Source: https://www.transformativeworks.org/reports_docs/2013-annual-report-0/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 07:08:30+00:00

Document:
Six years! Six years and the OTW not only still exists, but each of our projects is thriving. Over the course of 2013, we saw a confirmation of our commitment to providing hosting to fanworks of all types with a decision on meta works; dramatic growth in our fundraising and membership; a new and improved recruiting system for staff and volunteers; an increased investment in hardware and software for Fanlore, the Archive of Our Own, and transformativeworks.org; and the development of A Meet-Up of Our Own with two events in California, including one hosted by the entirety of the Board of Directors.
Internally, this year the Board voted to allow meta on Archive of Our Own, and the AO3 grew to nearly a million works (and passed that number in February of 2014). To support those works, and to support the growth of Fanlore, now boasting half a million edits, we invested more than US$70,000 in new hardware.
Much of this work will be discussed in detail throughout the annual report, along with the other amazing milestones and achievements of the year. However, we want to take a moment here to thank all of the staff, volunteers, members, and donors who made this work possible. With your support and the hard work of our Development & Membership committee, we had a record-setting year of fundraising. The OTW received nearly US$170,000 from over 6000 donations made from 61 countries; this is more than our first four years’ funding combined.
Thanks to the efforts of the staff of Volunteers & Recruiting, we also maintained a staff stretching nearly every timezone, meaning that, once again, OTW worked 24/7 to support fans and fandom everywhere.
We also want to extend our deepest gratitude to Julia Beck, Kristen Murphy, Maia Bobrowicz, and Ira Gladkova, each of whom served as members of the Board during the 2013 term before moving on to other roles.
“For fans, by fans” — over the course of 2013, all of us at the OTW had a chance to think about what that phrase means. From the themes of our April and October membership drives to the revisions of our recruiting system for volunteers, from investing in new servers to filing amicus briefs to support fair use in the courts, we were reminded of the power we all share as fans and the mission to which we’ve committed by volunteering with the OTW.
Looking ahead to 2014, we might need to put on sunglasses! After a successful meeting of the Board of Directors in Berkeley, California in November, we’re planning on implementing such meetings annually, just one of several ways in which we are working on bringing the OTW into line with non-profit best practices. We anticipate further expansion—and expenses—for the AO3 in 2014, as well as further investment (human and financial) in all of our projects as committees continue to recruit new staffers and expand their activities. In all of these projects and in everything we do, we continue to rely on the support of our staff, volunteers, members, and donors—in other words, on you! With your continued support, we anticipate 2014 being the OTW’s best year yet.
Having passed its five year mark in 2012, the Organization for Transformative Works has experienced rapid growth in the programs that support its mission. In terms of project user numbers, content growth, and organizational visibility, this past year the OTW has reached new milestones. This growth suggests that our organization is making strides in developing awareness among fans and the media of its efforts to preserve and promote fan culture.
The OTW’s five major projects all had a significant year. The accomplishments of the teams supporting each project are notable, especially as many of them were only able to recruit and train new personnel mid-year after a hold on recruitment that began in 2012.
The Archive of Our Own (AO3) continued to experience major growth during 2013 as it passed 200,000 user accounts and represented over 13,000 different fandoms by the end of the year. Board’s decision in February to allow non-fiction content to be housed at AO3 launched discussions both within and outside of the OTW. Content Policy responded with revised Terms of Service and FAQ changes for the AO3, which were submitted for public comment in March. Later in the year, Category Change offered a proposal affecting the way fandoms are organized on the site, and also asked for feedback from users.
Except for a period of site slowness and brief outages beginning in November, which has been a re-occuring issue through the years, the AO3 performed well in terms of stability despite surging user activity. Both the Accessibility, Design & Technology Committee and Systems Committee worked on plans to improve coding and hardware. Fortunately, user support also increased during the year allowing us to expand our infrastructure.
In addition to responding to site performance issues and fixing bugs, AD&T rolled out several improvements and new features by way of 9 code deploys during 2013. These improvements included: changes to the AO3 menu and front page; upgrading Ruby on Rails; using Resque for re-indexing tasks; changes to the Kudos button; bringing Twitter feeds to the front page; tag set and challenge fixes; updating the automated test suite; and changes to how articles were used when sorting fandoms.
This last improvement impacted the Tag Wrangling team as they worked to modify fandom names. Previously, “The” fandoms were all sorted under T, “A” fandoms all sorted under A, etc. The deploy made it possible to have a “The” fandom with the article in place, but make it sortable under the actually pertinent title’s letter. The Tag Wrangling committee also took in a large number of new volunteers in 2013 and worked on training and documentation in various areas. The new volunteers helped wranglers develop a number of teams to coordinate tagging in overlapping fandoms.
The growth of tagging at the AO3 has been a significant part of its expansion since the launch of open beta. At the end of 2013, there were 977,681 total tags on the Archive, 226,394 of which were canonical; and tag wranglers made 852,422 changes to tags during the year.
The Support and Abuse Committees both saw an increase in tickets during 2013. Support held an Open Support Chat on May 4th-5th and had the second busiest month on record in December, with 556 unique tickets received. Abuse compiled an internal report listing cases by fandom, and type of complaint, and saw the first case where they called on Translation for help with a plagiarism question. Abuse reported that their ticket numbers in 2013 had tripled compared to 2012 numbers.
Systems worked to close holes in their documentation and looked for better ways to formalize their training procedures and better track the committee’s projects. They also assisted Fanhackers in developing their new site, split the OTW mailserver into separate incoming and outgoing mailservers and upgraded their ticketing system. Systems’ proposal to board about the OTW’s expanding technology needs also assisted Communications and Development & Membership with facts and figures so that they were able to create both a spotlight on Systems work, and membership drive posts which highlighted these needs to our supporters.
Fanlore achieved a major milestone in 2013, passing the 25,000 article mark in July. The Wiki Committee also began working more closely with Communications with the establishment of a Wiki liaison position to better develop the use of their twitter account and include Fanlore links in the OTW Fannews posts.
Fanlore’s twitter was particularly active during their joint project with AD&T in April. The April Showers event was designed to promote the uploading of older fandom works to the AO3 and also expand or create entries on Fanlore for underrepresented fandoms. A new fandom received the spotlight each day of the month.
The Legal Committee had a particularly active year in 2013. While they continued receiving and responding to queries from fans regarding the legality of fanworks, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, and cease and desist letters, they also expanded legal filings and increased communication with fans on topics of concern.
In January, Legal filed an amicus brief in U.S. federal appeals court in the case of Fox v. DISH Networks. In July, Legal co-signed a legal brief seeking rehearing of the case of Hart v. EA and successfully helped an OTW member counter-notify against a DMCA takedown of her podfic. In November, after broadcasting an appeal to fans for their contributions, Legal submitted an 80 page document of formal comments to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Legal staffer Rebecca Tushnet later testified before these two U.S. government agencies on behalf of the OTW. And in December, Legal filed an amicus brief in the U.S. case of Lenz v. Universal.
In addition to these activities, Legal provided public comment on matters of concern to fans, notably responding to press inquiries about the implications of Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program, and writing a post about the topic for OTW News. Both this post, and a commentary on “Free Sherlock!”, regarding the implications of summary judgment in a Sherlock Holmes case, were widely read on OTW News outlets. Legal also produced a series of posts to better inform fans of copyright changes in Canadian law.
The Open Doors Committee had a record year for imports into the AO3, bringing the total works they had imported into the AO3 to approximately 12,000. They also continued to work with the Fan Culture Preservation Project and Special Collections at the University of Iowa in archiving fan zines and other analog artifacts related to fan culture.
Following a slight delay, 852 Prospect, an archive of works in the Sentinel fandom, was successfully imported in 2013, along with the import of The Good Omens Library. The Dannell Lites Collection, a memorial archive consisting chiefly of DC and Marvel comics fanfiction and the Leah Adezio Archive, a memorial archive consisting chiefly of DC Comics fanfiction and fanart, and original comics, continued importing their content in 2013. Open Doors announced the import of several additional archives: German Speaking Slashers United; and StargateFan, an archive of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis gen fanfiction and fanart.
The Journal Committee has continued to promote and provide access to scholarship on fanworks and practices with one standard issue and two special issues of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC).
In March, TWC no. 12, a guest-edited issue entitled “Transnational boys’ love fan studies” was released. The issue was edited by Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma of Oita University, Oita, Japan. A special issue (no. 13), “Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books”, was published in June. The issue was guest edited by Matthew J. Costello of Saint Xavier University, Chicago. Issue number 14, published in September, included articles on metaphors, sub-cultures, transcultural fandom, and fannish discourse communities among others. The issue marked the journal’s five year anniversary of publication.
The Journal Committee also spun off the Fanhackers blog, a reboot of the Symposium blog with a new name and renewed focus on connecting fans and scholars with research on fandom.
The Development & Membership Committee built on their 2012 record year with another increase in fundraising in 2013. The first fundraising drive of the year was held in April and the OTW received over 2,000 individual donations totaling US$53,243.99 during the 3-9 April drive period. The OTW also received a pledge total of US$16,729 from ao3auction.tumblr.com, an independently organized fan auction. The second drive ran from October 1-7 and raised more than US$44,000. Contributions outside of the two drive periods and recurring donations brought the total raised in 2013 to nearly US$170,000.
For the first time the OTW also had a fundraising promotion using a referral link with Amazon to receive a percentage of the proceeds from Smart Pop Books. Smart Pop also offered to double Amazon’s usual affiliate rate, which ranges from 6-8% depending on sale volume, so the OTW received 12% per book. The promotion was held from October 30 to December 31 and raised a total of US$322.30.
Development & Membership also hosted an OTW event at San Diego Comic Con thanks to OTW Legal staffer, Heidi Tandy.
Our Translation, Communications, and Webmasters committees went through changes in 2014. The newly renamed Web Strategy, Design & Development committee continued work on the site after the December 2012 Drupal upgrade with various bugfixes through the year. They also focused attention on redesign considerations and future upgrades. In January, they implemented a new Release Management process for the transformativeworks.org domain and its subdomains for Elections and Open Doors. They also created a new job board for Volunteers & Recruiting.
In an effort to keep organization supporters aware of OTW operations during 2013, the Communications Committee put out 257 posts to OTW News outlets in 2013. As well as writing 172 of these, they assisted other committees in creating announcement posts of important achievements or requests for public input. Communications also organized events to celebrate milestones such as Fanlore’s 25,000th article and created posts for other special dates such as the OTW’s sixth anniversary and SysAdmin Day.
While overall media attention on the OTW remained much the same as in 2012, there was a particular jump in contacts for print, radio, and video interviews relating to Amazon’s announcement of its for-profit fanfiction publishing project, Kindle Worlds.
Communications also recruited a number of graphic artists in 2013 in order to create greater visual appeal for the OTW website’s front page, and to draw attention to its posts and events across its posting sites, particularly on graphics-oriented platforms such as Tumblr.
The Translation Committee’s workflow was affected by changes to the OTW website, and it spent 2013 re-organizing as a committee. They continued to respond to translation needs by other committees such as Abuse, Tag Wrangling, and Internationalization & Outreach.
After many months of work by the Volunteers & Recruiting Committee, and with help from Web Strategy, Design & Development, the OTW began recruiting new volunteers and staff in April. VolCom’s work included a focus on documentation for all roles within the organization, an ongoing and revised recruitment process, and training materials. As part of this effort, VolCom created interactive tutorials for org-wide tools that are being used by staff or volunteers.
Although under the new process most job posts were only open for a week, most committees received numerous applicants for the positions. This was particularly the case for Tag Wrangling, who had such an overwhelming response to recruitment that they had to repeatedly close recruitment within days of opening to new wranglers. The following graph demonstrates the fluctuation in number of tag wrangling volunteers.
The Strategic Planning Workgroup, who were charged with analyzing the state of the organization, had surveyed the majority of the OTW’s staff and volunteers by year’s end. Four reports were submitted to Board for review, released internally, and then posted publicly, with several more in the pipeline for early release in 2014. The Workgroup anticipated completing individual committee or workgroup reports by 2014 and then beginning work on an advisory report on the entire organization.
In May, Board member Maia Bobrowicz announced that she would be stepping down. Board held an open house chat for chairs, staff and volunteers on July 13-14 and approved Phase 1 of a proposal from Systems to expand our technology infrastructure. Board then set aside 19 August – 19 September for their major project of the year, which was working on internal documentation pertaining to board activities. In October, the Board of Directors announced plans to hold their first-ever in-person Board meeting from October 31-November 4 in Berkeley, California. While there they also hosted an OTW meetup on November 3.
The organization announced that a 2013 election would not be held due to a lack of sufficient candidates to fill the open seats. In December, Strategic Planning chair Anna Genoese was inducted to the Board and Ira Gladkova and Kristen Murphy ended their three year terms.
The Board of Directors welcomed new members Maia Bobrowicz and Cat Meier, and bid farewell to departing members Julia Beck, Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, and Jenny Scott-Thompson.
Accessibility, Design & Technology successfully deployed 0.9.5 of the Archive.
Webmasters implemented a new Release Management process for the transformativeworks.org domain and its subdomains for Elections and Open Doors. This included a new job board for Volunteers & Recruiting as well as several fixes for existing bugs.
The OTW Board voted to allow fandom nonfiction (meta) to be hosted at the Archive of Our Own.
The Content Policy workgroup began work on Terms of Service and FAQ changes in response to the board decision.
Tag wranglers were busy renaming fandom titles after the articles feature was fixed in the latest AO3 deploy.
Communications inaugurated a Wiki liaison position and began posting to Google+.
Legal filed an amicus brief in U.S. federal appeals court in the case of Fox v. DISH Networks.
Strategic Planning’s Tag Wrangling report (the first team surveyed) was released to the general public.
Volunteers & Recruiting created interactive tutorials for org-wide tools that can be used as part of training for new staff.
AD&T released an updated version of the AO3 Roadmap.
Content Policy hosted a two-week feedback period on the fandom nonfiction proposal.
Abuse saw the first case where they called on Translation for help with a plagiarism question. Abuse also compiled an internal report listing cases by fandom, and type of complaint.
The reboot of the Symposium blog – now called Fanhackers – launched on March 1 with the help of Systems, Webmasters, and Legal.
Journal released No. 12 of Transformative Works and Cultures , a guest edited issue on Boys’ Love.
The Survey workgroup, together with Communications, compiled and released the OTW’s 2012 Community Survey Report.
Webmasters met with Communications and Development & Membership to assess content on the OTW website and bring it up to date.
Volunteers & Recruiting converted the Vidding Workgroup into the Fan Video & Multimedia Committee.
Development & Membership received over 2,000 individual donations totaling US$53,243.99 during the 3-9 April drive period. The OTW also received a pledge total of US$16,729 from ao3auction.tumblr.com, an independently organized fan auction.
Volunteers & Recruiting reopened recruiting and worked with chairs and leads on documentation to get additional roles open and projects staffed.
Tag Wrangling had such an overwhelming response to recruitment that the they had to hit the pause button long enough to train the 53 new tag wranglers inducted in April.
Accessibility, Design and Technology’s deploy early in April to the Archive of Our Own included a major revision to the Archive header and some new designs for emails.
AD&T and Wiki’s joint project, April Showers, came to a close after 30 days of activities on the Fanlore twitter and through the April Showers hashtag on Tumblr.
Systems worked to close holes in their documentation and looked for better ways to formalize their training procedures and better track the committee’s projects.
Strategic Planning released their report on Volunteers & Recruiting.
Open Doors announced that 852 Prospect, an archive of fanworks for the Sentinel fandom, had been successfully imported into the AO3.
Support held an Open Support Chat on May 4th-5th.
OTW Board announced the resignation of Maia Bobrowicz.
The AO3 got kudos as one of TIME magazine’s choices for the 50 Best Websites of 2013.
Journal released guest-edited Transformative Works and Cultures No. 13, on comic books. TWC has been publishing three issues, instead of the required two; this was the bonus issue.
Communications handled a number of media requests from around the world seeking comment to the announcement by Amazon that it would be launching a pay-version for fanfiction through its self-publishing infrastructure.
Legal staffers were among those who responded to press inquiries about the implications of Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program, and the committee wrote a popular post about the topic for fans.
Communications worked with Legal and Wiki to hold a celebration for Fanlore’s 25,000th article with a trivia contest.
Legal co-signed a legal brief seeking rehearing of the case of Hart v. EA and successfully helped an OTW member counter-notify against a DMCA takedown of her podfic.
Internationalization & Outreach released the Archive of Our Own’s Diversity Statement.
Board, Finance, Communications, and Webmasters completed their work on the 2012 Annual Report.
Strategic Planning’s report on Open Doors was released to the public.
Accessibility, Design, & Technology formed a Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) sub-committee.
AD&T made two small deploys in June making up Release 0.9.7.
Tag Wrangling posted several more advanced tutorials for both new and experienced wranglers and created new rules for translated fandom tags.
Abuse reported a rise in the Archive being used as a blog or tumblr for announcements.
Legal staffer Heidi planned and hosted The Meetup of Our Own at San Diego Comic-Con in conjunction with Development & Membership and collected US$365 in donations.
Open Doors began developing plans for three new archive transfers to AO3 while also facilitating two fanzine donations to the Fan Culture Preservation Project.
Systems split the OTW mailserver into separate incoming and outgoing mailservers and upgraded their ticketing system.
Journal’s editors worked with Communications staffer Jintian on a spotlight post discussing their production process.
Board held an open house chat for chairs, staff and volunteers on July 13-14 and approved Phase 1 of a proposal from Systems to expand our technology infrastructure.
Communications celebrated the 1000th subscriber to the OTW Tumblr account featuring work from its new Graphics Volunteer recruits.
Journal released No. 14 of Transformative Works and Cultures , which marked their 5-year anniversary.
Category Change offered a proposal affecting the way fandoms are organized on the site, and asked for feedback from users.
AO3 passed 200,000 registered users.
Abuse reported that their ticket numbers in 2013 had tripled compared to 2012 numbers.
Accessibility, Design and Technology successfully deployed Release 0.9.9 to the AO3.
Board set aside 19 August – 19 September for working on internal documentation.
AO3 Documentation began work with AD&T to update FAQs as new code hits the Archive.
Internationalization & Outreach worked with Communications to produce a spotlight post.
Development & Membership’s second fundraising drive of the year ran from October 1-7 and raised more than US$44,000.
The Journal editors submitted the page proofs for their edited volume, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, to the University of Iowa Press for early 2014 publication. Royalties go to OTW, which funded the reprint fees.
Open Doors completed importing works from The Good Omens Library and held two open house chats with the GSSU (German Speaking Slashers United) in preparation for importing its works to the AO3.
Accessibility, Design and Technology deployed Release 0.9.10 to the Archive.
No candidates came forward to run for seats on 2014’s Board so elections were not held.
Board held their first-ever in-person Board meeting from October 31-November 4 in Berkeley, California and hosted an OTW meetup on November 3.
Webmasters had an October release which fixed various bugs including those causing errors on the OTW’s contact forms.
Legal submitted formal comments to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).
Journal requested, and obtained, a bibliographic listing in the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s bibliography of journals.
Open Doors held two public chats and provided information on the planned import for StargateFan to the Archive of Our Own.
Accessibility, Design and Technology deployed Release 0.9.11 at the AO3 and began battling performance issues.
Tag Wrangling was limited to weekdays only to reduce strain on the AO3 servers during traffic-heavy Sundays.
Volunteers & Recruiting administered the Still Willing to Serve survey to find out which staff were planning to continue serving in 2014.
Anna Genoese was inducted to the Board and Ira Gladkova and Kristen Murphy ended their three year terms.
Development & Membership reported on our fundraising promotion with Smart Pop Books, which ended on December 31. This resulted in OTW supporters purchasing 157 printed books and 47 ebooks through the affiliate link, raising a total of US$322.30 for the OTW.
Strategic Planning released a report on the Survey Workgroup.
AD&T deployed Release 0.9.12 to the AO3 and finished 2013 with 300 closed bug reports.
Support had the second busiest month on record in December 2013, with 556 unique tickets received.
Legal filed an amicus brief in the U.S. case of Lenz v. Universal.
Legal staffer Rebecca Tushnet testified before two U.S. government agencies on behalf of the OTW.
Volunteers & Recruitment began the retirement of the Survey Workgroup project.
At the end of 2013, there were 977,681 total tags on the Archive, 226,394 of which were canonical; and tag wranglers made 852,422 changes to tags during the year!
The Board revisited its 2013 goals and began discussing where they wanted to see OTW go in the next year. The goals for 2014 reflect those conversations as well as feedback received from members and participants in various OTW projects.
Strengthen relationships with ally organizations and with fandom-friendly individuals in the entertainment, academic, media, non-profit, open source, and legal communities.
Cat Meier (President) Cat Meier studied International Relations at American University and has since worked in a variety of completely unrelated fields including financial administration, marketing and political canvassing. She is currently co-chair of the OTW Finance Committee, which she has served on since its inception. A science fiction and fantasy reader all her life, she has been a member of online fandom since 1999 as a reader, reccer, beta reader and meta writer in fandoms ranging from historical movies to superhero comics. From 2005-2011 she served as one of the compilers of the popular fannish newsletter Metafandom.
Anna Genoese (Secretary) Anna Genoese is a lifelong fan and professional editor/author who currently works full time for an international nonprofit focused on youth development. While working as a professional editor, Anna published the original fiction of several fanfic writers. Using a pseudonym, Anna has written fanfic and performed podfic in a number of fandoms, which can be found at the AO3. Anna worked with the Strategic Planning Committee of the OTW January 2012 – December 2013, and was the chair of the committee August 2012 – December 2013. Anna is also a volunteer tag wrangler.
Nikisha Sanders (Treasurer) Nikisha Sanders holds a BA in sociology and anthropology from Earlham College, where she authored a senior thesis on gender representation among queer women. She has worked as an activist for AIDS awareness and education, lobbied for LGBT rights at the local and state level as staff for the Fairness Campaign, and served as member of the board of the Kentucky coalition of Jobs with Justice. She brings experience in non-profit management and accounting to the board, and has a personal interest in outreach to fannish communities of color. She is relatively new to online fandom, joining in 2000 as an avid reader of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic; and has been writing in various television and film fandoms, including NCIS, Criminal Minds, and Harry Potter, since 2006.
Eylul Dogruel (Elections Officer) Eylul Dogruel is an artist and an MFA candidate at Marmara University, Istanbul. She has an eclectic background combining computer sciences and art. Her knowledge and interests cover a range of topics including new media, sci-fi, customer support, web technologies, and usability. Eylul is a lifelong fan and has moved through various media and gaming fandoms. She is a fanfic reader, fanart appreciator, an MMO roleplayer and, occasionally, a meta writer. Her current fandoms include Warcraft, Doctor Who and The Longest Journey/Dreamfall.
Franzeska Dickson Franzeska Dickson does back office work in finance. Always a geek, she was introduced to fanfiction by alt.tv.x-files at the tender age of 13 and has been in fanworks fandom ever since, first as a reader, then a writer and beta, and now a vidder. Her favorite venues and events are pan-fandom ones, including her own rare Asian fandoms exchange. She has previously served on the Content, Abuse, Webmasters, and Tag Wrangling Committees as well as filling various other volunteering positions within OTW.
Andrea Horbinski Andrea Horbinski is a Ph.D. student in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to the OTW Board, she also serves on the advisory board of the Ada Initiative, which is dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow to Japan, studying hypernationalist manga in Kyoto, and was a founding member of the OTW’s Internationalization & Outreach committee in 2010. She joined online fandom in 1999 after writing her middle school graduation speech on her love of Star Wars, and soon became involved in anime and manga fandom as an AMV editor and later a fan translator. She has discussed fandom, anime, manga, and Japanese history and folklore at conventions and conferences including Otakon, Sirens, WisCon, AnimeExpo, and the Popular Culture Association, and her articles and reviews have appeared in The WisCon Chronicles vol. 6, Mechademia, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

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