Posts by Caitlynne
The OTW is Recruiting for Legal Committee Paralegals, Legal Committee Trademark Specialists, and Policy & Abuse Volunteers
Are you a paralegal interested in helping the Legal Committee carry out its legal advocacy mission? Do you have legal experience, preferably trademark-specific, especially in the EU and US? Would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting! We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for: Legal Committee Paralegal – closing 22 April 2026 at 23:59 UTC Legal Committee Trademark Specialist – closing 22 April 2026 at 23:59 UTC Policy & Abuse Volunteer – closing 22 April 2026 at 23:59 UTC We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always… Read more
OTW Board Meeting, April 18, 2026
The OTW Board will be holding its next public meeting at 01:00 on April 18, 2026 UTC (what time is that for me?). This meeting will be held in the Board Discord server. The server will have a team of moderators and a set of rules (including question rules) and community guidelines. The server will remain open even after the meeting, but the channels for meeting and asking questions will be read-only. Board will be posting replies to questions that do not get addressed during the scheduled meeting two weeks after the meeting in the server’s #questions-answers channel. The agenda will include: Decisions made since… Read more
February 2026 Newsletter, Volume 208
I. INTERNATIONAL FANWORKS DAY On February 15, Communications coordinated many International Fanworks Day (IFD) activities, including a Feedback Fest highlighting fanwork recommendations, an editing challenge in conjunction with Fanlore, and an IFD Discord server with games and chatting. Additionally, Translation helped make IFD materials available in 22 languages. Thank you to everyone who joined us in celebrating! II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN In February, we celebrated AO3 reaching 10 million registered users! \o/ Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) focused on some important upgrades and bug fixes, including upgrading to Ruby on Rails 8 and improving the collection revealing process. They also published release notes for… Read more
Updates to “No Fandom” Additional Tags, February 2026
AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don’t belong to any particular fandom (also known as “No Fandom” tags). This post overviews some of these upcoming changes. In this round of updates, we continued to adjust existing canonical “No Fandom” tags to add or remove new subtag and metatag relationships. We also continued to streamline creating new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a… Read more
OTW Signal, January 2026
Every month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works. In the News As part of Copyright Week 2026, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) highlighted a broken aspect of U.S. copyright law: statutory damages. These are fines imposed on platforms and users for copyright infringement, and because there is little guidance on how to calculate them, they can far exceed the amount of actual financial harm—up to $150,000 per work. For the many internet users whose… Read more