I. THANK YOU!
Our April membership drive, “Finding Community in Isolation,” was a roaring success! Soaring above our target, donations to the Organization for Transformative Works totaled US$458,501 from 14,905 donors in 96 countries. That’s US$328,501 and 253% more than our goal amount.
Thank you to Development & Membership for coordinating the drive and to Communications and Translation for their help publicizing the drive with two news posts translated into 36 languages. And special thanks to everyone who donated, signal boosted, and otherwise supported us through the drive – we’re so incredibly grateful for all your generosity!
To learn more about where your donations go, check out the OTW’s 2020 budget recently published by Finance. Finance also held a public chat on April 25 inviting users to ask questions about the budget.
II. AT THE AO3
The Archive of Our Own has been experiencing significantly increased traffic due to the ongoing global pandemic. To help our servers cope with this increase, Accessibility, Design, & Technology began caching works for logged-out users. This resulted in temporary issues with both guest hit counts and the adult content warning, so AD&T worked on those issues as well as some problems with the Terms of Service prompt the GDPR requires us to show to all users. Hits are now counted a bit differently, but visits from logged out users do make the counter go up again!
In March, Tag Wrangling handled more than 260,000 tags across 36,400 fandoms. At the time of this writing, Policy & Abuse had received about 1,300 tickets so far in April, while Support was expecting to blow past 2,000 tickets, particularly after receiving about 800 tickets in roughly 5 minutes when the Archive experienced a short disruption on April 22.
Finally, Open Doors was proud to announce the completion of 4 archive imports in 2019. Thank you to everyone for their kind words on the announcement post!
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
The pandemic shutdown across the globe has led to other effects for OTW committees. Communications has had media contacts about AO3 activity, since many people are turning to fanworks during this time. Some of the resulting articles may be coming to the OTW’s Press Room. Meanwhile, the creativity being seen as people shelter in place has led Legal to work with allies on legal advocacy related to the copyright lessons being learned from it.
IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From 23 March to 15 April, Volunteers & Recruiting received 45 new requests, and completed 43, leaving us with 17 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 15 April the OTW has 870 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Staff: anotherone674, Bethanyw, Masha, serkestic, Tamara Jerée (all Fanlore); Alex Clark, Amy2, Darcy Lindbergh (all Volunteers & Recruiting)
New Tag Wrangler Volunteers: abhorsen, AkiJ, BabelGhoti, Cia, cinnamonandtea, Corbae, dytabytes, Echuro, Eithe, Eliromie, EllipsisObsessed, Emily Fowl, Eri, Giles, Gracie, haru, Jacks, Jae Nguyen, Laula, Level4Chaos, MaoMao, Mika, MissMinnow, Myrtle, Mystikel, Nenya, Oniondip, pan2fel, Peaches, Ping, pyrrhuloxia, QED, Rhine, serkestic, Singy, snuffles, Thendal, UnderOrange, Wadeye, wick, Yonah and 1 other Tag Wrangler
Departing Committee Staff: memorizingthedigitsofpi (AO3 Documentation)
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: 4 volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.