I. OPEN DOORS ANNOUNCEMENTS
Open Doors released two announcements for the upcoming imports of two Lord of the Rings archives, West of the Moon and Lord of the Rings Fanfiction. Thanks to Communications and Translation for their assistance publishing these posts! These mark the eleventh and twelfth archives whose imports have been announced in 2021, with more to come soon.
Open Doors’ import assistant team has also been hard at work compiling creators/works tracking spreadsheets and tags mapping spreadsheets for three archives: Land of Dreams, Weaver of Dreams, and The BuffyGiles Fanfiction Archive. These spreadsheets help us keep track of honoring requests from creators about their works, systematically search the Archive of Our Own for existing copies of works that would otherwise be imported as part of an archive import, and (with help from Tag Wrangling) map the tags used on an archive to the appropriate Archive of Our Own canonicals for use during the import process.
Finally, Open Doors’ technical staff and volunteers have been making significant progress improving our eFiction processing code and applying it to several archive imports! Stay tuned for more imports to come.
II. AT THE AO3
AO3 Documentation is pleased to release an updated Skins and Archive Interface FAQ, which is now live on AO3.
In March, Tag Wrangling wrangled approximately 480,000 new tags – that’s around 1,100 tags per wrangler – across approximately 43,000 fandoms. Support received approximately 1400 tickets in March and, at the time of this writing, had received approximately 850 tickets in April, while Policy & Abuse had received about 2,000 tickets to date.
III. ELECTIONS ARE COMING!
In anticipation of the Board of Directors election to take place this August, Elections has been hard at work finalizing the Elections Timeline and releasing additional details about membership and elections. Communications assisted with publishing these posts, and Translation translated both posts into 25 additional languages.
The last date to become a member of the OTW in order to vote in the upcoming election is June 30th! Keep following along for more information about the election and its candidates soon.
IV. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Development & Membership coordinated the OTW’s April 2021 Membership Drive, Kudos to You, with support from Communications. Translation also translated the Drive posts into 35 languages. The Drive far exceeded our target goal of US$50,000, raising US$264,918.85 from 9110 donors in 84 countries. We also increased our membership to 16,842 members total. Thanks so much to everyone who donated and signal boosted!
Fanlore has been working on some edits to Help pages, including creating “templates” that will make the creation of new pages easier. One existing template, Vid Pages, has been updated, while three new templates have been created, including Fan Pages, People Pages, and Fanfiction Pages.
TWC is finishing up the work on the September 2021 issue and is reviewing three pitches for guest-edited issues for 2022 and 2023. In addition, TWC will be recruiting again for production roles, so check our volunteering page from time to time or follow our news posts through your social media accounts.
In April, Legal testified at hearings before the U.S. Copyright Office regarding section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This hearing was part of the every-three-year process of renewing and clarifying the “vidders’ exemption” that allows vidders to decrypt DVDs, Blu-Rays, and digital sources to make fair uses of video clips. We’ll keep you informed as the exemption renewal and clarification process continues!
Finance also released a budget for 2021 and held a live chat where anyone wanting to stop by and ask questions about the report could talk to members of the committee.
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From 25 March to 25 April, Volunteers & Recruiting received 120 new requests, and completed 112, leaving us with 47 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 25 April 2021, the OTW has 988 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Staff: jmathieson (Tag Wrangling), May K (Support), Joy_Z (Support), Steph S (Support), Lucy Longman (Support), Aque (Support), JKLM (Support), Alyssandra Maglanque (Support), keluoyi (Support), KehkashanB (Support), stillreading (Support), tova (Support) & 17 other Support staff
New Communications Volunteers: 2 volunteers
Departing Committee Staff: Nerine Luna Cyran (Policy & Abuse), Zoey (Support), C. Ryan Smith (Open Doors), JoJo (Tag Wrangling), & 1 AO3 Documentation Staffer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Anne Apocalypse, bre, jeansprout, tread-softly, Wadeye & 5 other volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Harold Liu, Lunabreaker, Mimozka, Paiyan and 2 other volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.