Archive of Our Own ^beta

Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Would you like to wrangle AO3 tags? Can you read and translate from Portuguese or Spanish to English? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

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

• Open Doors Import Assistants - closing 18 September 2024 at 23:59 UTC or after 35 applications
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer - closing 18 September 2024 at 23:59 UTC or after 120 applications
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Portuguese) - closing 18 September 2024 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
• Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Spanish) - closing 18 September 2024 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 Import Assistant

Do you enjoy spreadsheets, self-paced projects, and helping protect fanworks from getting lost over time? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Do you still guiltily—or not so guiltily—love the first fanwork that opened your eyes to fandom?

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 import assistants contribute to our goal by:

• Importing works to AO3 from rescued digital archives and fanzines
• Searching AO3 for existing copies of works that creators have already uploaded themselves (to prevent us from importing duplicate versions when we import an archive)
• Compiling and correcting spreadsheets of works from an archive to be imported and/or tags to use on those works
• Copyediting/proofreading works from fanzines that have been scanned from PDFs (to ensure that the scanned works were transcribed properly by the software we used)

The training is self-directed, and so is the work for the most part, though we also have weekly working meetings/parties for people to all chip in and work on tasks together! Import assistants can generally alternate the types of tasks they work on—at any one time we usually have several tasks of different types available.

If you're interested, click on through for a longer 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 18 September 2024 or after 35 applications

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.

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 Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Čeština (Czech), isiZulu (Zulu), Italiano (Italian), Polski (Polish), Suomi (Finnish), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), Türkçe (Turkish), Русский (Russian), Українська (Ukrainian),ไทย (Thai) and 中文 (Chinese - we welcome all dialects) — but help with other languages would be much appreciated!

Applications will close on 18 September 23:59 UTC or after 120 applications are received.

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.

If you're a fluent Portuguese speaker and 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 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 will close on 18 September 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications are received.

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.

If you're fluent in Spanish and an experienced AO3 user 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 will close on 18 September 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications are received.

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.

I. 2024 ELECTION FINALIZED

Elections successfully closed the 2024 OTW Board Director election! Congratulations to the new Directors: Erica Frank and Rachel Linton. Erica and Rachel will be replacing Kari and Michelle, who have both reached the end of their Board terms.

Many committees collaborated throughout the election process:
Communications helped coordinate election-related news posts, Translation made election content available in 26 languages,
Development & Membership coordinated with OTW members and helped distribute ballots!

Elections would like to thank all the candidates who ran, the volunteers from across the OTW who assisted the Elections Committee in their work, and everyone who engaged with the election, either by asking questions or turning out to vote.

Statistics from this year’s election were made available on August 29: out of 14,959 eligible votes, 3,415 cast a ballot, representing 22.8% of potential voters.

II. TO SEE IN SEPTEMBER

Fanlore’s themed month for July, Fandom in Color, was a big success! Fanlore’s next editing challenge, Stub September, will have a fantasy adventure theme and run from September 15-29. Everyone is encouraged to participate! Keep an eye on their Twitter/X and Tumblr for announcements about the upcoming challenge.

Transformative Works and Cultures will publish their annual general issue on September 15th. They also recently announced a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Gaming Fandom!

III. AT THE AO3

Accessibility, Design & Technology tested and released the update to Sentry, their new service for monitoring Archive performance and errors. That release also included some fixes for an annoying tag set nomination bug, as a treat. Also in August, Systems dealt with an issue with one of their firewalls which impacted the Archive. They believe the issue was identified, which should prevent this type of problem from having such an impact in the future.

AO3 Documentation has made minor changes to some of their live documentation based on cross-committee feedback.

Open Doors continues work across various activities, and their Import Assistants are almost done importing The 9 Forum! They have also announced the import of Sentinel Angst, a Yahoo Group belonging to The Sentinel fandom, set to begin after October.

In July, Policy & Abuse received 2,411 tickets, while Support received 2,171 tickets. They continue to work on keeping up with responding to users’ questions and reports!

In August, Tag Wrangling welcomed their newest group of volunteers. Tag wranglers continue to work hard to keep up with the growth of the archive – in July, they wrangled more than 460,000 tags or over 1,100 tags per wrangler!

IV. ELSEWHERE AT OTW

Communications and Legal have been collaborating on News Posts regarding upcoming legislative proposals in the US and Canada. While these bills don't directly affect AO3, they would change online fandom experiences if passed, and the OTW is committed to keeping fans informed about legislative developments.

Translation has been busy translating Elections and Open Doors announcements. Recruitment for new translators has just started, and the committee hopes to welcome new translators soon!

Development and Membership arranged for the OTW's attendance at DEFCON in Las Vegas, Nevada (August 8-11) and FanExpo Chicago (August 16-18).

V. GOVERNANCE

Board and the Board Assistants Team (BAT) participated in various projects and worked on several different policies. They are in the process of preparing for Board turnover as the 2024 Election results were released, and they are planning for their next public meeting on the Board Discord in late September/early October.

Board and BAT, in collaboration with Finance, Legal, and the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution subcommittee, have finalized the OTW Whistleblower Protection Policy and are now working on developing FAQs for the policy. They also are working on Procurement Policy related documents, such as a Request for Proposal template. Moreover, Board started initial steps toward Paid Staff Transition Lead Strategic Planning goal -- further updates will be shared later.

BAT has also focused on continuing their current projects, such as helping oversee the OTW Organizational Culture Roadmap, CSAM Protection Policy, working on OTW website updates, and helping Board with several other projects.

Strategic Planning finished drafts of the 1-year assessment of the Strategic Plan to review with the Board for OTW and public-facing announcements. They also began compiling internal sustainability plans from all committees as part of the internal sustainability goal.

VI. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for two committees in August: Translation and Fanlore.

From July 23 to August 23, Volunteers & Recruiting received 162 new requests, and completed 152, leaving them with 71 open requests. As of August 23, 2024, the OTW has 930 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Alicia Zhao, Anastasija Vasilevska, Antoinette, Blue Shadow, Carrot, CorgiBlu, Crepe, CuriousDuck, cutesytootsie, Echo H, Eirvyan, Emmy, Erica L., Eve T., Hayden, Hokori, Jayzee, Jessio, Kitchel, Koschei, laleia, LezSTH, Linwelin, Lizyrd, lostdandelion, LPCollins, Lysippe, mwritesff, Oona, pawzzles, Pipdip, redpanda, Rian, ryuuseirune, Saint Corvus, Sanity, Sel, sewichii, starpoked, Stars, Tamyra, tilly, Umdlye, viol, and 1 other Tag Wrangler
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Production Manager
New Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Mitzi, Ducky, Ankita, Anishi, and 3 other Volunteers

Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: Amy Lowell
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Administrative Volunteer and 1 Import Assistant
Departing Support Volunteers: Karlo (Support Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: ElleC, Kaesa, marie belle, MickyRC, Mossflower, Nexidava, and 13 other Tag Wranglers
Departing Translation Volunteers: nire, Decembre, 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.

Shoot the confetti, the OTW is turning 17 today! Since 2007 we have achieved a lot, and we're happy to celebrate another anniversary with you. Another year has passed, full of exciting achievements and milestones, including but not limited to:

• The Archive of Our Own reached 7 million users and 13 million works, with more than 300,000 non-English works added since last September alone,
• Open Doors imported 9 fanfiction archives into Archive of Our Own,
• The number of articles on Fanlore hit 70,000,
• And 14 articles, 5 symposia, 3 book reviews, and 2 multimedia works were published on Transformative Works and Cultures!

Since it's our birthday, we dressed up to celebrate. There is now an official OTW anniversary skin available on Archive of Our Own to mark the occasion, for a limited time only!

If you feel like dressing up your AO3 interface, you can use the anniversary skin by scrolling to the bottom of the page and selecting "Happy 17th!" under the Customize section. Alternatively, you can go to Skins in your Dashboard where you'll find the skin under Public Site Skins.

Want to rock your own style for the occasion? Did you know that you can create your own site skin in minutes using the Skin Wizard?

To do this, go to your Dashboard and select Skins.

Next, select Create Site Skin. Under Create Site Skin, you have the option to write custom CSS or use the Skin Wizard. For all you programmers out there, the first option could be a fun challenge! But the Skin Wizard offers a quicker and easier way to create your skin.

Once you select Use Wizard, a number of customization options will be displayed. First, give your site skin a unique title. If you'd like, you can add a description as well.

Next, you can choose your font and adjust settings like font size, work margin width, and paragraph gaps. (If you're unsure what any of these terms mean, check out the little question marks beside each option.)

After that, you get to pick your colors! You can change the background, text, header, and accent colors by entering the names or hex codes of whatever color speaks to you!

While creating your site skin, you also have the option to add parent skins. This allows you to combine and layer multiple site skins while creating your own. If you'd like to keep the default options for a specific parameter, simply leave that field empty.

Once you're all set, select Submit to make the magic happen!

Once you submit, you have the options to preview, edit, delete, or start using the skin. When you select Use, your skin will be applied to all pages on the Archive.

You can always edit or delete a site skin and start again if you want to do something different. The skins you create will only be visible to you.

However, in honor of the OTW's birthday, we would love to see some of your custom skins! Take a screenshot of your AO3 page with your custom skin equipped, and share it with us on one of our social media channels!

Thank you for celebrating the OTW's 17th anniversary with us! We wouldn't have made it this far without the dedicated fans and hardworking volunteers. We can't wait to see what the next year will bring, and what we will achieve 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.

Now that the 2024 election is over, we’re happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!

For the 2024 Election, we had 14959 total eligible voters. Of those, 3415 voters cast a ballot, which represents 22.8% of the potential voters.

Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 27.8%

We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 4247 to 3415, which represents a -19.6% 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 which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different.

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.

EDIT: 30 August 2024 15:30 UTC Post title edited for clarity.

Governments around the world have sometimes introduced legislation that tries to regulate online platforms and limit access to "harmful" content, instead of regulating bad behavior itself. However, not all proposed internet legislation thoroughly considers the challenges of living in the digital age and the risks of government regulation.

We have covered some of these proposed laws in the past, and we're still keeping an eye on a number of proposals. You can follow the ones we're watching at Bad Internet Bills.

The most recent development in the US is that the US Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), but the US House of Representatives is unlikely to take up the bill this year. This is good news for now, but fans should stay vigilant. There is no firm timeline for this particular bill to progress further, but it's still possible for KOSA or bills similar to it to be brought to a vote in the future. If you live in the United States, you can contact your local congressperson about your concern.

We have called on AO3 users to oppose KOSA and other bills like it in the past because these bills often have vague definitions of what's considered harmful to children, leaving it open for interpretation and abuse by various government entities or officials. Further, enforcement of bills like these hinges on age-verification technology. Such technology is currently unreliable and, even if it improves, will pose extreme privacy and security risks to users. In addition, these kinds of laws encourage affected sites and platforms to self-censor any information they believe governing bodies will consider inappropriate in order to avoid liability.

The OTW and AO3 would not be directly impacted by KOSA because we are a nonprofit and KOSA's current draft only applies to for-profit institutions. However, many other sites and platforms fans use regularly for their fannish activities would likely be affected. More generally, bills like these may have the inadvertent effect of exposing internet users to greater security risks. We will continue to highlight upcoming regulatory changes that may affect fans online and offline.

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 help keep the Fanlore Discord server a lively and welcoming place? Are you fluent in a language other than English? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

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

• Fanlore Discord Moderators - closing 28 August 2024 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications are received
• Translation Volunteers - closing 28 August 2024 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 Discord Moderators

Are you interested in community management? Do you enjoy chatting with fans about fannish history and fandom in general? Do you like helping people answer questions about wiki editing? The Fanlore team needs Discord moderators to help Fanlore editors connect with each other, answer questions, and run our quarterly editing chats.

The Fanlore editing community on our Discord server documents fandom history, engages in challenges and editing chats, and works on editing Fanlore together. We need your help to keep the server a lively and welcoming place. If you think you might enjoy that, come and join us!

Applications will close on 28 August 2024 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications are received.

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, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, 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, we'd love to hear from you!

(Please note that our Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Italian, Malay, Polish, Portuguese-BR, Portuguese-PT, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish teams are not accepting new members at this time. If you are fluent in one of these languages and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead.)

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 will close on 28 August 2024 at 23:59 UTC.

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.

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.

The election has opened!

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!