I. STUB SEPTEMBER
Fanlore has been hard at work preparing for their next event, Stub September, which is focused on expanding and creating “stub” pages (short pages with lots of room for new content to be added). For more details about the challenge, visit Fanlore’s help page for the event, which is ongoing now!
II. AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design & Technology posted their latest set of release notes for deploys going back to June. Most notably, they are now able to assign certain roles (with different sets of permissions) to Archive of Our Own admins. AD&T also added the option for work creators to disallow all comments on works.
Policy & Abuse received around 1300 tickets in August, and Tag Wrangling had a busy July, wrangling around 381,000 tags in over 38,000 canonical fandoms. That is up from about 232,000 tags in over 33,000 canonical fandoms in July of 2019. Additionally, Tag Wrangling’s Fast Track process for wrangling small freeform synonyms that aren’t associated with any particular fandom went live in August, after a successful test the month before; this marks an important step towards opening the new process for No Fandom freeform canonicals.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Communications helped the OTW celebrate SysAdmin Day — thank you to all the readers who expressed their appreciation for these volunteers! We also now have a moderator, Claudia Rebaza, for our LinkedIn account.
In August, Legal chair Betsy Rosenblatt met with U.S. Congressional Judiciary Committee staff to discuss the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Legal also worked with a fan to address a copyright complaint, dealt with a takedown notice and analyzed privacy law developments that might affect the AO3 Terms of Service.
IV. GOVERNANCE
August was the busiest month of the year for Elections! The OTW’s annual Board of Directors election saw a record-breaking number of ballots cast by our membership. You can learn more details about this year’s election from Elections’ 2020 Election Statistics post.
In alphabetical order, Alex Tischer, Jess White and Kati Eggert were elected to the OTW’s Board of Directors. Thanks so much to all of our voting members and to everyone who ran! We appreciate all the work they have put into this year’s election process and we wish every one of them the best.
Thanks also to our Translation team for translating the election materials into a whopping 31 languages!
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From July 25 to August 24, Volunteers & Recruiting received 61 new requests, and completed 64, leaving us with 34 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of August 24 the OTW has 921 volunteers \o/. Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Staff: Stephanie Godden (Fanlore), Novic, JoJo, Janneke (all Tag Wrangling)
New Fanlore Volunteers: SecurityBreach
New Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Amaranth42, Bethn, Bram, Egg, Elbereth, Elli, Evi, EzraP, Fire, Haak, HuiLian, Ida Shen, rinrin, Jazz J, Jel, Julie Shaun, JupiterMelichios, Keladry, Lee B, Lokapala, Mackaley, Maela, Mayrin, memoriast, Mia, Minjonet, MintCream, Naicha, nolightss, periru3, Poem, Putri, Ranowa, SayuriShiro, Shecago, Stay, Theo N, Timpa, Tsuruta, Vio, whetherwoman, Whiskey, WYSIWYG & 1 other Tag Wrangling volunteer
New Translation Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Committee Staff: docmint (Translation), Stephanie Godden (Volunteers & Recruiting)
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Translation Volunteers: Paiyan & 1 other Translation Volunteer
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.