An Archive of Their Own:
A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design
Casey Fiesler
University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, CO, USA
casey.fiesler@colorado.edu

Shannon Morrison
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC, USAmorrisonse1@g.cofc.edu

ABSTRACT

Rarely are computing systems developed entirely bymembers of the communities they serve, particularly whenthat community is underrepresented in computing. Archiveof Our Own (AO3), a fan fiction archive with nearly
750,000 users and over 2 million individual works, wasdesigned and coded primarily by women to meet the needsof the online fandom community. Their design decisions
were informed by existing values and norms around issues
such as accessibility, inclusivity, and identity. We
conducted interviews with 28 users and developers, andwith this data we detail the history and design of AO3 using
the framework of feminist HCI and focusing on the
successful incorporation of values into design. We conclude
with considering examples of complexity in values indesign work: the use of design to mitigate tensions in values
and to influence value formation or change.
Author Keywords

accessibility; human-centered design; fan fiction; feminist
hci; online communities; social norms; values in design
ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous
INTRODUCTION

I know we have project managers in our community -- andcoders and designers -- can't we do this? Seriously -- wecan come up with a site that would be miles better and more
attractive to fanfic writers/readers than anything else out
there, guys, because we actually USE the stuff.
We need a central archive of our own.
- Naomi, in a blog post dated May 17, 2007
In 2007, in the wake of YouTube’s massive success andamong the wave of start-ups dedicated to user-generated

Amy S. Bruckman
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, USA
asb@cc.gatech.edu

content, a group of men created a website intended tomonetize content that a community of mostly women had
been sharing amongst themselves for free [18,24,27].
FanLib, a for-profit archive for fan fiction (stories based on
existing media), was heavily criticized by the existing
community of writers, who viewed it as at best tone-deaf totheir values and at worst a deliberate attempt to exploit.
The larger community of creators of fanworks1 have ahistory that began long before the Internet, and have been
online migrants, appropriating new technologies to theirneeds [15,27]. In 2007, Livejournal was also a hub for thiscommunity, but had implemented design and policy
decisions that made fanwork creators feel unwelcome[18,25]. In reaction to these changes as well as thecontroversy surrounding FanLib, some members of thecommunity voiced a desire to avoid both dependence on the
online communities they had been using and potential
exploitation by new ones. The result was an initiative tocreate a space to share work that they would have control
over: an archive of their own.
Since its launch in 2008, Archive of Our Own (AO3) has
grown to amass nearly 750,000 users and over 2 million
individual fan fiction works.2 Its code is open source, andthe archive has been designed, coded, and maintained
nearly entirely by the community it serves—a community
made up mostly of women. Because the controversy thatsparked its existence was surrounding a disconnect with thecommunity’s value system, baking these values into thedesign of the site was a priority. As a result, the design of
AO3 is a unique example of building complex values andsocial norms into technology design.
Moreover, unpacking this value system reveals an
underlying commitment to many core feminist values such
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An excerpt from Naomi Novik’s testimony before Congress (on the topic
of fair use) serves to define fanworks and describe the community [39]:“[B]efore I wrote one word of my first novel, I wrote fan fiction, built
online computer games, wrote open source archiving software, and created
remix videos. I met hundreds of other artists creating their own work andfound an enthusiastic audience who gave feedback and advice and help.
We weren’t trying to make money off our work. We were gathering
around a campfire. We were singing, telling stories with our friends. The
campfire was just a bigger campfire, thanks to the Internet, and instead of
telling new stories about Robin Hood, we told new stories about Captain
Picard, because that is who we saw on our television every week.”
2

https://www.archiveofourown.org

as agency, inclusivity, diversity, and empowerment. Thesesame values, as articulated in Bardzell’s agenda for feminist
HCI, are also a natural ally to interaction design [2]. Even
without this specific design agenda, the developers of AO3
adhered to many of the tenets of feminist HCI as they
instilled their value system into the design features of thearchive, including nuanced handling of multiple
pseudonyms, translations of content into over 20 languages,
and a powerful, user-controlled folksonomy tagging andsearch system.
In order to better understand the history, design, and impact
of AO3 on the community of creators it was built to serve,
we conducted interviews with 17 users, as well as 11
designers, developers, and staffers. Through our analysis ofthese stories, as well as trace data such as public blog posts,
bug reports, and feature requests, we present AO3 as a casestudy of feminist HCI in action. We present successful
incorporation of designing for existing values, and conclude
with examples of additional complexities in this process:the use of design to mitigate tensions in values and to
influence value formation or change.
BACKGROUND

written in Ruby on Rails, after a public discussion led to theconclusion that it was easiest to learn for new programmers.
The site launched in 2008 and entered Open Beta in 2009.
AO3’s code is open source,4 and though anyone can submit
pull requests, nearly all of the coding is still done by fan
volunteers, part of the site’s Accessibility, Design &Technology (AD&T) Committee. AD&T consists of the
Design, Coders, and Testers subcommittees who are
involved in bug management, design implementation, andother coding issues that affect the website.
Another group essential to the functioning and design of thearchive are the “tag wranglers.” AO3 has a complex tagging
and search system infrastructure based on the principles ofuser-entered folksonomy [29]. Wranglers’ main duties
involve manually coagulating and connecting all of the new“canonical” tags that users create so that users can freely
tag their works however they wish without negatively
impacting the site’s search potential. For example, tagwranglers would manually connect “mermaid,” “merman,”and “merfolk” into one “merpeople” meta tag, invisible tousers, that allows searching any one of these tags to bringup all the others.

Archive of Our Own

In the aftermath of the FanLib controversy [18,24] asignificant contingent of the fan fiction community
galvanized to create the Organization for Transformative
Works (OTW), a “nonprofit organization run by and forfans to provide access to and preserve the history of
fanworks and fan cultures,”3 in order to provide a legal
entity capable of supporting the creation of a fan fiction
archive. Though in addition to AO3 as the major initialproject of OTW, committees also formed to start an
academic journal, The Journal of Transformative Worksand Cultures, the Fanlore wiki dedicated to preserving fan
history, and a legal advocacy team.

Figure 2. Tag Wrangler view of a tag page on AO3 (retrieved
from http://fanlore.org/wiki/AO3_Tag_Wrangling, CC-BY)
Related Work

Figure 1. Screenshot of the front page of AO3 (January 2016)

A team of fan coders, coordinators, and designers usedcommunity input to create AO3’s basic structure, which
remains largely unchanged to this day. The website is3

http://transformativeworks.org/

The history of AO3 suggests a close alignment of design
with the existing values and norms of the fan fiction
community. One way to look at this would be as an
example of value-sensitive design (VSD), “a theoreticallygrounded approach to the design of technology that
accounts for human values in a principled andcomprehensive manner throughout the design process”[20]. VSD emphasizes a relationship between values andtechnology, taking into account all those affected by a4

https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchivesystem, even non-users. Though whose values is often aconcern in VSD, some adopters of VSD as a design
philosophy have suggested thinking of it as a method thatcan be applied to any set of values [3]. Closely considering
existing social norms is a way of identifying appropriate
values for the community, and could be important for
design of both technology and policy. Values andcommunity identification can be critical to elements thatpredict the success of online communities, such asencouraging commitment and contribution [30]. Our priorwork has also suggested that website policies might benefit
from closer alignment to norms of user communities [16].
AO3 is also somewhat unique among even examples of
VSD, in that it was built by the same community that itserves. Another example of this would be open source
software, which is often built to serve some existing need(and judged successful by how well it accomplishes this).
This is often called “scratching an itch” [12,36]. Because
the “irritations” scratched tend to come from the softwarecommunity, many open source software projects are tools
for developers [36]. However, there are other kinds ofirritations. Another example of a successfully “scratcheditch” would be Ravelry, an online community for knitters,
which was created due to the founder being “frustrated by
the lack of organization of online knitting resources” [33].
However, even having a knitter at the design helm isdifferent than open source projects where all of the coding
is accomplished by potential users. After all, outside of acommunity of software developers, most communities witha need would not have the existing expertise to build
software for themselves. Statistically, this would be
especially true of populations that are predominantly
women such as knitters or fan fiction writers, since womenare underrepresented in computing, making up somewhere
between 1% and 10% of the open source softwarecommunity [32,37]. This gender divide persists despite
values of openness and inclusiveness that would seem tomesh well with feminist values [32].
Feminist Values in HCI and Fandom

Drawing from prior work in feminist methodology andscholarship on feminism and technology, Shaowen Bardzell
published an influential 2010 paper introducing an agendaof “feminist HCI”—an idea that the design of interactive
systems can be “imbued with sensitivity to the central
commitments of feminism” [2]. Lucy Suchman had
previously outlined some of these commitments as, forexample, questioning of categories (such as male andfemale or people and technology) and the residing ofagency within networks of people and things rather than
individuals [35]. Bardzell further articulated important
feminist values as including agency, fulfillment, identity,
equity, empowerment, and diversity. In laying out how they
can be integrated into HCI, she presented an action-based
design agenda to the community [2]. A follow-up to thisagenda included elaboration of what a feminist HCI
methodology would include, such as an empathic

relationship with research participants, researcher self
disclosure, and research reflexivity [1]. Subsequently, otherresearchers and designers have integrated these values andmethods into their work [14,19,23].
Just as Bardzell describes feminism as a “natural ally” tointeraction design, it is for fandom as well. Beyond simply
the demographics of fan creation, which Henry Jenkins
calls “an almost exclusively feminine response to mass
media texts,” [28], many of the underlying values of thecommunity also correspond to the commitments offeminism. Fandom’s position as a subculture [31] andcommitment to a “labor of love” gift economy [9] drives aculture of inclusivity and empowerment. Our prior work
studying online fan creation communities also identifiedsocial norms that track to a strong value system, and we
observed AO3 as being built upon these norms [15,16]. For
these reasons, we identified AO3 as an appropriate site for acase study of incorporating values into design.
METHODS

Our data for this study consists of in-depth interviews with
AO3 users and designers/coders, as well as examination ofearly public documentation related to the formation of AO3
and public feature requests and bug reports. Interview
participants were recruited in two ways: (1) direct contact
with the current AO3 development team, asking forvolunteers as well as pointers to past designers, whom wealso directly contacted; and (2) a public recruitment post
targeted at AO3 users, stating a preference for fan fiction
writers who had used both AO3 and other fan fiction
archives and communities in the past. This publicrecruitment message was posted on Tumblr and given
appropriate tags (“fan fiction”, “AO3”, etc.). In themessage, we encouraged sharing and reblogging. The post
was favorited and shared over 700 times on Tumblr, andalso passed along on other fan sites and social media.
Because we received more volunteers than we had theresources to interview, we first privileged those who had
been directly involved with AO3 or OTW (staffers incapacities other than archive development), as well as those
who reported having used the archive longer, and thenchose randomly from this group. We did not screen for
demographics or attitudes/experiences about the archive.
We had a final set of 28 interview participants: 6
developers/designers, 5 staffers (2 on the communications
team, 2 tag wranglers, and 1 from the legal committee), and17 users. These interviews were conducted via phone/Skype(18), in person (2), and over instant message (7). Thoseparticipants who chose instant message said they were more
comfortable doing so than speaking on the phone, andresearch has shown that there is not a significant differencein the amount of information conveyed between the two
mediums [13]. The interviews were semi-structured,
providing us with the flexibility to adjust questioning basedon responses [34]. We asked archive users about their
history in fandom communities, including which websites

they used and when, and why they moved from and to eachdifferent technology. We also asked them to compare andcontrast these to AO3, and about specific design featuresand values related to AO3. When interviewing developers,
we focused on the history of the archive’s development anddesign decisions.
Participants ranged in age from 23 to 62. Because we
specifically recruited participants with an eye towards
writers who have migrated to different fan spaces (meaning
they necessarily have been participating longer than some),
this age range skewed older than in previous studies of fan
fiction writers [15]. With respect to gender, our participants
were 24 women, 1 man, and 1 non-identified. This gendermakeup is representative of fan creation communities[11,28]. Every AO3/OTW developer and staffer weinterviewed identified as female; women have made up the
majority but not entirety of the organization anddevelopment team. Our participants were predominantly
white, and the majority live in the United States with the
exception of two in Canada, and one each in Australia,
Japan, England, and Germany. Interestingly, four out of six
developers interviewed are outside the United States. Ourparticipants have used AO3 for, on average, 5 years, andhave used a wide range of technologies for fan fiction
previously, including Usenet, Yahoo Groups, Livejournal,
fanfiction.net, Tumblr, and fandom-specific archives.
Though typically participant names are anonymized inresearch publications, there are times when using real
names or chosen pseudonyms is appropriate, particularly
for creators who deserve credit for their work [6].
Following Bruckman et al.’s advice that allowing
participants to indicate how they want to be identified is as
important as whether to identify them [6], we explained the
publication process to our participants and gave them achoice of being anonymized or using their chosen name(whether their real name or their fannish pseudonym).
Developers/Designers
A*, Betsy, Lucy*, Maia*, Michele*, Naomi*

User/Staffers
Heidi*, Kirsten*, Maureen, Mira*, mmmdraco*

Users
Abigail, Carolyn, Catie, Chandri*, Cora*, Jamie*, Jessica, Jo,
KM*, Krystal, Laura, nonesuch*, Olofa*, Roth*, Sara, Tara, VR*
Table 1. Interview participants, designated as: (1)developers/designers who contributed to code or design of
AO3; (2) user/staffers, users who have also been involved in
AO3 or OTW in a non-design capacity (such as tag
wranglers); (3) users with no official affiliation with AO3 or
OTW. * indicates a chosen name rather than anonymization.

After transcription of voice interviews, two independentcoders used iterative qualitative coding to identify emergent
patterns and themes from this data in the tradition ofthematic analysis [4]. We began with an inductive approach
but then grouped themes deductively under the frameworkof feminist HCI once we identified its relevance. Once
every interview was coded and the themes were considered
finalized, each transcript was re-coded by the researcher
who had not coded it originally. Our final analysis focusedon themes deriving from the values of feminism andfandom, as well as design features and philosophies
tracking to these values. Feminist values were an emergent
theme in our data despite interviewees not having beenasked about feminism.
In addition to interviews, we also looked to historical
documents about the archive. These included public
discussions about its development from blog posts and the
public code depository, bug reports, and feature requests.
We coded these documents using the same themes as ourinterviews, and used this data to supplement our knowledge
about specific design features and recommendations.
Self Disclosure

We drew from feminist methodologies as described byBardzell and Bardzell, and as implemented by Dimond etal. in the study of the activist website Hollaback!, in ourdata collection process [1,14]. Part of this is researcher selfdisclosure of their position in the world, goals, andintellectual beliefs. To this end, the first author of this paper
has been involved with OTW since 2009 (after AO3 waslaunched) in a capacity unrelated to design anddevelopment, and both the first and second authors havebeen part of the fan fiction community (whereas the third
author offers an outsider’s perspective). Making thisdisclosure to research participants positioned theresearchers in an empathic position with respect to thecommunity. However, half of the interviews wereconducted by a researcher other than the first author, tominimize any bias due to her involvement with OTW.
AO3 AS FEMINIST HCIIn her design agenda for the HCI community, Bardzell lays
out qualities characterizing feminist interaction [2]. These
include participation, advocacy, self-disclosure, pluralism,
ecology, and embodiment. Though in the interest of focus
we will not discuss every one, we saw evidence for each.
For example, ecology is relevant in the contextual impact of
the archive and how it interacts with other media thatwriters user, such as social networking sites. However,elements of participation, pluralism, and advocacy were themost prominent in our data, and here we examine how thesevalues are embedded in AO3’s design, describing thedesign features and philosophies that capture each.
Participation

The quality of participation in feminist HCI refers tovaluing participatory processes in design [2]. This can beinstantiated in many different ways, so long as the approachis inclusive and collaborative with users, and demonstrates
a respect for different perspectives. Not only has
participation been an important part of the functioning andevolution of AO3, but it could be seen as the primary
motivation for its creation.

Though not all of the 17 users we interviewed had a sense
for the history of AO3, many did; between these and the 11
staffers and site developers we interviewed, a clear picture
formed of the circumstances that led to the creation of thesite. Science fiction (and fan fiction) author Naomi Novik,
was universally acknowledged by our other participants asboth the major advocate and developer behind the archivein the early days. In the wake of the FanLib controversy,
she wrote a blog post that served as the starting place for
AO3 and OTW. The title was “An Archive of One’s Own,”a name that stuck. The impetus was that the community saw
FanLib as not valuing participation. As she wrote, “They
don’t actually care about the fanfic community… They
don’t have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board;they don’t even have a single woman on their board.” As
one of our interview participants, Naomi described thethinking that led to the creation of AO3:
We need our own site. We need to put up our own front
page that basically says, “This is the fannish community,
and this is by us, for us, and we support everyone.”
AO3 was not the first fan fiction site built by fans. One of
our interview participants, Heidi, in addition to being
involved with OTW in a non-development capacity, wasalso one of the creators of a well-known Harry Potter fan
fiction archive that launched in 2001. Similar to FanLib andAO3, this site was created largely in response to policychanges at Fanfiction.net, and she described their rationale
as being similar: “If they’re going to keep changing therules, we’re going to build our own place.” Though thedifference between AO3 and many smaller, fandomspecific archives over the years (many of which wereactually built on open source software that Naomi createdin the early 2000s) was one of scale and infrastructure.
Being big enough for everyone (not just Harry Potter fans,for example) and being willing to protect its users fromlegal challenge and ensure its continued existence was alarge order based on past precedent.
Naomi’s original blog post received over 600 comments.
She described the post as “exploding”—not only peoplechiming in and saying it was a great idea, but also listing
features that they would like to see. AO3 was designed andbuilt with a great deal of input from the community.
Moreover, it was designed and built by members of thecommunity. This was an important early priority: rather
than bringing in outside software developers, they searchedfor programming and design talent from members of the fan
fiction community. When they needed more, theyprioritized training them.
Part of it was just the necessity like, “How are we going to
get enough people to not just build this thing, but maintainit?” So, from the very beginning, it got, “All right. We’regoing to have to sort of teach people internally. We’regoing to have to grow our own.” – Naomi

This was not without problems—mostly with respect tomaintaining a large enough developer base and not burningout the current ones with the additional burden of training,
an issue pointed out by both past and current developers.
We had developers who had like a deep well of kindness,
and were available to be kind to people, and teach them,and help them where they could, and keep that rolling. But I
don’t think we ever focused enough on support mechanisms
and creating an environment where there was an instructive
way to learn enough to really sustain that. - Maia
However, as a former software engineer, Naomi was able toarticulate why she thought this value was important despite
the difficulty in sustainability:
The best platforms are built by people who use those
platforms. If you’re not actually using the software service
that you provide on the ground floor, it’s not going to bethat great. Where things really work is where you’re like
“I’m really frustrated that this thing that I want doesn’t
exist,” or “These other sites don’t do what I want, so I’mgoing to make my own.” That’s where the AO3 came from.
As the archive has evolved, the development team has
continued to value input from users. They maintain an
active feature requests board on Trello, and when theyreject feature requests they provide reasoning. For example,
a popular request is for a “tag blacklist” feature, and adeveloper added a note that they are hesitant to implement
it due to specific concerns, and included a link to a third
party tool that might help serve that function for users.
Feature requests from users are also nearly always polite,with good reasoning for the request, and often include
appreciation for the work that the developers do on the site.
A current member of the development team told us that
communication is a high priority, and making a more
conscious effort has improved user experience.
We worked really hard on announcing any site changes inadvance, talking to users in comments. We were reallyconscious of communicating any major changes, or
explaining why stuff was happening. You could tell it was
having a positive effect. – A
She says that this effect seems to have improved user
response, including things like not reacting badly totechnical problems. When the archive was down for an
evening, instead of complaining on Twitter, users tweeted
pictures of kittens at AO3 and wished them well in fixing it.
Many users interviewed compared AO3 to other websites
and the way that they handle user input:
The changes that have come about have been foraccessibility and smoother operation. I think all those camefrom people saying, “Hey, we like this. We don’t like this.
We don’t use that.” The changes on other websites havecome from companies not listening and just being like, “We
think this would be better, but we don’t know.” … Then

those changes are really annoying. AO3 doesn’t have thatproblem because it’s user-driven. – Kirsten
Active involvement of users is of course core to usercentered design generally, and can be essential to thesuccess of a technology [38]. One of the examples Bardzell
provides is Whirlpool’s “World Washer,” or “the washingmachine that ate my sari” [2,10]. The design was based on auniversal idea of clothes washing rather than engagementwith target user groups—such as women in South India
whose saris were too fragile for the machine. FanLib’s
universal idea of user-generated content (based upon a false
assumption that the fan fiction community would be similar
to the YouTube community) caused the site to fail becauseof a lack of engagement with its target user base. Valuing
participation dovetails into another component of feminist
HCI, which is the rejection of this kind of universality.
Pluralism

The quality of pluralism refers to designing to resist asingle, universal point of view [2]. This touches on issues ofaccessibility, diversity, and inclusivity. A number ofinterview participants mentioned a culture of inclusivity offandom as a whole, which heavily impacted early AO3
design. Developer interviewee Lucy characterized the
major need that AO3 filled as being a “stable, central,protected place which was accessible to everyone.” Thispriority touches on the importance in feminist HCI on
supporting not just women but any marginalized orunderrepresented population.
Accessibility

Though design towards inclusivity was a broader mission, abig part of this was accessibility in its traditional sense,
designing the website in such a way that it could be used bypeople with disabilities. One of the key designers in theearly stages of the website due to personal experiences withdisability worked hard to make the site accessible, and thisdesign philosophy continued.
The whole archive from the ground up was designed withaccessibility in mind. Everything we add has to beaccessible; otherwise it's not added. We had a few people
with assistive technology provide feedback. - Betsy
Several users mentioned an appreciation for theaccessibility of the site. Though much of this effort isinvisible to the average user, one example feature is theability to easily change the site skin, and one option is “lowvision.” User/staffer Mira felt particularly strongly about
the positive impact that designing for the visually impaired
has had, comparing AO3 to other websites.
My mother has vision problems. There is thought about thatbuilt into AO3 in a way that it isn’t into other websites. I’m
always thinking about disabilities, other ones too… If moreplaces would be like AO3 and consider feedback and thesekinds of problems then the Internet would be a better place.

Inclusivity

In addition to ensuring that everyone has the ability to use
the archive, there was also a broader mission towards
making everyone feel welcome in using the archive.
Staffers and developers expressed this as a key value—notbuilding the site so that it prescribed being a certain type offan, and instead acknowledging all their potential users.
Mira said their definition of fan is “If you think you’re afan, then you are a fan and you’re welcome here.”
As for any new feature, we always try to garner use cases
from as wide a fannish spectrum as we can. A feature
shouldn't work better for people in a fandom for an
American TV show than for fans of an Argentinian soap or
a J-Pop band or an obscure Russian book. - Betsy
Mira, who was not a site developer but had some input into
AO3 in its early stages due to her role on theCommunications team, explained that she worked hard toprioritize a value that tracks well to pluralism’s notion ofresisting a universal point of view.
I wanted to make sure that OTW and AO3 was reallyfriendly to the stuff that I would call nontraditional. I’m thisnice, middle-class person reading fiction that’s written in
English to a certain standard, but I didn’t want to impose
my preferences on the world. So I was always, as many ofus were, saying, “Well, you’ve got to look at others.”
Part of realizing this mission was a priority towards
translation of material on AO3. Designer Lucy emphasized
a sense that fandom is an international community, andmaking AO3 a “site that could exist in lots of languages”
was an acknowledgment of that. Though initial plans tohave all workings of the site auto-translated haven’t beenrealized, OTW has a committee dedicated to translation
with nearly 150 volunteers translating information by hand.
News posts, help pages, comments, and other site content
for OTW are AO3 are available in over 20 languages.5
Though this team of volunteer translators is not tasked withtranslating fiction in the archive, there are plenty of users to
do this already. AO3 supports most languages, and includes
functionality to link story translations to their original. User
Roth spoke with enthusiasm about her work beingtranslated into Chinese by a fan, and how great she thought
it was that AO3 supported Chinese characters and a numberof other languages. As a result, non-English speakers feel
more welcome on the site than they might otherwise.
Another feature towards rejecting a universal point of viewis the search and tagging system organized by a small armyof tag wranglers. Nearly every user we interviewed
mentioned this feature as being essential to AO3’s success.
A robust tagging system was a common feature request ininitial conversations about the archive, in large part in
response to other sites not meeting their needs. For
5https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/3231

example, several of our user interviewees stated that AO3
improved heavily upon Livejournal due to a lack ofcentralized search features, and also upon Fanfiction.net
due to constraints it imposed on tags and search.
It is much, much easier because of the tagging system at
AO3 to find exactly what you want to read, whereas,
Fanfiction.net was a lot harder. You could choose
characters to sort by, but you couldn’t sort by relationships
or with tags the way you could at AO3. - RothThough this was a complex infrastructure and databaseproblem, the rationale behind it wasn’t just making searcheasier, but a conscious embedding of values of inclusivity
and agency. By building in folksonomy rather than
imposing structure, the design of AO3’s database makes nojudgments about content and what is important to its users.
One interviewee contrasted this to Fanfiction.net restricting“pairing” search (representing a romantic relationship) to
two characters. AO3 has no such restrictions, allowing tags
for threesome (or more) relationships. As one user put it:
The failure of Fanfiction.net is that you could only kind ofsay, “This has one or two of these things.” Archive of Our
Own has the ability to say, “Okay, you want something thathas all of that, plus it’s got lemonade.” - Kimberly
The primary interface designer in the early days of AO3
described the rationale in giving users this level of control:
We knew that people called things by different names… If
you wanted to write a Buffy/Spike [characters from Buffy
the Vampire Slayer] fic, and you really wanted to call it
Spuffy, we didn’t want to stop you from doing that, even if
we disagreed with it. So, thinking about sort of how you
manage creating tags for a potentially infinite universe ofsource texts, and characters inside the source texts, andthings that people will want to say about their own work, iswhere the tagging system came from. - Michele
Users expressed that this instantiation of a value of nonjudgment really does help people feel included, particularly
in a community that is welcoming towards non-genderbinary and queer fans. Writers have control over how to
describe the characters in their stories.
Of course, AO3’s design necessitated trade-offs as well,and the most common complaint regarding inclusivity on
the archive is that it is largely limited to text. OTW as anorganization supports fanworks generally, which includes
things like art and video, but AO3 caters to fan fiction
writers and readers. As one of the early developers put it:
Because of the limitations of what we could afford and what
we could do, we prioritized text-based, and that’s what thearchive has become… I would love to be able to [hostfanart], but it’s such a huge amount of work… It means thatit’s only one part of fandom that can really use the archive.
I’m a bit sad for that. – Maia

Developer Lucy also spoke of this trade-off with regret,saying that supporting multimedia was always the plan.
Like other developers we interviewed, she spoke of thetechnical burden: “A lot of the coding expertise went onjust keeping the existing stuff running,” and that despitewishing that AO3 had been more inclusive to other types ofcreativity, they decided that it would better to “have it out
in the world” with this limitation than not at all. Others felt
similarly about the AO3 interface being in English only,
despite the manual translation of a lot of the content.
Identity and Self

Closely tied to values of pluralism and inclusivity is anuanced treatment of identity and self, one of the central
commitments of feminism. As Suchman points out,
feminist scholars often draw attention to the politics ofbinary divisions, and a feminist framework necessitates
displacing these binaries with specificities of knowing
subjects in a more nuanced away [35]. Pluralist design as
instantiated by feminist HCI foregrounds “constructive
engagement with diversity” as well as “embracing themargins both to be more inclusive and to benefit from themarginal” [2], a philosophy that can be challenging forsocial networking sites that often privilege normative selfpresentations rather than fluidity of identity [22,26].
These concepts are particularly important in the fan fiction
community, parts of which have been characterized as a“queer female space,” in terms of both identities andcreative themes [31]. Tagging and search on AO3
supporting any label (or lack of label) for characters infiction is one way of supporting nuanced identity. Anothersensitivity to this value is AO3’s treatment of user identity
as both fluid and user-controlled. This tracks to a highly
ingrained fandom value towards respecting anonymity,
pseudonymity, and privacy [8]. In discussing this value,
Naomi framed it in a pluralist way, an acknowledgment that
not everyone has her same view on the world:
I’ve got a lot of outside endorsement… a lot of fans are notin that position. Some of them, their own families don’tknow what they do. Some of them were afraid, especially inthe early years… Everybody has sort of a horror story
about somebody called a person’s boss and was like, “Youknow that this person writes explicit fan fiction on theInternet.” There were a lot of people who either were or felt
very vulnerable in that way. - Naomi
One way that OTW instantiated a norm to help protect thefans that might feel this type of vulnerability is by having
specific rules against “outing” (i.e., linking a real name witha pseudonym) without permission. Additionally, the ability
to remain anonymous is part of the design of AO3,
including in basic structure. For example, Naomi told usthat this is one of the reasons that AO3 does not offer tiereduser accounts (i.e., the ability to pay for more features).
AO3 does not take credit cards for any reason, so as not torequire real names. When OTW takes donations, they do
not ask for AO3 usernames. The absence of tiered accounts

also puts every user on equal footing, a decision mirroring
the feminist commitment to equality.
Another design mechanism regarding identity is a nuanced
handling of pseudonyms. In addition to the importance ofallowing pseudonyms at all (a controversial issue with somesocial networking sites such as Google+ and Facebook[22,31]), AO3 allows users to have multiple pseudonyms
and to link them together. In other words, the name of astory’s author’s does not necessarily have to be a user’s
login username. Naomi said that though some people findthis feature “puzzling,” it is important because themigration of fandom through different technologies meansthat people often had to change their pseudonyms—for
example, going to a new site and discovering that theirusername was already taken. Another reason might be that
before AO3, there were few centralized fan fiction archives
and instead they were separated by fandom—so someone
might write by one name in a Harry Potter archive and byanother name in a Star Trek archive. Designers told us that
this infrastructure was challenging but necessary:
That was a pain in the neck to represent and draft both adatabase model and an information design model. But it
was sort of a requirement coming in that there might bepeople who use different pseudonyms in different fan spaces
who wanted to combine all of their work in one account.
– Michele
Users validated the importance of this feature, and indicatedthat they find it unique to the other sites that they’ve used.
The ability to be anon behind a pseud is a long-standing
tradition dating back to the 1990s online. Even in fanzines
a lot of authors used pseuds. Then on LJ some people had adifferent pseud for each fandom. I’m supporting of how
AO3 deals with that, which is basically allowing people todo what they want. If they want to merge pseuds they can,or they can have multiple accounts, keep everything
separate. – Carolyn
I really appreciate being able to be on AO3 and be reading
various fandoms where people maybe have multiple
pseudonyms. More often, it makes it easier for me torecognize if something is written by someone I know or I’ve
read a lot of their work and I like it, or I hate it, or
whatever. - CatieInterestingly, this feature caters both to the older generationof fans who have migrated through different technologies
and become attached to their usernames, but also to an
emerging practice of younger fans, mostly on Tumblr, who
treat identity more fluidly:
You get really attached to your username. That’s who you
are. But newer people… they change their usernames
frequently when they write their fics on Tumblr. – Krystal
Even though these attitudes towards identity are somewhat
at odds, AO3’s design supports them both. This kind offlexibility is important, given the complex strategies thatfans often have toward managing multiple identities. Many
participants told us about maintaining multiple email andsocial media accounts to separate their real lives from theirfannish identity, or even multiple fannish identities.
Drawing from Goffman’s theories of self presentation [21],one way that we can “give” impressions to others is byadopting personas or even splitting personas [7]. AO3 incontrast to most social media sites, provides the option to“own” more than one identity. In sum, pluralism andinclusivity are core to the design of AO3, and these arehighly tied to the feminist value of equality. Naomi
described AO3’s core values like this:[Fandom is about] what you give to the community. The
thing you bring to the potluck is valued, and it’s not about
whether you can pay to get in the door. Anybody’s
welcome. I think that those are very good values that werepart of the community that had been baked into the archive
as well. That’s part of what’s behind the desire to allow
translation, the remixes, an attempt to provide as many
features as we can. It was all about making it possible forpeople to come play.
Advocacy

The quality of advocacy in feminist HCI considers both theimportance of taking an advocacy position towards positivesocial change and the risk of designers imposing their own
values on users [2]. One user told us that she sees theexistence of AO3 as being advocacy in itself. Advocacy inthis sense is critical to the feminist commitment toempowerment, which is at the core of AO3’s mission anddesign. “Owning the servers” was a rallying cry in thecreation of the archive [31]:It was ours and nobody could cease or desist us. They
couldn’t wipe the whole thing out. They couldn’t make it all
disappear. The GeoCities exodus wouldn’t happen again,
because the servers would belong to us. It wouldn’t matterbecause no one could buy it out from under us. - Chandri
I trust that the people who run [AO3] aren't going to shut it
down without warning like the people who ran [a smaller
fan fiction archive] did. – KM
This kind of trust was also a common refrain, especiallycompared to other sites that users mentioned. Despite thefact that most users don’t read Terms of Service for thewebsites they use, even on AO3 [17], our interviewees had
a sense of the policies of the site—and perhaps more
importantly, a trust that the policies would be favorable.
The “mass exodus” from Livejournal, in particular, was due
in part to policy changes and in part to design changes. Ourinterviewees saw both as an indication that the site did notcare about their user base. In stark contrast to sites thatmany of our interview participants described as“corporate,” AO3 is run by fans. Bardzell describes thequality of self-disclosure in feminist HCI as relating to theways technology makes visible its effects on its subjects

[2]. Our interviewees feel positively about AO3’s
transparency, and this contributes to this sense of trust.

feeling of vulnerability. Naomi explained how this presentsa challenge for the preservation of history:

I think [AO3] handles everything better [than Livejournal].
Everyone involved in the running and creates on the site
has been there because they love it. We’re not going tochange something because we think this will help
advertisement. We’re not going to change it because it
helps a different feature of our site that doesn’t involve
fannish activity. It’s a labor of love. – Kirsten

A lot of people wanted the feeling, especially earlier on,that they could just wipe out their fannish identity in an
instant if they had to. They wanted to be able to disappear.
People would wipe out their fannish identity and just go. Of
course, that becomes considerably more difficult on theInternet in practice. Very frequently, you wipe out entire
swaths of a community’s history with you.

LESSONS FROM VALUES IN DESIGN CHALLENGES

The development team’s solution to help mitigate thistension was “orphaning.” Writers who felt that they wanted
to erase their fan fiction identity could “orphan” works on
AO3, leaving them posted there anonymously with noconnection to a real person or even to a pseudonym. This isrelated as well to AO3’s “fannish next of kin” feature, inwhich users can designate someone else to take care of theiraccount in the case of their death, a “stewardship” model ofpost-mortem management [5]. This similarly provides some
control while offering an alternate to deletion.

AO3 designers said that integrating community values was
critical to the design of the archive, and that many of thesetrack to the values that underlie feminist HCI. Moreover,users expressed appreciation for those design features thatreflect the community’s values. However, a key challenge
when considering values in design is thinking about whose
values. Next, we consider what happens when thecommunity has competing values.
Designing to Reconcile Competing Values

The values embedded in AO3 described so far have notpresented much challenge in terms of understanding theirplace in the community. However, we came across several
examples of values that were at odds with each other—andfor each of these, a design feature at AO3 helps to mitigate
this tension. Some of these were simple—for example, theability to post anonymous comments on fan fiction coupledwith the ability for individual users to turn off receiving
anonymous comments helps to reconcile the tension
between the importance of anonymity in fandom and safety
from harassment. However, some were more complex andrequired more complex solutions.
History vs. Control

Naomi described the experience of attending a machinima
conference in the mid-2000s, where many attendees seemedto think that remix videos were a recent invention.
We were all like, “You guys have just completely erased a
30-year history of women vidders.” There were lots ofpeople talking about remix, and again, erasing female fans,erasing fan fiction, erasing the fact that women had beenbasically doing transformative fandom for years, and years,
and years before guys suddenly showed up on the scene.
The value of preserving fandom history is at the core of
OTW. Many interview participants mentioned experienceswith fan fiction archives disappearing, the work gone
forever. One intention of AO3 was to provide a stable,
permanent archive, and it has design features towards this:the ability for users to download PDFs of stories, so thatthey have local copies; and “Open Doors,” an initiative
towards importing stories from smaller archives that mightotherwise be abandoned. However, this value can at times
be at odds with another important value: that of maintaining
control over your own work. As noted with respect to theimportance of anonymity, this comes in large part from a

Inclusivity vs. Safety

User interviewees were by and large extremely positive intheir stories and attitudes about the archive. However, oneuser had a complaint serious enough that she consideredstopping her use of the archive. The complaint was one of
personal safety; she felt triggered by some of the content
that she came across on AO3. However, as discussed
earlier, an important formative value of the archive was its
inclusiveness. As Naomi put it, in describing the need foran archive “of our own”:
We support everyone. We support the slash hiders. We
support people writing explicit stuff. We support anybody
writing anything that is legal. None of us were willing togive our time, frankly, to a site that didn’t have as one of its
principles that “This is not my cake, but I will defend to thedeath your right to post your fanfic.”
This was the line drawn by OTW and AO3: that any
content was allowed, so long as it was legal. This was indirect response to Livejournal’s policies that had led to
fandom account deletions (having to do with theirdefinitions of pornography) as well as to Fanfiction.net’s
notoriously long list of not-allowed content (which included
not allowing stories written based on books whose authors
were against fan fiction). This user thought that AO3 hadgone too far in the other direction, and is too permissive.
Those behind AO3 are sensitive to the fact that their
inclusive policy means that there is content on the site thatmany people may not want to see. One developer said she isglad to not be on the Abuse team, where they have to lookat the stories that are reported. However, the difficulty theyexpressed was in drawing lines: if not at legality, thenwhere? Heidi told us that some fan fiction sites once drew
the line at gay relationships. Fanfiction.net does not allow
explicit content at all, nor stories based on real people.

Knowing that this tension would exist, and wanting toprotect users from being triggered or stumbling acrosscontent they did not want to see, AO3 added required
warnings for stories. These include graphic violence, major
character death, rape, and underage sex. These warnings
were chosen based on conventions at the time, what fan
fiction writers already tended to warn for when posting
stories elsewhere. Warnings are not only required, but arepart of a visual display that shows up in search results.
One early concern was that requiring these warnings mightnecessitate spoilers—for example, telling the reader aheadof time that there was a major character death. Therefore,
AO3 added an additional warning tag: “Choose not to use
archive warnings.” Seeing this tag in search results
essentially means “read at your own risk.” Most
interviewees found this to be a solution that did a good job
at taking into account different kinds of needs.
I like that it doesn’t discourage mature and explicit thingsfrom being posted, but that it’s easy to filter out so that if
you don’t want to see them, you won’t, and if you reallywant to see them, it may be easy to find. – Abigail
One user’s concern was that despite warnings, stories stillshow up in search results. Other users also have thiscomplaint, and a “tag blacklist” is a popular feature request.
Though the development team has pointed out why this will
be difficult to implement, it would be another example of adesign feature that could help mitigate these value tensions.
Designing to Influence Values

Interviewee Heidi, who ran a Harry Potter archive years
ago, described a design and policy decision that was“roundly criticized,” as she put it.
We decided that regardless of the gender of the people
snogging or shagging, ratings would be the same. This wasa huge deal in 2001. We were called smut-peddlers forallowing slash to be rated G. [Some thought] my goodness,gay people holding hands? That should be rated R!
Heidi went on to acknowledge that societal norms havechanged since then, but at the time, their hardline decision
to push back was actually a big deal—and they did it in partas an attempt to influence norms. They wanted to show thathomosexuality was okay, and she quoted one fan fiction
writer as saying, “I want the people who read my fics to be
exposed to something that’s perfectly ordinary.”
Similarly, Naomi described a policy decision of AO3 that
was a deliberate attempt to influence a value. Prior work
understanding fandom norms towards re-use of content has
shown something of a disconnect, with different standards
for different types of work [15,16]. Surprisingly, although
fan authors themselves are building on others’ work, some
don’t want people to remix their remixes. In Naomi’s
original blog post, there is some argument between fansabout what AO3 should do about this, with suggestions forproviding a mechanism for fan writers to give permission

for remixing. Naomi described their ultimate design, andfeels that in the time that has followed the creation of AO3,
the values of the community have actually shifted to be
more accepting of this practice:
We had baked in right from the beginning that you could
post a work to the archive that was a remix, or sequel, ortranslation, or a podfic or whatever, based on anotherwork, another fannish work. As long as you gave credit, youdidn’t need permission. In fact, we built a system into thearchive where it notifies [the original author]. That was
because we were coming from a philosophy where what
we’re doing is fair use. It’s legal. We are making
transformative work. We don’t need permission from theoriginal copyright holder. That’s why fanfic is legitimate.
But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander…
So, I think that’s an example, actually, where archive and
OTW almost got a little bit ahead of the curve, got a little
bit ahead of the broader community’s internal values. That
was a deliberate concerted decision on our part.
Of course, designing to influence values is a tricky
prospect, and has the potential to go very wrong,particularly from a feminist HCI point of view. By making
a choice in deliberate opposition to some of their users’
wishes, the designers of AO3 exercised power over others
in a situation without a level playing field—the developers
were empowered through their technical skill to make achoice on behalf of their users. Such a choice is normal
operating practice for much software development, but
perhaps more surprising in a feminist undertaking.
However, the choice to strongly support remixing in thedesign came out of a desire to privilege the values of
openness and sharing over the value of respecting user
wishes. This is one way in which applying feminist values
is not always straightforward in practice.
CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented AO3 as an example ofembedding values and process from feminist HCI into thedesign of a system. Though AO3’s creators had not beenreading about feminist HCI or value-sensitive design in2007 when they started their project, they prioritized theneeds of their own community and were true to their values
in the work they undertook. This design philosophy isappealing for many members of the HCI community. This
research serves as a concrete and detailed example of what
it means to enact feminist HCI in the design of a social
computing system. We also hope that in the spirit of thefeminist commitment to reflexivity, this work can inform
other communities that wish to empower themselves
through technology and design.
ACKNOWLEGMENTS

We thank the reviewers for their helpful feedback on thispaper. We also thank the fan fiction and AO3/OTW
community, not only our research participants but those
who volunteered or shared our call for participation. This
work was funded by NSF IIS Award #1216347.

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