For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.
I. TAKE PART IN STUB SEPTEMBER!
The Wiki Committee is organizing Stub September again this year, which encourages newcomers and seasoned Fanlore editors alike to pick a stub and expand on it. A stub is an article on Fanlore that is under-developed and missing important information. Right now, there are over 1600 existing pages on Fanlore that are identified as stubs. You’re invited to use the list to find a page where you know something about the topic and edit the page to add your new information.
To help newcomers get started, the Wiki Committee will be organizing an editing party on Sunday, September 14th at 19:00 UTC (what time is that in my timezone?) in the Fanlore chat room, where you can come and ask questions, or just work on entries alongside other people.
II. COMING AROUND AGAIN
Fan Video & Multimedia is once again working with our Legal Committee as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to petition for a DMCA exemption granting vidders, AMV makers, and other creators of noncommercial remix video the right to break copy protection on media files. In 2010, we won the right to rip DVDs; in 2012, we got that exemption renewed and expanded to include digital downloads (iTunes, Amazon Unbox, etc.). In 2015, we’ll be pushing to add Blu-Ray. Right now we’re in the data-gathering stage: asking fan video makers to talk with us about how they get Blu-Ray source and why Blu-Ray is important.
In August, Legal also responded to several legal queries from fans and continued its work with the USPTO Green Paper DMCA working group, and responded to a claim from an alleged rights holder.
Open Doors has been working on documentation, in-progress imports, and closing (or re-opening!) old cases, while Journal is in the last stages of production on issue 17, which will be published on September 15. They’re also working on the two special issues for March and June 2015, which are on ‘Performance and Performativity’ and ‘European Fandoms and Fan Objects,’ respectively. Meanwhile, editor Karen Hellekson was an academic keynote speaker at WorldCon 72 in London.
III. OVER AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design and Technology have squeezed three more deploys into August, a somewhat slower month than usual. However, user activity at AO3 has not been slow at all! On August 10, we recorded our first Sunday (always the busiest day of the week) with over 10 million page views, an average of roughly 7,000 page views per minute.
To go along with all that activity, Abuse received 198 reports in the last month. All but 18 have been resolved! Support also had a busy, busy month: 458 tickets and counting as August came to a close. They also held a multilingual live chat to assist users with the help of Translation. Support will be recruiting in October, so if you’d like to help users at AO3, keep an eye out for their announcement next month.
Tag Wrangling Staff helped out the Support team on some complicated tag-related tickets, and thanks the AD&T team for their advice on working around server restrictions and bugs.
IV. GOVERNANCE & OPERATIONS
Development & Membership had personnel changes with the departure of former chair Lesann and the addition of Aja and Dan as new co-chairs in her stead. New staffer James Baxter will be working on graphic design as part of the October Drive. Development & Membership also coordinated an OTW presence at Nine Worlds and LonCon 3, and collaborated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others at Dragon Con as part of Project Secret Identity.
Systems is happy to report that their efforts to spin different functions off onto different virtual machines has kicked off with the move of the OTW’s Vault platform, and they’re continuing to work on a mail server and a new RT server, which will include improvements to benefit Support and Abuse. Additionally, staffer James has been hard at work applying our new wildcard SSL certificate to secure various sites on transformativeworks.org subdomains, while Sidra is undertaking the daunting task of looking into long-needed Vault improvements.
Board had a relatively quiet month while our directors continued to hold weekly Office Hours and plan for their October retreat along with Strategic Planning. Strategic Planning has been working on some internal training sessions about non-profit organizations and structures while continuing to survey and write reports for a variety of committees.
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Translation is busy interviewing and training their many new recruits from their successful call for volunteers. They kept Volunteers & Recruiting busy co-ordinating recruitment. Besides inducting and retiring personnel, Volunteers & Recruiting has been answering internal requests, finishing up their database audit, and gearing up for the annual Still Willing to Serve, and releasing their 2013 Annual Report.
New Committee Chairs: Aja (Development & Membership), Dan (Development & Membership), Kiri Van Santen (Communications)
New Committee Staff: James Baxter (Development & Membership)
New Workgroup Members: Jenny McDevitt (Elections) 2 (Elections); Lady Oscar (AO3 Documentation) and 1 other AO3 Documentation member.
New Translator Volunteers: MagdaC, Quarby, DeeCharlotte, sevenwonders, GreenFug, convincle, Eimry, Lextiel, Kyanite, Keito, Hayyu Anshary, Jáchym Fitris, Iristiel, chocochino, Amalia Blondet, Artmetica, Sanni L., A Walker, firebreathing, Magdalena A, and 14 others
Departing Committee Chairs: Lesann (Development & Membership)
Departing Workgroup Leads: Matty Lynne (AO3 Documentation)
Departing Committee Staff: Lesann (Development & Membership), vtn (Tag Wrangling), Sherry (Abuse), girlmarauders (Support), Nikibee (Support), Jenn Calaelen (Tag Wrangling), Ellen Fleischer (Web Strategy, Design & Development), Kit Paige (Translation), victoriajm (Translation), Charlotte (Translation), lisaa35 (Abuse) and 2 other Abuse Staffers.
Departing Workgroup Members: Richard Davie (AO3 Documentation)