Archive of Our Own ^beta

Now that the 2023 election is over, we’re happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2023 Election, we had 15274 total eligible voters. Of those, 4247 voters cast a ballot, which represents 27.80% of the potential voters.

Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 39.3%.

We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 4574 to 4247, which represents a 7.1% decrease.

Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW’s projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.

For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose the candidate rankings.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.

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.

One of the main tasks of the OTW’s Open Doors project is to import at-risk archives of fanworks into AO3 collections.

As part of that task, Open Doors searches for works already posted to AO3 to avoid importing duplicates. Until now, the archivist account would then invite the found work to the archive’s collection and bookmark the work if the invitation wasn’t accepted.

Following recent changes to the collection invitation process, archivists now have the ability to automatically add a found work to the archive’s collection.

This will only apply to works that were originally hosted on an imported archive, and is limited to the archive collection only. Creators will receive an email notification when a work is added and can remove their works from collections at any time if they wish.

We try to contact creators during each archive import process to ask their preferences. However, if you don't want any of your works to be imported to AO3, please contact the Open Doors committee.

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

We look forward to helping preserve more at-risk fanworks!

- The Open Doors team

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on 3 September. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this matter after that date, please contact Open Doors.

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 Elections Committee would like to thank all of our candidates for their hard work in this year's election. We are now pleased to present the results of the 2023 Election.

The following candidates (in alphabetical order) have been officially elected to serve full terms (3 years) on the Board of Directors:

• Anh Pham
• Kathryn Soderholm
• Qiao Chu

As previously announced, Heather McGuire stepped down from her position on the Board prior to the 2023 election. Director Natalia Gruber also resigned, in July 2023. We are grateful for Heather and Natalia’s service and thank them for their work and dedication.
To fill these vacant seats, the remaining candidates, Jennifer Haynes and Zixin Zhang (in alphabetical order), have been elected to join the Board of Directors. They will serve the remaining two years of Heather’s and Natalia’s terms starting on October 1 2023, so that the Board will be fully staffed until the next election.
Board turnover will formally begin on October 1. We wish the new members of the Board well.
With that, the 2023 election season comes to a close. Thank you to everyone who participated by spreading the word, sending their questions to candidates, and, of course, voting! We hope to see all of you again next year.

15 August 2023: Edited to clarify that all Board Directors are named in alphabetical order.

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 election has opened!

Every OTW member who joined between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, should have a ballot by now. If you didn't get one, please check your spam folder first, then contact us via our contact form. Please note that your donation receipt will be dated in US Eastern Time, so if your donation is listed after 19:59 on June 30, 2023 on the receipt, you won't be eligible to vote. If you are unsure whether your donation was made before the deadline, please contact our Development and Membership Committee by using the contact form on our website and selecting "Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?" .

The election will run through August 14, 2023, 23:59 UTC; check this time zone converter to find out what time that will be for you.

Once you’ve voted, you can head over to Twitter or Tumblr and use the hashtag #OTWE23 to let us know! We'd love to hear from you!

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. DOWNS AND UPS

Systems was hard at work getting the Archive back online after a large DDoS attack. After a period of downtime, the Archive was back up behind Cloudflare, and the committee has been spending some time fine tuning things to reduce the impact to good traffic, while still taking care of the bad stuff.

Huge kudos to Cloudflare for working to get us back up and running & continuing to help us refine things, to our datacenter for helping us work through the initial attacks & the move to Cloudflare, and to everyone who sent messages of support as our volunteers worked around the clock to get the site back online. It was certainly a stressful time, but your messages helped keep us going, and we appreciate it! <3

II. AT THE AO3

Despite the DDoS attempt to take AO3 offline, Accessibility, Design and Technology worked on new features and bug fixes to continue improvements to readability, stability and security.

Policy and Abuse received 1916 tickets in June. In July, they were forced to take their reporting form offline temporarily because of the DDoS attack that struck the Archive, which coincided with an influx of spam.

Support also took their form offline for a couple of days in July due to the DDoS attack and as a preventative measure in view of Policy & Abuse’s spam situation. Their form was working again on July 13 and they have been catching up, as well as dealing with new issues that have cropped up for some users since Cloudflare’s implementation.

In July, Tag Wrangling volunteers started the second level of the new tag wrangling training platform, marking another milestone in their work to completely overhaul and consolidate training procedures. They have also been holding a discussion, which should be drawing to a close soon, regarding updating the formatting for some of AO3's Alternate Universe tags. In June, more than 450,000 tags were wrangled across more than 59,000 fandoms – that's more than 1,050 tags per active wrangler!

Open Doors' import assistants have been busy compiling spreadsheets and importing works for three archives and helping with various tasks related to the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project.

III. ACROSS COMMITTEES

Fanlore's themed month for July, Fandom in Color, was in full swing across its social channels, with highlighted pages on its Tumblr. The Fandom in Color editing chat in their Discord server was a big success.

The DDoS attack caused a surge in subscribers to the OTW's social media accounts and Communications received a number of news media contacts as well. In the meantime, our Fanhackers team has been busy, and we urge everyone to check out their fan studies discussions.

Legal submitted the OTW’s request that the U.S. Copyright Office renew the vidding exemption to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, and joined allies including the ACLU in opposing U.S. legislative proposals that would seek to silence LGBTQ+ voices online. Legal is closely watching a number of overlapping pending proposals with such aims to oppose them in the most effective way.

In addition, Legal committee members connected with allies and monitored legislative developments announced at San Diego Comic Con. They also responded to several queries from users and worked with other OTW committees to address the DDoS attack and interact with law enforcement.

IV. GOVERNANCE

Strategic Planning released the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan, which was approved during the last public Board meeting. The plan’s implementation officially began on the 24th of July.

Last weekend, Elections held all four Candidate Chats — thank you to our candidates and all those who participated over on Discord! Transcripts have been posted to the Elections site.

Elections also announced the withdrawal of another one of our candidates, Audrey R. We wish her all the best.

Important info for the election:
The election will take place from 11-14 August. As there are now 5 open seats and 5 candidates, the election will be uncontested. However, your vote still counts — we will be voting to elect 3 candidates to serve full-term (3 years) and 2 candidates to serve partial terms (2 years).

Voting instructions have been emailed to all eligible members. If you have not received your voting instructions by email, or if you have a different query, you can contact the Elections Committee through our website. Reminder to all voters: Anyone who seeks to raise awareness of our election should not attempt to directly contact or harass candidates, their families, or employers. Elections has issued a statement on our stance.

Board met with various committees, including Systems and Legal, about the DDoS attack. In addition, three Board Directors have stepped down from their Board roles -- Antonius Melisse, Natalia Gruber and Alex Tischer. We thank them for all their work, and wish them the best in their future endeavours. Board has been working on updating some of their internal documentation in preparation for this month's election.

Development and Membership is working hard on the leadup to the October Drive, with many new graphic designs for stickers, donation gifts and the member icon. They are also collaborating with the Elections team as Board Elections approach and doing setup for tables at two conventions in August.

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting has been making progress on the Human Resources Outsourcing project, having compiled a list of potential companies to interview.

From 24 June to 24 July, Volunteers & Recruiting received 133 new requests, and completed 122, leaving us with 52 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).

As of 24 July 2023, the OTW has 930 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Communications Volunteers: Abby (Site Moderator), Eskici (Chair Assistant), Harley G. (Chair Track Volunteer), Meilinda Lopez (Site Moderator), scrivea (Media Outreach Volunteer), 1 other Chair Track Volunteer, 1 Event Coordinator, 1 Posting Specialist, and 1 Site Moderator-Weibo
New Development & Membership Volunteers: rachaelly and slakemoth
New Open Doors Volunteers: A.Heidi (Import Assistant), Pips (Import Assistant), Scrivener (Technical Volunteer), SonoSvegliato (Import Assistant), Runekaster (Import Assistant), Zoë Elisabeth (Import Assistant) and 1 other Import Assistant
New Translation Volunteers: 1 Translation Volunteer Manager, InsertSthMeaningful, and 3 other News Translators
New VolCom Volunteers: sam_sational & Slumber

Departing Committee Chairs: Eskici (Communications)
Departing Communications Volunteers: 1 Graphics Volunteer
Departing Elections Volunteers: 1 Election Candidate Liaison
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Fanlore Graphic Designer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: StableState and 2 other Import Assistants
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: Ranowa
Departing Support Volunteers: Sammie Louise and 1 other Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Dessie, trashchancellor, Kaylyn, and 7 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Ilona van der Vegt, solrosan, Katerina Valsamaki, and 3 other Translators

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.

Snow Lands, a fanfiction and fan comic archive for The Lion King (1994 animated movie), is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

• A bit of background explanation
• What this means for creators who have work(s) on Snow Lands
• And what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

To preserve the gems of The Lion King fanfiction in a well-organized popular archive, the Snow Lands fanworks are being imported to the 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 Athari to import Snow Lands into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all images currently in Snow Lands will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from Snow Lands to the AO3 after August. 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 have work(s) on Snow Lands?

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 invite 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 Snow Lands 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.
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 Snow Lands 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 Snow Lands 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 Snow Lands

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 Snow Lands 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 Snow Lands!

- The Open Doors team and Athari

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on August 12. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is saddened to announce that Antonius Melisse and Natalia Gruber have resigned from the Board of Directors. Antonius's term was already scheduled to end in a few months, with his seat on track to be filled at the end of the current election season. However, Natalia still had two years to her term. Her seat will be added to the number of seats to be filled in the upcoming election.

Because the number of Board vacancies is now the same as the number of candidates, this year's OTW Board election will be uncontested. However, the election will still happen, on August 11 - 14, and OTW members will elect three candidates to serve a full-term (3 years) and two candidates to serve partial terms.

We would like to thank Antonius and Natalia for their service as members of the Board and wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

Edited to add: Board director Alex Tischer has also resigned from the OTW Board effective July 27th.

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.

Effective July 25, Audrey R. has withdrawn her candidacy for the 2023 OTW Board election. The Elections Committee wishes Audrey all the best.

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.