Welcome to our April newsletter!
News from the Board
The OTW’s 2010 annual report was released on April 18. Thank you to all the staff, volunteers, members, donors, and well-wishers who helped make 2010 a successful year!
The Board spent much of April focused on the server naming poll: listening to various perspectives from staff and volunteers about how the poll happened, discussing the poll results, and considering wider issues of fannish diversity in the organization. We appreciate the thoughtful discussion of these issues that has been taking place within the OTW and elsewhere, and we’re continuing to talk about how we can better serve a diverse range of fans. Our International Outreach committee plays an important role in this mission — you can read more about their work in this recent post on the work they do behind the scenes.
April Showers Challenge
The Archive of Our Own and Fanlore jointly hosted an April Showers Challenge to encourage fans to archive and document their older works. The challenge featured a different fandom every day in April (special thanks to the tag wranglers for helping to suggest the fandoms), and we had a great response! For announcements of future challenges, watch the Fanlore community on Dreamwidth and/or the @ao3org account on Twitter.
More AO3 news
We’ve had a great response to the new user subscriptions feature — nearly 10,000 subscriptions have been created already! The Archive saw a big bump in activity this month, likely due to both subscriptions and the downtime issues that LiveJournal was dealing with. Having our new servers allowed us to handle the increased traffic without any major problems, so thanks again to everyone who donated to help us buy them! (The number of Support requests has doubled, so we also appreciate your patience.)
Around the OTW
Communications has been coordinating efforts with other groups to develop a response to YouTube’s Copyright School. Communications also fielded a number of media queries related to fanfiction and other fan activity.
Zine donations are coming in to the Fan Culture Preservation Project at a fairly steady clip, and the Open Doors committee has been talking with the maintainers of several online archives interested in importing their stories to the AO3. The revamped Open Doors website is almost ready to go — watch for a launch announcement coming soon!
Vidding chair Francesca Coppa presented at Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design on April 8. There are some videos from the conference available online, with more coming soon.
Thanks for reading! Please feel free to contact us anytime with questions or suggestions.