Organization for Transformative Works News

This is now an inactive mirror of the Organization for Transformative Works news blog.

In order to be sure that we are mirroring our posts in an effective and timely way in all outlets, the OTW's Communications team is closing this, the InsaneJournal otw_news account.

You can now subscribe to OTW News posts using InsaneJournal's syndicated feed otw_blog, and we will continue to monitor and respond to comments. You are welcome to make those comments either on syndicated posts or on the original posts at the Organization for Transformative Works news blog.

Thank you.

Sometimes the way the OTW works can seem a bit opaque. We hope to shed light on it with spotlights: a series of posts which function as windows into the organisation. We start with a spotlight on International Outreach.

The International Outreach (IO) committee was founded a year ago, and as a young committee operating mainly behind the scenes it isn't particularly well known. IO is committed to serving as a lobby for current minority users as well as potential future users, and it works to ensure that the needs of an international user base are heard. Whether the users are Chinese-language fans looking for information on vidding, Russian fans organizing translation challenges, or Israeli authors uploading fic in Hebrew, IO believes that the OTW's projects should serve fans of different languages and fannish cultures, even if these fans are not part of the majority within the tradition that the OTW emerged from.

IO works mainly in collaboration with other committees. To give an example, recently we talked with the Support committee about how we could develop a support system which would include people who don't speak English, and how we could develop dedicated foreign language support teams in the future.

IO was founded specifically to amplify and support concerns related to international accessibility, and you can always turn to the committee with feedback. While you can volunteer as a staffer – see the Willing to Serve post – one-time advice is equally good. Just drop the committee an e-mail.


Click image to see larger

Questions about IO? Ask them here! You can also suggest topics for us to write about.

Mirrored from an original post at the OTW Blog.

The Archive of our Own will be down for maintenance today, Thursday 10 February, from c. 18.00 UTC, for approximately 6 hours (What time is this where I am?).

Today is the day of the new servers! Our colocation host has run some new power lines for our hungry beasts, and moved our trusty old servers into the rack with the shiny new ones. Today, we'll be switching over to actually using the new servers!

The switch means there will be extended Archive downtime. The Archive will be down today, Thursday 10 February, c. 18.00 UTC, for approximately 6 hours (What time is this where I am?).You can keep track of the Archive's status on our Twitter, AO3_Status.

You can lay in stores for the AO3 absence by using our handy-dandy download feature, which will let you have fic in HTML, PDF, epub or mobi format. You might also like to pass the time by contributing some of your fannish knowledge to our sister project the Fanlore wiki, currently asking fans to Share the Love and write about a friend in fandom!

Our trusty Systems admin, Sidra, will be working hard to set up the new servers and integrate the Archive into its new home. But there's one task still to complete - we're looking for names for our servers! Channel your creativity while the AO3 is gone into thinking up appropriate names for our seven lovely machines and join in our Server naming festival.

Hurray for new servers!

ETA: Nominations are now closed. Thanks for your suggestions! Watch this space for the opportunity to vote on the final picks!

Server naming festival! Nominate names for our new servers here!

You can suggest just one name, or you can submit a full set of seven names (maybe with a theme!). Optionally, you can give a short explanation of why the name[s] would fit / where they come from. This would be particularly appreciated if the name is drawn from a less well-known source, particularly if it is a source not in English (we would LOVE some names from sources not in English and our nominations panel will be international, but sources in languages other than English are harder to research).

There are seven machines to be named- please let us know which machine you would like the name to go to. You can see their full details in Meet the Machines - in your entry please use the short names below:

• DB


• Rails1


• Rails2


• Original1


• Original2


• Storage


• Switch

You can submit names in the following ways:

• In the comments to this post.


• Via Twitter @ao3org.


• Via our nominations webform.

Nomination format

Nominations should be in the following format:

Name - Machine - Other optional comments / source

For example:

Elsie - DB - She was the best sister in 'What Katy Did', and the cleverest!

For more details see our post on the Server naming festival!

ETA: Nominations are now closed. Thanks for your suggestions! Watch this space for the opportunity to vote on the final picks!

ETA - deadline for nominations extended to 12 February

Thanks to the wonderful generosity of fandom, we're upgrading the servers for the AO3! Our original two servers are being joined by four more, bringing more storage space, more power and more speed, all paid for through fannish donations to the OTW. We think this calls for a celebration!



The Archive will have some downtime while we swap over to the new servers. We know that this will leave some of you twiddling your thumbs - we'd love it if you could harness some of your unused fannish energy to help us name the servers! We're looking for fitting fannish names which will celebrate the wonderful fannish community and creativity the servers will host.
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As we may have mentioned a time or two, we’re lucky enough to have been able to purchase some shiny new servers for the Archive! You can read all about them at our new server announcement post! This is great news for all our users, as it means more power and more possibilities in future.

In order to move over to the new servers and perform associated maintenance and code changes, we will have 3 periods of downtime:

• Sunday 6 February, c. 18.00 UTC, for approximately 3 hours (What time is this where I am?)
• Monday 7 February, c. 17.00 UTC, for approximately 30 minutes (What time is this where I am?)
• Thursday 10 February, c. 18.00 UTC, for approximately 6 hours (What time is this where I am?)

We will send out an update on our Archive status Twitter account AO3_status before we take the site down, and again when we go back up again.

We know that many of you will miss us while we’re gone! To fill the time, we hope you’ll join in our Server Naming Festival! We’ll be posting more details of this on the OTW news blog at http://transformativeworks.org/ very soon.

Thanks for your patience while we perform these exciting upgrades to our system!

Love,

AD&T and everyone at the OTW!

Here's a roundup of recent stories that might be of interest to fans.

* The New York Times ran a skeptical editorial upon hearing that the Conan Doyle Estate has commissioned a new, "authorized" Sherlock Holmes novel, since the Holmes stories are entirely out of copyright in the UK and mostly out of copyright in the U.S. As the article notes, "there is no reason why an 'official' 21st-century Holmes story will be any better...than an 'unofficial' one," and concludes, "We shudder to think what the Shakespeare Estate might be endorsing now."

* In Japan, the supreme court has ruled that a service which transfers TV to overseas viewers is illegal. This reverses earlier rulings that the service did not violate copyright law.

*Political remixer Jonathan McIntosh has put together an HTML5 video demo using Mozilla's Popcorn.js framework in order to create an annotated remix: that is, a version in which remixers can cite sources or add footnotes. McIntosh, who believes that a transparent citing of sources might strengthen fair use claims, also offering his code, skin, and design files to anyone who wants to use them.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about you can submit it in three easy ways: comment on the most recent Link Roundup on LJ, IJ or DW, tag a link with "for:otw_news" on Delicious or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.b

Welcome to the OTW's fourth term! Below the cut, you'll find our January newsletter, with information about our committees and their goals for 2011.

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Mirrored from an original post at the OTW Blog.

We're super-excited to announce that we've just taken delivery of the brand-new servers for the Archive of Our Own! \0/ Our new, vastly expanded server setup gives us more power, more memory, and more room for expansion, and we are THRILLED to be able to have them. They have been purchased with the generous support of fandom - thanks to all our awesome members and donors!

What we're buying

Check out Meet the Machines! for full details on our server family. Our original server setup had just two servers: a main database server and a backup. We're adding three more servers to this, plus a storage server and a switch, so our new setup will look like this:

( Diagram of the new server topology )

Money matters

We bought our servers from an awesome company iXSystems, who specialise in open source applications and were really responsive to our needs. They gave us a great deal: our DB server was US$5,554, and the Rails twins were US$4,193 each. The storage server was US$3,014, and the switch that lets them all talk to each other was US$280. In total we spent US$17,234 on new hardware, which is a great price for the kind of machines we've invested in.

Buying new servers also means paying more hosting costs - we own the machines, but we hire space for them with a colocation company who hook them up to the internet. When we had just two servers, we were paying US$228 per month for our 2U of rack space and bandwidth. With the new servers, we'll be paying US$800 per month for 8U of rack space plus extra bandwidth. Because our new servers are such powerful beasts, the company are running a brand new power cable just for us!

All of this investment was paid for by donations from fans! The AO3 is funded by donations to our parent org, the Organization for Transformative Works; the success of our last membership drive, which raised US$18,308.46, gave us the financial confidence to make this investment. Thank you to all our supporters!

If you'd like to support the ongoing development of the AO3 and the OTW, you can donate at any time. A donation of just US$10 makes you a member of the OTW (if you so desire) and confers voting rights in Board elections. Donations over US$50 also qualify for a variety of nommy premiums.

What this means for Archive users

More speed! More features! More fanworks! Once we're up and running with this setup, we'll be much better able to handle high loads, so you'll be seeing much less of our sad 502 page! We'll also be able to start thinking seriously about hosting multimedia fanworks - we still have work to do before we can start hosting fanart, but it's definitely in sight now! We'll also be able to start moving towards implementing Subscriptions on the Archive - one of our most-requested features.

Server installation: Archive downtime

In order to install our new servers and move to the new setup, we will have extended Archive downtime. We're still coordinating with our colocation company, but we're expecting to have two periods of downtime in the week beginning 30th January. All Archive user accounts will be emailed as soon as we know the exact timing (now is a good time to check that your registered email is still correct) and we'll be posting on our news blogs and to our Twitter accounts @ao3_status and @ao3org as more news arrives.

Server naming festival

These servers belong to fandom, so it's only right that fandom should get to name them! During our downtime, we'll be running a server naming festival and soliciting suggestions for names for our servers (and their trusty switch). Meet the Machines to find out what they are like and start thinking about what they should be called! More information on the competition coming soon!

SERVERS YAY!

We are EXCITED! Thank you, fandom!

Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

Here’s a roundup of links that might be of interest to fans: stories about the Catcher in the Rye sequel, video parodies and edits, more inexplicable takedowns, editable videos on iTunes and more beneath the cut!

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