Our Own is housed on servers that are owned by the OTW. Servers themselves are a one-off cost, but they involve monthly fees for colocation, and over time the hardware has to be replaced or added to. Our other projects use hosted servers for which we pay a monthly Web hosting fee. Every year there are changes. For example, in 2012 Fanlore added more disk space and the OTW website transitioned to a specialized Drupal hosting service.

$179.80 per month provides Web hosting and support for the following:

* The main OTW website
* Our Elections website
* The Open Doors website
* Our Journal website
* Our Fanhackers site
* Our fundraising database

A separate post to come will discuss hardware and hosting expenses which affect several projects, but particularly the Archive of Our Own.

Helping volunteers

Finally, there's one big cost which isn't included here: volunteer time. Whether it's designing, inducting and training, coding, planning, testing, paying bills, doing taxes, developing documentation, or answering questions and providing information, we are run by volunteers. They give many hours of their time to support the OTW and support its users. Their work is priceless. <3

However, the tools they need to do that work do have costs. Here are some examples:

* $167 per month covers the directors & officers insurance the OTW has to carry as required by law.
* $54.41 per month pays for a post office box and mail forwarding service.
* $43 per month covers software that organizes our finances.
* $40 per month pays for a remote scanner service to deposit checks directly to our bank.
* $2.08 per month pays for postage and office supplies for general administrative work (mailing insurance applications, bill payments, etc.).

There are also one-time expenses, such as $99 for screencasting software that our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee will use to create tutorials to train our staff and volunteers.

Support the OTW!

As you can see from the above, it costs both small and large amounts of money to keep the OTW organized and running. These costs will increase in years to come as more users become aware of our services and vendor costs go up (for example, a new U.S. postage hike has been proposed). But you can help get us there!

All our projects are entirely funded by donations: we don't run ads on any of our sites or charge people to use them. If the OTW's projects make your fandom experience better and you have a little money to spare, please donate to help keep us thriving! A donation of US$10 confers membership in the OTW and the right to vote in organizational elections. At higher donation levels there are some awesome thank-you gifts to choose from.

Thank you to all our donors, past, present and future! We appreciate your support!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

The OTW's Legal Advocacy project has stood up for fans' rights to create and share, helping individual fans with legal questions and making fans' collective voices heard in court cases.

Recently, our Legal Committee asked for fans to help by providing either media stories or personal stories of takedown requests and actions that have made fans hesitant to create or share fanworks.

Your help is needed again! The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) are seeking public comments on copyright policy issues, including the legal framework for the creation of remixes. The window for these submissions is short -- they must be in by October 14, so we need to act now.

The Legal Committee is thus looking for stories of how fandom has helped fans in day-to-day life. We need you to share your individual stories with concrete examples. For example, perhaps being in fandom has helped you to learn a language, helped you in school, or helped you improve skills that you use elsewhere — skills such as writing, video editing, coding websites, audio editing, or anything else. We don't need personal information from you, but the more specific the story, the better.

Our attorneys will use your stories to explain to these agencies, which are likely to propose new legislation about copyright, why any change in copyright law should favor freedom to make transformative works. We succeeded before with the DMCA remix exemptions, but only because we were able to share specific stories from vidders. Now we need stories of all kinds.

We also need them soon! Please provide us with your stories by October 10, as our team needs time to work with them before the submission deadline of the 14th.

To submit your story, please use the Legal Committee's contact form.

And if the OTW's legal advocacy work is important to you, please consider making a donation to support our ongoing efforts. Thank you!

Sometimes fanworks vanish from the Web when they weren't intended to. Hosting services shut down; software becomes obsolete; archivists pass away or simply find that they no longer have the time or money to keep up their sites. Any of these occurrences can result in the loss of thousands of fanworks. The OTW's Open Doors project is a resource to help fans prevent such losses.

Open Doors works with fannish archivists to import fanworks from endangered archives into the Archive of Our Own. Approximately 11,600 works have been imported to date. Some archives can be imported automatically, but in most cases the Open Doors staff assist archive mods to manually import their archives into the the AO3. Manual importing involves creating an AO3 collection for the archive, contacting as many fanwork creators as possible, and then importing the works and editing them to indicate their original creators. These archives can be large or small — we’ve worked with designated archivists to import small collections of works of deceased fans, and we've worked with archives containing over 5,000 works. The process of manual importing can be time-consuming, but we think it’s worth it!

Open Doors has completed imports for three archives so far. The Foresmutters Project, an archive of early Star Trek slash that is also mirrored on OTW servers, has been migrated to a forever home on the AO3 where it is more accessible. The Smallville Slash Archive and 852 Prospect, an archive for The Sentinel fanfiction, have been imported as well. We also imported Kista and Demeter, two early Star Trek novels, which were first hosted on OTW servers as scanned PDFs. This involved using optical character recognition to turn the PDFs into editable text and then, in the case of Demeter, painstakingly comparing the results to a print copy of the original 304-page zine to correct any errors in the electronic copy.

Imports currently in progress include The Good Omens Library; GSSU - German Speaking Slashers United; the Dannell Lites Collection, a memorial archive consisting chiefly of DC and Marvel comics fanfiction; the Leah Adezio Archive, a memorial archive consisting chiefly of DC Comics fanfiction and fanart, and original comics; and Stargatefan, an archive of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis gen fanfiction and fanart.

We also have several archives stored as backups in case of failing hardware, software, and/or hosting issues, and are working with the mods to manually import them or to keep them safe until automated import code is available.

To inquire about preserving an archive, please contact the Open Doors committee. And to support our ongoing preservation efforts, please donate to the OTW today! Your support will help to ensure that the fanworks you love will be around for future generations of fans to enjoy.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Today is the final day of the OTW's April 2013 membership drive, and we're thrilled to announce that it's already a record-breaking success!

Since April 3, the first day of the drive, we've received more than 1,879 donations totaling more than US$48,508. That blows the record from the April 2012 drive (when we received 1,276 donations totaling US$38,379.50) out of the water.

We're immensely grateful to everyone who has supported the drive so far. Thank you for sharing testimonials, reblogging and retweeting, and, of course, for your generous donations. This success is thanks to you.

If you haven't participated in the drive yet, there's still time to show your support! The drive will continue through the end of the day on April 9 so please donate today to be part of the drive. However, if this time isn't a good one for you financially, you can also donate throughout the year to keep the OTW and its projects thriving into the future.

The Archive of Our Own is growing rapidly! We now have over 145,000 registered users, and about 275,000 unique visitors a day. All these visitors rack up roughly 4.3 million pageviews a day (that's almost 3,000 a minute on average). It cost more than US$52,000 to keep the Archive up and running in 2012. Our costs will only increase as the Archive continues to grow, and we anticipate spending at least US$70,000 in 2013.

The Archive is funded entirely by donations to the Organization for Transformative Works. As part of the OTW's membership drive, we'd like to share some details of what we have to pay for and how much it all costs.

Hardware

The Archive of Our Own is hosted entirely on servers which are owned by the Organization for Transformative Works. This is a key part of our mission: fanworks often disappear from the internet because a site goes down without warning, or because a takedown notice is issued and site owners are unable or unwilling to resist it. By owning the servers, we ensure we're in a position to protect fanworks and keep them available.

Servers are a one-off cost, although over time they have to be replaced or added to. Over the lifetime of the Archive, we've spent US$58,099 in total on hardware. This was spread over several years:

2009

When we launched the Archive in 2009, we started with two servers with upgraded RAM, which cost a total of US$8,165 (including shipping).

2011

In 2011, we expanded our server family substantially, adding four more servers and a switch. The total cost for the new hardware was US$17,234.

2012

By the end of 2012, the extremely rapid growth of the Archive meant that we needed to add more new servers. After some extensive research by our Systems team we settled on three new machines, at a cost of US$28,200. In the same year we upgraded our existing machines by adding some solid state discs — a cost of US$1,650 — and upgrading the RAM — this cost approximately US$2,200.

The size of the Archive codebase and the number of volunteer coders we have working on it meant that in 2012, we also needed to upgrade our testing and development environments. These are used to host web-based coding environments so that our volunteers don't require very high performance computers to code on, and a test environment where our testers can test the new code before it goes onto the live site. We were lucky enough to have these machines donated, so we didn't have to pay up front for them, but we bought a hardware-based firewall for these servers at a cost of US$670.

Our total cost for hardware was US$32,720.

Colocation and hosting costs

The servers themselves are only a small part of the cost of running the site. We also have to pay for them to be physically hosted in a colocation facility: we rent the space for them and pay for electricity, bandwidth, and the physical maintenance of the machines (so if we need to add a new disc, for example, our colocation hosts do it for us). We also pay for a managed firewall at one of our colocation hosts.

Our hosting costs are US$1,365 per month, which breaks down as follows:

Hosting costs: US$1,315 per month
Managed firewall: US$50 per month

Additional tech costs

In addition to paying for hardware and hosting, there are a few other ongoing costs in keeping the Archive up and running. We pay a licence for a product which enables us monitor activity on our servers and to identify performance problems. This cost us US$1,400 in 2012 for June-December and will cost an estimated US$3,500 in 2013. (The cost goes up as we add more machines.)

We pay for backups and image hosting (only used for icons and collection header images). This costs an average of US$65 per month. In 2012, we also paid US$835 for cloud hosting to do some enhanced testing of the Archive code, prior to launching our new tag filters.

We currently pay to use a hosted ticket system for our Support and Abuse teams, which is used to keep track of queries from users. This costs US$180 annually.

And the rest

The above costs don't include smaller sundries such as the cost of our volunteer chatrooms, mailing lists, or other volunteer tools. The Archive is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, so these costs are rolled into the OTW's overall expenses and it's not really possible to break them out as individual Archive costs.

Finally, there's one big cost which isn't included above: volunteer time. The Archive is entirely designed, coded, tested, and run by volunteers, who give many hours of their time to develop the site, support users, wrangle tags, and manage the servers. Their work is priceless. <3

Support the Archive!

As you can see from the above, it costs a lot of money to keep the Archive up and running. These costs will increase in years to come as more users join the site, and we expand the types of things we host (multimedia hosting is still very much part of our plans). In the next year, we expect our expenses to grow by nearly 50 percent, to a minimum of US$70,000, and you can help get us there.

The Archive is entirely funded by donations to the Organization for Transformative Works: we don't run ads on the site or charge people to use it. If you enjoy using the Archive and have a little money to spare, please donate to the OTW to help keep us thriving! A donation of US$10 confers membership in the OTW and the right to vote in organizational elections. At higher donation levels there are some awesome thank-you gifts to choose from, like our AO3 Kudos Water Bottle at the US$75 level.

Thank you to all our donors, past, present and future! We appreciate your support!

Why do you participate in fandom?

For many of us, the answer to that question is love — love of a favorite TV show, video game, or band; love of fannish communities and the friends we make there; or love of the creative process involved in transforming canon to create something new. Fans put in long hours making and consuming fanworks, traveling to conventions, moderating communities, and chatting about their latest fannish passions — not out of obligation, not for pay, but because it brings us joy.

Like so many other fannish endeavors, the Organization for Transformative Works is a labor of love. We’re a nonprofit organization run entirely by fans, for fans, which relies on the generous support of donors and volunteers. During our membership drive from now through April 9, we invite you to become an OTW member by making a donation of US$10 or more. Your donation will help to sustain Fanlore, the Archive of Our Own, Transformative Works and Cultures, Open Doors, and our legal advocacy work. If you donate US$50 or more, you can opt to receive a thank-you gift to proudly show off your support.

Donations to OTW are tax deductible in the United States. If you have questions about donating, please visit our membership FAQ (located at the bottom of the donation page) or contact the Development & Membership committee.

The OTW and its projects depend on the support of fans like you. Be a part of this ongoing labor of love — please donate today.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

You may have seen the banner on the site this week asking for donations: our parent organization (The Organization for Transformative Works) holds membership drives twice a year, and the money raised is what pays for AO3's hardware, hosting, and maintenance costs. We don't have paid accounts or advertising, so donations from regular users are what keeps the site running and allows us to expand.

If you enjoy using AO3 and you're able to help support us, please donate today!

A few common questions:

What is the Organization for Transformative Works and how is it related to the Archive of Our Own?

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. It's the parent organization that runs AO3 and several other fan-oriented projects.

What do you spend donation money on?

Neither OTW nor AO3 has paid employees or offices - all of the work of building and maintaining AO3 is done by volunteers like you. OTW funds and supports other wonderful projects as well (legal advocacy for fans! a fan wiki! an academic journal!) but because of the scale of the Archive, its hosting and hardware costs do make up a good chunk of the organization's expenses each year.

If you're interested in more detailed information, you can find an expense breakdown in our annual report.

Can I get an Archive invitation if I donate?

No, sorry! For privacy reasons, donations and organization memberships are entirely separate from AO3 user accounts and invitations. It's free for everyone to use the Archive, and invitations are granted by our automated queue in the order that requests come in. There may be some indirect benefits to donating: how much funding we have determines how much we're able to expand our systems, which affects the rate at which we can send out invitations. But it's not possible to directly purchase an account.