Organization for Transformative Works News

Written by Tanaqui

(Please note that many of the links lead to web pages in Brazilian Portuguese.)

A revised copyright law to be put before Brazil's National Congress in the next few months will, if passed in its current form, provide more explicit protection from action by copyright holders for transformative works. The law should also make it legal for fans to break Digital Rights Management (DRM) locks if they are using the DRM-protected content in transformative ways.

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

Part Two of the fan vidding segment of the 2010 DIY show is now available at Henry Jenkins' blog.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Oh and P.S. - Part One of the fan vidding segment of the 2010 DIY show is now available at Henry Jenkins' blog.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

* Board member Rebecca Tushnet has posted notes from a presentation she gave on vidding at Notre Dame's Creativity and the Law Symposium, Scary Monsters: Hybrids, Mashups, and Other Illegitimate Children.

* TWC editor Kristina Busse has posted, Affective Aesthetics to the Symposium Blog, a piece that argues that fan works are still discriminated against because they engage the emotions as well as the critical facility.

* The New York Times is soliciting Harry Potter fanfic from students; What Would Your Favorite Literary Characters Be Like If Their Stories Never Ended?

* Moby has founded Moby Gratis, a site which makes music available for free to makers of independent, student, and non-profit films or videos.

* Dan Pankraz's Generation C: The Connected Collective Consumer sounds an awful lot like fandom.

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.

The results of the election are in. In alphabetical order:

Francesca Coppa
Ira Gladkova
Kristen Murphy

Congratulations and thanks to all our candidates, each of whom is incredibly qualified and hard-working. We are proud to work with every one.

Board members from this election will serve for a 3-year term.

Please feel free to contact Rebecca Tushnet, our elections officer, with any questions. For an overview of the election process we used, a variety of preferential voting, see here.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog, where it is also available in Español.

Political remix artist Jonathan McIntosh, in an interview with Henry Jenkins done as part of an exhibition of DIY video currently ongoing at Henry's blog, discusses what he's learned from fan vidders and how its affected his political remix work.

(Vidding will be featured next week, so stay tuned.)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Thanks to our heroic OTW Systems team, voting is now open in the 2010 OTW Board elections!

Voting will remain active for a full 48 hours, so you have until 16:20 19 November to cast your ballot. (What time is that where I am?)

The ballot can be found here, and you can read about our candidates here.

You can read more about the elections process on the OTW Elections Website.
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Welcome to voting day!

We've run into a slight delay that we are currently scrambling to resolve, but with five minutes left prior to the beginning of voting, we suspect you'll encounter it! There will be voting account reminder emails coming soon, as soon as things are resolved. We'll keep you up to date -- thank you for your patience!

Today, November 15th, is the first anniversary of the Open Beta launch of the Archive of Our Own! We're totally thrilled to reach this milestone!

Open Beta was the launch of our beautiful Archive into the fannish world at large, and came after two years of intense coding, testing, fundraising, writing of docs, development of policy, and other amazing work. Everyone working on the Archive was super-excited to be able to share the fruits of this work with the rest of fandom, after a year of testing with just a small group of volunteers in Closed Beta.

The results since we launched suggest that fandom loved our shiny work as much as we did! We have expanded faster than we ever dreamed.

When we entered Open Beta on 15 November 2009 we had:

• 347 users
• 668 fandoms
• 6565 works

At the time of writing we have reached:

• 10649 users
• 7757 fandoms
• 116888 works

We're looking forward to seeing our userbase grow and diversify even more — our International Outreach committee have been working hard on the mission of improving the experience for multinational fans. We already have 22 languages represented on the Archive, but we want to see more! (Let Support know if you want to post in a language not represented on that list!)

All this fannish activity filled up our servers quick-smart, so after only one year we're investing in new, much more powerful ones — an investment made possible by the generous support of fandom at large.

We've still got much, much more work to do — Open Beta is, well, beta, and it's been a year of immense change and growth for us. We've learnt a lot about what makes our users happy and we look forward to improving based on all the feedback we've had from fandom. But we're also VERY proud of how much we've achieved so far. Here are a few reflections from staffers on what reaching the first anniversary of Open Beta means to them — do add your thoughts in comments!

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

Yuletide Treasure, an annual fic exchange challenge hosted by Astolat and Elynross, is running on on the Archive of Our Own again this year. This is a big fannish event which has a big impact on the Archive: this post aims to give a bit more information about the relationship between Yuletide and the AO3 and to give Archive users an idea of what to expect while the challenge is running — roughly from now until the first week of January.

Yuletide is not an OTW project; rather, it's a private project created and moderated by two fans who make decisions about how it will be run. The timeline and parameters of the Yuletide challenge are set by the Yuletide moderators, and the Archive team expends significant time and effort to accommodate those needs for two compelling reasons: first, because it is part of the OTW's mission to support at-risk fannish endeavors such as Yuletide; and second, because Yuletide provides a valuable test case for the Archive, providing us with the opportunity to develop and refine our code in realistic conditions while the site is still in beta. Because of the size of the Yuletide challenge, it provides us with a level of use which would be exceedingly difficult to replicate under testing conditions. In addition, because one of the Yuletide mods is also a staffer with the OTW, we have the ability to work closely with them and get the feedback we need.

Yuletide is a very large challenge with thousands of participants, and it involves periods of heavy server traffic — particularly around the time of sign-ups, the story-uploading deadline, and the day stories are revealed to readers. Although our volunteers have been working hard to improve system performance, we know that this heavy traffic will cause the Archive to be slow, and we fully expect that some things will break. Please understand that this is the nature of beta testing. We know it's no fun to encounter a slow or buggy website when you're trying to view or post works, but by testing the Archive under the intense conditions of Yuletide now, we can learn where the problems are and how best to correct them while the code is still in beta. This is particularly important for us this year, as we're on the brink of investing lots of money in new, shiny servers, and understanding where the points of stress are in the existing servers will help us evaluate our needs going forward.

The Archive staff wish to express our gratitude to everyone who is assisting with this massive effort, including the coders, testers, tag wranglers, Support and Systems staff, Astolat and Elynross, and the many Yuletide participants who have pitched in to help with testing and tag checking. We would also like to ask all Archive beta users, including those who are not participating in Yuletide, for their patience and understanding during the next several weeks. We cannot promise that everything will run smoothly, but we can promise that this experience will help us make the Archive stronger, more resilient, and generally shinier in the future. If you'd like to participate more directly in making the Archive better, we welcome feedback and volunteers!