Organization for Transformative Works News

It's that time again! As the end of the OTW's second term nears, we will soon begin putting together the next round of committees for our third term, which means we are once again in search of people who are willing to serve. We did an amazing amount of work during our second term, and we have a lot of things planned for the next. Many of our current committee members will be returning for a third term, and we are looking for enthusiastic and dedicated people to join them.

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This post brings you a mid-week Hello! from the Development and Membership committee of the OTW and some exciting news!

An anonymous donor has come forward to offer a matching challenge grant of up to US$5000. That means that when you donate now, a contribution of equal value comes from a secret source and effectively doubles the impact of your giving. If you give US$10, it’s matched by another US$10 and the OTW receives a total of US$20. If you give US$50, you can opt to get an OTW sticker & iron-on pack AND your donation is still matched by another US$50, making the total impact of your donation US$100 for the OTW and a premium for you. Matching will continue cumulatively up to US$5000 of donations – US$5000 from you and other donors plus US$5000 in matches equals US$10000 in funds raised for the OTW, for hosting costs for the AOOO and Open Doors, and for future fannish projects not even imagined yet.

We’ll be posting regularly to our twitter account over the next few days to let y’all know how much of the challenge amount we’ve raised. You can subscribe to our twitter feed, or just check in to see the news, here: http://twitter.com/otw_news

Now is a great time to give if you haven’t done so yet, and a great time to give a little bit more if you can. We’d really like to raise all US$5000 needed to max out our challenge grant, and every donation helps!

Thanks,
The Development and Membership Committee of the OTW

This post is available in Español at the OTW blog.

During this October membership drive, the OTW is launching a new series of "donation premiums"--that's the technical fundraising term for "small gifts we offer to our donors as a token of our gratitude for your support." (You know--Merch. Tchatzkes. Clutter.)
We're offering two premiums this time around (click to see larger images).

OTW Stickers: Your (Laptop, T-Shirt, Notebook Cover) Looks So...Naked!

If you donate US$50 or more, you can receive an OTW sticker and iron-on pack. The stickers and iron-ons are 3" in diameter; the iron-ons (assorted shapes) are suitable for use on light or dark-colored clothing, tote bags, or other textiles. Stick 'em on your laptop, your writing notebook, your breasts: our Merch Coordinator assures us that they make very generous pasties. Iron-ons turn that boring t-shirt or tote bag from "Blah!" to "Wow"! (or possibly we need to get out more. But really, they're cool!)

OTW Travel Mug! (Get 'Em While They're Hot--No, They're Cool, Just The Coffee Is--I'll come in again.)

If you donate US$100 or more, you can snag an insulated OTW travel mug. It holds 14 oz. of your favorite beverage, plus it's swanky as all hell: acrylic and stainless steel exterior, 18/8 stainless steel inner liner, splash-resistant lid. The OTW graphic is printed with eco-friendly organic inks on both sides of the mug: yes, our mug goes both ways! Come on, you know you want one!

Combo Package!! (Yes, You Can Have It All!)

If you donate $120 or more, you can get it all: the stickers, the iron on, the insulated travel mug, as well as the devotion of all of us here at the OTW. And if you carry something adorned with our logo to a party or a conference or on the bus--well, hey, you might find fans in places you never expected to find us!

ACT NOW! Operators are standing by!

And now for (some of) the news you've all been waiting for: the details of the OTW's 2009 Election Season!

We have great news for you: two fabulous people are joining the OTW Board! Because only two candidates came forward, we won't be holding a contested election this year. However, they are both awesome and eminently qualified for Board service. Without further ado, let's introduce them!

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Elizabeth Yalkut is a student at Columbia University in New York City. She has worked in development, marketing, and strategy for nonprofit legal and theater organizations, is a long-time American Civil Liberties Union volunteer, and currently works for the Educational Technology department at Barnard College. Elizabeth has been a staffer with the OTW since 2007 and has been particularly instrumental on our Content Policy committee, where she helped to research, write, and publicly workshop our complex, fan-friendly, and highly-readable AO3 Terms of Service as well as general policy documents across the OTW. She also serves as a member of our Development committee, and was asked, as someone intimately familiar with Archive policy, to chair our Abuse committee at the beginning of 2009. Food is one of her fandoms: Elizabeth blogs about food at A Very Uncommon Cook, serves as treasurer of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society, and currently enjoys the hell out of Merlin, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Elizabeth plans to work on outreach (organizational, fannish, international), accessibility, and education during her term on the Board.

Allison Morris works in a public library as a public services supervisor and has a BA in Japanese Literature from the University of Michigan. An OTW staffer for two years, Allison currently chairs the OTW Webmasters committee, which is responsible for building and maintaining all of transformativeworks.org, including the OTW blog, donations software, Open Doors subsite, and elections subsite; this requires her to work closely with the Drupal and CiviCRM open source software communities, as well as with people involved in a broad selection of OTW projects. This year, Allison also serves as co-lead with the Tag Wranglers subcommittee and heads the cross-committee Merchandizing workgroup which organized and is carrying out the OTW's new donation premiums. A lifelong fan, Allison is particularly interested in not only works that transform canon but also fanworks that honor the work of other fans and transform other fanworks, like remixes, podfic, recs, and meta, among other fan arts. She has been a devoted creator and advocate of podfic; she built and maintains the Audiofic archive, providing a stable, permanent home for a constantly growing collection of podfic -- currently ~3700 recordings covering ~290 fandoms, including readings in five languages -- and she has conducted several podfic workshops at cons. She has many theories concerning robots, clones, and John Sheppard, and has presented on those and related subjects at WisCon and Writercon, as well as informally to whomever will listen.

Allison plans to work on increasing the OTW's profile among technical women's organizations as well as on creating a grantwriting team.

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We would like for all of you to get to experience their awesomeness yourselves (or bask in it again, if you've already met them) and to ask questions about the details of the experience and ambition they bring to the table. They are your Board members - come say "Hi!" To this end, we'll be hosting a chat at 1400 UTC on 24 October 2009.

Time clock for this event is here:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=10&day=24&year=2009&hour=14&min=0&sec=0&p1=0

The chat will take place in our Public Discussion room on Campfire, which can be accessed via this URL:

https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/28473

Alas, the tea and coffee we can provide will be only virtual, but you are welcome to bring your own mug to the computer.

Although we didn't get to hold a competitive election this year, we are delighted to have attracted two such marvelous new Board members. Welcome, Elizabeth and Allison!

If there's anything we didn’t cover here that you're concerned about, or if you want any more information, please respond to this with any questions, comments, or objections you may have. You can reach Elections by leaving a comment on this blog post or any of its mirrors, or by using the Elections contact form; you can reach the Board by leaving a comment on this post or its mirrors, or by using the Board contact form.

Visit the OTW Elections website.

Welcome to our weekly update from the chair of ADT. All the news that's fit to print about the progress of the Archive of Our Own is below the cut. Comment or ask questions at the OTW Blog or on the original post at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/425207.html.

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Fans looking for reasons to become a member of OTW during our current drive might check out Jack's latest article over at The New Gay: Gay Geekery: The Organization for Transformative Works. In this column, Jack explains how his support of the OTW is connected to his own politics around queer liberation and sexual freedom. "But even beyond that," Jack adds, "I want people to know that what we [fans] do is truly meaningful artistic work."

Read the rest of the article, and then join the OTW! (And thanks for the shout-out, Jack!)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

As the rash of new OTW lolcats might suggest, it's time for our annual October donations drive! If you're on our mailing list, you've hopefully already received an email about this. (Let us know if you haven't!)

In the last few months, we have:

• purchased servers of our very own and moved them into a colocation facility, which means that soon we plan to move the Archive of Our Own from closed beta into open beta! (What does this mean? Learn more at Archive News post #4: Colocation & Open Beta);



• launched several new projects, among them the Fan Culture Preservation Project and the GeoCities Rescue Project;



• represented vidders and other remix artists at DMCA anticircumvention hearings;



• filed an amicus brief in the Salinger/60 Years Later case to influence the courts' legal definition of "transformative" use;



• put out a new issue (our third, and right on time: most universities haven’t ever managed to put three issues of a journal out on time!) of Transformative Works and Cultures;

and much more!

Thanks to your awesome response to our March membership drive, we had the funds in-hand to purchase our shiny new servers outright. This is incredibly exciting. \o/!

But we still have costs: colocation, bandwidth, saving up for our second set of servers when the first set get worn-out, and all kinds of exciting new projects we hope to dive into once the AO3 is out of beta, including a Vidding Archive of Our Own. So we hope you'll choose to donate to the OTW this week!

If you have trouble donating, you can contact DevMem by leaving a comment on this post (at the blog or its livejournal or dreamwidth mirrors) or by using the contact form at our website. Thanks for your support!

This post is available in English, Dansk, Nederlands, Deutsch, & Español at the OTW Blog.

The OTW's October donation drive is right around the corner (begins 11 October!), so we've created some new lolcats to share with you. Please help yourself! You can post them by copying the text below each image and pasting it into your journal or website.

( lolcats below the cut! )

Welcome to our weekly update from the chair of ADT. All the news that's fit to print about the progress of the Archive of Our Own is below the cut. Comment or ask questions at the OTW Blog or on the original post at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/423205.html. We hope you find these notes informative!

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You might think fighting robots only happens in video games, in which case: read the The Slow Road to Fair Use: Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video, a guest post by video remixer IKAT381 at politicalremixvideo.com. IKAT381 chronicles the three week--but ultimately successful--slog to get a vid up on YouTube, a process that included fighting the upload bot, which did an automatic takedown, lodging a dispute through YouTube's built-in online tool, and then lodging a DMCA counternotice when the dispute was denied (by another bot?) in favor of UMG, the record company that owned the Weezer song.

Persistence paid off, but as IKAT381 points out, "imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek."

IKAT381 concludes: In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots. In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

(You might also enjoy the vid. Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (Weezer Remix) is a tribute to IKAT381's favorite internet celebrities, of which you're sure to recognize more than a few!)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

We continue to keep you updated on the AO3 by crossposting our ADT chair's summary of weekly meetings. You can comment or ask questions at the OTW Blog or on her original post at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/422082.html. We hope you find these notes informative!

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If there you are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or by volunteering, or by messaging or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party :)

This entry was originally posted at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/422082.html.

Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens' rights in the digital culture, has just done a four part "TV" series called, "We Are Creators, Too."

Part One features Nina Paley, the brilliant independent filmmaker and animator who made Sita Sings The Blues, whose release was tied up over music rights: while the actual recordings she used (from 1927) were in the public domain, the "sync licenses" were exorbitant.

Parts Two and Three feature Elisa Kreisinger and Jonathan McIntosh of Political Remix Video; Elisa's political remixes, including "Queer Housewives of New York City (Real Housewives Remix)", can be found at elisakreisinger.com; Jonathan's political remixes, including, "So You Think You Can Be President?" and the recent "Buffy vs. Edward" can be found at rebelliouspixels.com.

Part Four features OTW board member Francesca Coppa talking about vidding and vid culture, as well as the work of the OTW. (Francesca was also recently interviewed over at Geek Feminism, where she talks about the Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, and where the OTW is vis a vis a vidding archive.)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Welcome to our September, 2009 newsletter. Get news from all your favorite committees about all your favorite OTW projects...right beneath the cut!

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Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Description: Now that we're close to Open Beta, we want to put in place a Support Team who will be responsible for responding to user questions and problems on the Archive of Our Own. The Support Team will respond to queries filed through the support form on the Archive, and liase with members of other teams to resolve bugs and provide users with accurate information.

Skills required: You'll need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively, and to have the patience to work through a user's problems if necessary. No specialist technical knowledge is required, but you'll need to be comfortable with talking to coders and testers to find out what is going on. If you have experience providing support on other sites, then that's a bonus, but it's not required.

Estimated Time Involved: A few hours a week.

How to Volunteer: Use our contact form to send us the following information:

Your name (you may provide your real name or your fannish name--please consider what you feel comfortable using both inside and outside the organization):

Your email address:

Please put "Archive Support Team" in the subject line.

Send us your information by: 3rd October, 2009

All volunteers will receive an email confirming their information has been received; please give us up to five days to reply.

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by using our contact form.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog and is available there in Deutsch and Español.

The OTW will be holding its next membership drive from October 11 to October 18, 2009. This is important for many reasons (not least of which is our continued need for your support!) but please note that should we happen to have a contested OTW Board election this November (i.e. more declared candidates than open seats), you must be a member of the OTW in good standing by October 18, 2009. That means you need to have made a membership donation of at least US$10 in the last year, or since October 19, 2008.

You can, of course, become an OTW member at any time, and we will always accept your donations! But if you’re not a member and want the option to vote in a potential election, please be sure to join the OTW before the end of our October drive.

Visit the OTW Elections website.

This post is mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog and is available in Deutsch & Español.

In the interest of giving you more information, we continue to crosspost entries summarizing ADT's weekly meetings. You can comment or ask questions of our ADT chair on the OTW Blog or on her original post at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/420566.html. We hope you find these notes informative!
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Description: The Wiki Committee is in need of a terrific writer to help us straighten out the internal side of Fanlore -- basically, we need help reorganizing and rewriting policy pages and help files, and organizing them in a user-friendly manner. You do not need to be an expert in wiki markup, though some experience and comfort with basic wiki markup (linking, categorizing) is needed.

The committee's feeling is that our policy pages are somewhat over-detailed, and our help files aren't sufficiently helpful in walking a new user through the process. Basically, we need help straightening this out to make Fanlore as user-friendly as possible. The ability to write clearly and succinctly, using examples and user-friendly language, is required, as is the ability to organize information.

Estimated Time Involved: We would love to have this complete by the end of the term (December 18th), but the position can continue into the new term if necessary. No specific time commitment is required per week, but we would like to see steady progress.

How to Volunteer: Use our contact form to send us the following information:

Your name (you may provide your real name or your fannish name--please consider what you feel comfortable using both inside and outside the organization):

Your email address:

Applicable experience:

What you can bring to this position:

Please put " Wiki Documentation Specialist " in the subject line.

Send us your information by: October 2nd, 2009

All volunteers will receive an email confirming their information has been received; please give us up to five days to reply.

Anyone can contact the Volunteers & Recruiting committee at any time by using our contact form.

This post has been mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog and is also available in Deutsch and Español.

The Summer, 2009 issue of Cinema Journal features a section on fandom in general and vidding in particular edited by TWC's Kristina Busse and featuring a number of members of TWC's editorial board. (Yes, that's a shot from Lim's "Us" on the cover!) The issue is currently being mailed to subscribers, but eventually will be online at JStor and available through academic search engines in libraries and such.

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism
Gender and the Politics of Fan Production

"Introduction," by Kristina Busse
"A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness," by Francesca Coppa
"A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture," by Karen Hellekson
"Should Fan Fiction Be Free?" by Abigail De Kosnik
"User Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence," by Julie Levin Russo
"Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership," by Alexis Lothian

Edited to add: Not sure for how long this file will be available, but the "In Focus" section can currently be found on the SCMS website here.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

This is a reminder that the OTW will give Archive beta accounts to people's whose fic will be thrown off GeoCities when it closes at the end of next month! But you have to come and ask! (Please ask!) If you haven't found other hosting options for your own fic, or if you are an archivist or maintainer of a multi-author site, please email Open Doors with your site name and we'll try to hook you up one way or the other.

Meanwhile, some awesome fans are documenting the existence of fannish sites on GeoCities using Fanlore. If you ever wanted to try your hand at using Fanlore, this is a great time to learn: there's loads of sites that need documenting. And if you know any of the people hosted on or running these sites, please please encourage them to request Archive accounts: we don't want to lose the stories!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

The Copyright Office requested further information from the OTW and other groups that testified during the DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings on May 6-8. These hearings were designed to entertain testimony in favor of and against DMCA exemptions for media educators (including K-12 teachers), documentary filmmakers, vidders, and other noncommercial remix artists.

For those who are interested, our answers are linked here.

The first is a joint answer, collaboratively written, submitted, and signed by the OTW, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a number of library associations (ALA, AALA, ARL, ACRL), film and media studies professors, and documentary filmmakers and their organizations. (Joint Supporters Response To Supplemental Questions On Proposed DVD-Related DMCA Exemptions (PDF).)

The second is a separate response co-written specifically by the OTW and the EFF to address the particular needs of vidders and other remix artists. (OTW & EFF Response To Supplemental Questions, Specific To Noncommercial Video Remix Creators (PDF).)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.