The Elections Committee would like to thank all of our candidates for their hard work in this year's election. With that, we are pleased to present the results of the 2024 Election.
The following candidates (in alphabetical order) have been officially elected to the Board of Directors:
Erica Frank
Rachel Linton
Board turnover will formally begin on October 1. We wish the new members of the Board well with their terms.
With that, the election season comes to a close. Thank you to everyone who got involved by spreading the word, asking the candidates questions, and, of course, voting! We look forward to seeing all of you again next year.
Every OTW member who joined between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 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, 2024 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 19, 2024, 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/X and use the hashtag #OTWE2024 to meet and chat with other voters! We'd love to hear from you!
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 Yrindor, who volunteers as an Open Doors chair assistant and administrative volunteer.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
Open Doors is responsible for helping to preserve at-risk fannish materials. The bulk of our committee work is devoted to working with archive moderators to import the fanworks from at-risk online archives to AO3. We also help coordinate the donation of physical fannish materials—things like print zines and con programs—to institutions who are interested in collecting and preserving them.
We've also recently launched a new project to convert stories from print zines and post them to AO3. As an Administrative Volunteer, I'm responsible for a lot of the project management tasks that go into our work, which range from communicating with archive moderators about deadlines to coordinating with other OTW committees on public announcement posts and system bugs. As a Chair Assistant, I also help with creating committee reports, running meetings, and training new volunteers.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
Open Doors holds regular working meetings for all of our roles. We distribute meeting facilitation across our Chairs and Chair Assistants, so in a typical week I will lead 2-3 meetings. When we've just recruited new volunteers, I spend most of the meeting time leading walkthroughs and answering questions.
When we have fewer new volunteers, I also work on tasks for archives I'm assigned to during the meeting times. Outside of the official meeting times, I'm frequently around in our committee spaces to answer questions as they come up. Open Doors work has enough complex documentation and large spreadsheets that I try to keep the bulk of my Admin Volunteer work to when I have at least an hour on my computer to focus on it.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I originally joined OTW as a Tag Wrangling volunteer back in 2015. At that time, I was in library school, and I was considering specializing in cataloging. I was also an avid fic reader on AO3 and loved the tagging and search features.
When I saw a post for Tag Wrangling recruitment, it seemed like the perfect intersection of my interests. Fast forward five years, and my professional work had shifted to focus on digitization and digital projects. I had also seen announcements for Open Doors imports on the AO3 news blog, so when they put out a call for recruitment, it felt like another wonderful intersection of my professional and fannish interests.
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
Definitely communication. Open Doors manages multiple projects, but at their core they're all about moving fannish archives from one place to another in order to preserve them. Any time there's movement across systems, there has to be some degree of translation from the original format to the structure the new system expects. That could mean anything from mapping tags on an archive to the corresponding tags on AO3 to deciding how to convert mailing list posts to AO3 works.
It can also mean facilitating communication across groups who may not all use the same vocabulary—for example, coordinating zine donations between fans and academic librarians.
What fannish things do you like to do?
I'm primarily a fanfic reader and writer. As a writer, I jump around fandoms a lot, primarily within the anime and manga world, but my first and forever fandom is Naruto. I also dabble in other fannish crafts here and there; I've done everything from bookbinding to cosplay to wood burning.
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.
Internet bill S-210, An Act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material, aims to protect Canadian youth but instead could drastically alter Canada’s online landscape for everyone.
Like various proposed US age-verification laws, it would not affect the Archive of Our Own (AO3) because AO3 is not a commercial website. However, it would introduce serious risks to Canadians’ ability to securely access content on the internet, regardless of their age or of whether or not that content is sexually explicit.
S-210 creates liability not just for providers of adult content, but for internet service providers (ISPs) as well. Age verification requires providing personal information to an ISP, where it can create security and privacy risks. Separately, ISPs would also need to view content passing through their services. The latter task is mostly impossible because internet traffic is often encrypted for security purposes. To comply with potential orders issued under S-210, ISPs would need to reject encrypted traffic, which would leave Canadians either cut off from large portions of the internet or exposed to significant security risks due to unencrypted data. Internet Society has a detailed breakdown of how all of this would work in practice.
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.
This year's election will take place from August 16-19. As there are 2 open seats and 4 candidates, the election will be contested. Voting instructions have been emailed to all eligible members. If you have not received your voting instructions by email, or if you have a different question, you can contact Elections.
Elections has posted candidates' answers to the Q&A questions on their website. Thanks to everyone who submitted questions to the candidates during the Q&A and the Candidate Chat on Discord! The transcript of that chat is available on the Elections site.
The Elections Committee asks all members of the public to be respectful towards all candidates and other volunteers when discussing or promoting the election. Please do not attempt to directly contact or harass candidates, their families, or their employers.
II. AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) stumbled into some issues at the beginning of the month with staging, the version of the Archive where new features and bug fixes are tested. Fortunately Systems was able to resolve the issue by the middle of the month. AD&T also ran into issues with their application monitoring service, which are still being worked through with the help of Legal, Volunteers & Recruiting, and Finance.
Open Doors has made continuous progress across a range of archive imports. Meanwhile, they are developing their AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) documentation to get ready for working with fanzine publishers to import their fanzines' works.
Policy & Abuse received 2,386 tickets in June, bringing the total amount of tickets received in the first half of 2024 to 13,500 (for more information, refer to the pie chart). Additionally, some of their volunteers participated in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.
Non-fanworks: 52%; Rejected complaints about offensive content: 13%; Plagiarism and copyright infringement: 10%; Harassment: 8%; Commercial promotion: 7%; Policy questions: 3%; Incorrect fandom tags: 3%; Insufficient ratings or warnings: 2%; Other: 3%.
These categories reflect the subject of the complaint, and (with the exception of Offensive Content), do not indicate whether the report was upheld or rejected.
Support received 2,051 tickets in June, including a large volume of Fannish Next-of-Kin requests. Please have patience as they work through these! They also helped revise the new and improved Fannish Next-of-Kin FAQ page.
Tag Wrangling finished up another round of recruitment in July, made preparations to welcome their new volunteers, and worked on several sets of tag mapping for Open Doors. In June, wranglers handled more than 430,000 tags across over 66,100 fandoms—more than a thousand tags per wrangler!
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanhackers volunteers from Communications are looking forward to their online zine! The theme is Fandom and Friendship. Fanhackers welcome submissions in traditional format such as essays and papers alongside visual and multimedia work. Please tell your fandom friends about the project! Details on how to submit can be found on the Fanhackers website.
Fanlore held a Fandom in Color editing chat in their Discord server on July 29. You can also check out the month's highlighted pages on their Tumblr.
Legal has been responding to user queries, keeping a close eye on proposed legislation about copyright and free expression, and dealing with apps that have used OTW/AO3 trademarks in confusing ways and sites that have tried to profit from AO3 users' work.
Translation has concluded their latest recruitment round, welcoming a total of 16 translators across 12 language teams. Nearly all their teams have finished translating all platforms and news posts for this year's election—an amazing feat of hard work! They're working on getting the translated platforms uploaded and will then be posting information for voters up until the election itself.
On Twitter/X, Transformative Works and Cultures has just finished counting down their ten most cited articles since the beginning of the journal. Elsewhere, they’re disseminating a new call for papers for a special issue on Disability and preparing the upcoming publication of their annual general issue.
IV. GOVERNANCE
In July, Board successfully ran the third public Board meeting of 2024. There were 23 attendees and they received a total of 7 questions from participants, all of which were answered live during the meeting. Minutes from this meeting are available on the OTW website.
Board also finished reviewing Board Training and Recruitment related documents, researched and approved a new customer relationship management service for Board emails, and approved the Board Break & Hiatus Policy.
Board Assistants Team worked on a lot this month: ongoing projects, helping oversee the OTW Organizational Culture Roadmap, moderating a public Board meeting and more! This public meeting was the first test of asynchronous question procedures—a project researched by Board Assistant Project Specialists—and it went great!
Lots of work was cross-committee this month, including scoping and planning around external training resources, creating a template for volunteers to track their hours, and supporting various projects and policies.
Development & Membership has been catching up on shipping out donation gifts. If you've been waiting for a gift, be sure to check your email for a shipping notification (of the parcel, not fandom kind).
V. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for 3 committees and 1 subcommittee this month: Fanlore, Tag Wrangling, Volunteers & Recruiting, and Internal Complaint & Conflict Resolution.
From June 25 to July 23, Volunteers & Recruiting received 115 new requests, and completed 108, leaving them with 34 open requests.
As of July 23, 2024, the OTW has 907 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Chairs: wichard (Policy & Abuse), Kari Dayton (Webs) New AD&T Volunteers: Bilka (Coding Volunteer) New Board Assistants Team Volunteers: 1 Moderator New Communications Volunteers: 1 Report Writer New Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: Alecto Gaia, Kate G, xeno, and 1 other Moderator New Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 Graphic Designer New Fanlore Volunteers: 3 Chair Track Volunteers New Translation Volunteers: Gloriosa, Marina Monto, RayboVeld, and 22 other Translators; 1 Volunteer Manager, and 1 Task Assistant New TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor
Departing Committee Chairs: 1 Webs Chair Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: dearjenna (Graphic Designer) Departing Open Doors Volunteers: A.Heidi, Anh Pham, onwardorange, and 3 other Import Assistants Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: catchmeifyoucreon, catmisae, hematophage, Noelia, and 4 other Tag Wranglers Departing Translation Volunteers: 2 Translators Departing TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor Departing Webs Volunteers: 2 Volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
The Sentinel Angst Yahoo Group was a Gen-only writers group active from 1999-2019. In order to preserve this piece of fandom history, we are importing the stories written for the group 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 Lady Shelley, Lyn Townsend, and Annie Booker to import Sentinel Angst into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own.
We will begin importing works from Sentinel Angst to the AO3 after October. 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.
Because posters in Sentinel Angst were led to expect privacy, individual works will only be imported upon receiving the explicit consent of their respective creators. The moderators have actively sought to contact all creators to gather permission to post. Works for which we do not have explicit consent to import will not be saved to the Sentinel Angst collection on AO3.
For works we do have permission to archive, 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 unless we were asked for the work to be orphaned or anonymized.
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.
Please contact Open Doors with your Sentinel Angst pseud(s) and email address(es) if we haven’t managed to get in touch with you but:
You'd like us to import your works and you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3.
You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
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 Sentinel Angst 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 Sentinel Angst mods to confirm your claims.)
We're excited to be able to help preserve Sentinel Angst!
- The Open Doors team and the Sentinel Angst mods
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on 20 August. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
At this time, all members of the OTW who are eligible to vote should have received an email linking to the voting instructions for 2024. The subject line was "Voting Instructions for Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board Election". Please note that anyone who didn't receive this email is not on the voter rolls this year and will not receive a ballot.
The voting instructions email contains a link to a test version of the ballot. Please follow that link to make sure that the page displays correctly and the candidates are visible. If not, please ensure you are not blocking JavaScript from ajax.googleapis.com and/or bootstrapcdn.com.
If you are an OTW member and didn't receive this email, please do the following:
Check your spam folder.
If you use Gmail, check your Social tab.
If the email is marked as spam, unmark it. Otherwise, you will not receive your ballot, as it will end up in spam as well.
If no email is present, open your donation receipt and check the date.
To vote in this election, your receipt must be dated between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, inclusive of both dates.
If you paid by check, your membership is measured by the arrival date of the check. 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, 2024 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?" .
If your donation was made during the eligible time period, make sure you checked the box to become a member. Membership is voluntary for those who donate at least $10; only members can vote.
If you did become a member, make sure you neither marked any email from the OTW as spam nor opted out of OTW emails or last year's ballot. If you did so and would like to vote this year, you'll need to follow step 5 below.
If you donated at least $10 during the eligible period and you checked the box to become a member, please fill out the Elections Contact Form and select the topic "Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?". Make sure to include the email you used when donating.
Membership has no connection to being a user of Archive of Our Own – AO3 or Fanlore. Please don't give us your AO3 or Fanlore username – we have no way of knowing who that name belongs to, and we don't want to know.
Most importantly, if your voting instructions email bounces, gets marked as spam, or you opt out, you will not receive a ballot for this year's election, and you may not receive a ballot next year. Similarly, if any of those things happened to last year's election emails, you will not receive a ballot this year. Therefore, if you previously opted out of OTW emails or marked them as spam and would like to vote, fill out the Elections Contact Form and select the topic "Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?"
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 LianneW, who volunteers as a Fanhackers volunteer on the Communications committee.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
Fanhackers is a group that aims to make scholarly work on fandom accessible to a general audience. We write blog posts on fan studies topics, promote studies looking for fan input, manage a community bibliography, and more in the same vein!
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
Fanhackers volunteers typically write one blog post per two weeks. So far, I’ve posted summaries of scholarly articles on fandom (especially on queer topics) and info on various fannish projects like oral history and archiving projects. I’m also organizing an exciting publication project with Fanhackers! We’re soliciting written and visual submissions for a zine that combines scholarly, artistic, and generally thoughtful work on the theme of “fandom friendship.” If you’re interested, check our blog on July 26 for more details!
What made you decide to volunteer?
Fandom is one of my life’s biggest joys, and I wanted to give back to fandom in a different way. I also specifically was interested in Fanhackers as a way to continue my scholarly thinking after graduating from university.
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
I can’t really say that there have been any challenges, since I started volunteering with OTW somewhat recently! It’s been a lot of fun.
What fannish things do you like to do?
I used to write fanfiction and organize fandom events a lot more, but now I’m mostly a consumer! I still enjoy fanfiction and fanart and have my favorite fan merch on my bedroom wall. My fandom nowadays is mostly my friends.
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.
