Category: Spotlight

5 Things an OTW Volunteer Said

Five Things Stacey Lantagne Said

Claudia Rebaza Leave a comment

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Stacey Lantagne, who volunteers as member of OTW’s Legal Advocacy project. It’s posted today to highlight the celebration of Copyright Week.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a volunteer for the Legal Committee, I work on behalf of OTW’s mission to protect and nurture fanworks as a legitimate creative activity. The Legal Committee monitors legislation in the United States as well as internationally, and provides comments on behalf of the interests of fan creators. For instance, recently the Legal Committee provided comments in response to New Zealand’s request for input on its review of its Copyright Act (with help from New Zealand AO3 users!). We also join briefs in legal court cases that have fanwork implications, as well as review internal procedures and policies to ensure compliance.

Read More

OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: Briony

Claudia Rebaza Leave a comment

From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.

Briony is a vidder from the UK who has been editing fanvids for more than 12 years. Her work can be found on YouTube. Today, Briony talks about her experience creating fanworks.

How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?

Like many, I have always been very fannish for as long as I can remember. As a child I committed intensely and wholeheartedly to any given media text that captured my attention. I was also very creative and would often create de facto fanart. It wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I serendipitously discovered Real Fandom. I was trying to find a scene from Titanic (one of the first texts I engaged with in an intensely fannish way as a child) on YouTube and I was instead presented with a fanvid.

I was completely enthralled. I loved the synthesis between image and sound and the way that the vidder had reworked the footage to highlight salient aspects of the text. The creator of the vid mentioned a popular Titanic fansite in their description that hosted a range of clips available for download. I soon headed to the fansite, downloaded all the footage I could find on there, and almost immediately began editing what would become my first ever fanvid. This soon introduced me to the world of fan forums, fan sites, mailing lists, and the like.

Read More

5 Things an OTW Volunteer Said

Five Things Anhaita Said

Claudia Rebaza

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Anhaita, who volunteers with the Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a volunteer, I’m part of the Translation Committee. Our main objective is making the site and its content available in different languages for easy accessibility and understanding to all those whose first language isn’t English. We help in cross lingual communications with other Committees as well! (Support and Abuse, for example).

Translation is also subdivided into smaller language teams, so no matter what language you wish to communicate in, we most likely have someone to make sure the message gets interpreted correctly. As the OTW is geared towards fans from various communities and cultures, our goal is to make sure people can access our website in languages they feel comfortable with.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

As I’m part of a very small team (literally, it’s just two of us here), we mainly have a large number of documents to sort through and translate. So usually, I spend the week translating a document, perhaps a webpage for the OTW site, like the FAQs or a News post. At times, I may get contacted to help translate a text-image, or fic-tags in my language, for a different Committee — we are kind of the go-between here!

Translating some words into my language, Marathi, can be pretty tough, and sometimes hilarious even. We have to figure out how sentence structures have to be changed to fit a text, or the closest possible translation is used. Fun fact: Fanvid is literally translated to mean “Western Picture Gallery” in Marathi (because that’s a word English totally dreamt up one day and refused to inform the other languages).

Read More