For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.
I. MILESTONE-PALOOZA
February was a month with major milestones from three OTW projects. Fanlore passed 500,000 edits, the AO3 passed 1 million fanworks, and our Journal Committee editors produced The Fan Fiction Studies Reader.
To continue the celebrations in March, Communications has lined up a series of discussions on “The Future of Fanworks” with academic, fan, legal, and entertainment industry guests. And to continue the focus on fanworks through coming years, they announced an International Fanworks Day to be held annually on February 15th.
II. NON-MILESTONE NEWS
Accessibility, Design & Technology deployed Release 0.9.13, which included significant performance fixes and improvements to the importing code. Their next update, Release 0.9.14, is happening in tiny batches and will focus on small bug fixes — this will enable them to work through the backlog of code submissions more quickly and efficiently.
Open Doors also worked with AD&T and QA&T to update importing documentation with the fixes and features in the last deploy.
Abuse is finalizing its 2014 Road Map, discussing new policies and working on 2013 stats. Support is in the midst of recruiting and looking forward to welcoming new staffers to help them respond to tickets! Tag Wrangling is still limited due to server strain, but AD&T’s latest code push allowed them to lift some of the time restrictions. Tag Wrangling staff spent the month helping Support with tag-related requests, and coordinated with AD&T and Systems to get some large re-wranglings done without disrupting the servers.
Journal is currently going through production, with the March and June issues (No. 15 and No. 16) going through simultaneously.
III. IN OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
Development & Membership welcomed five new staffers and is in the process of training them. They’re also working on plans for the April membership drive, scheduled for April 3-9. DevMem chair, Kristen Murphy, was also interviewed by Three Patch Podcast about the OTW’s growth and milestones.
Legal continued their outward-facing work, helping fans with inquiries about fair use, about how to respond to takedown requests, and about what to do when others are using their fanworks without permission. In addition, Legal Staffer Casey Fiesler published a paper on fans’ understanding of fair use. Legal also registered the OTW in the European Union’s Transparency Register and filed a submission to the European Commission in response to its call for comments concerning possible EU copyright reform.
Strategic Planning is wrapping up surveys of Abuse, Comms, DevMem, I&O, and Web and moving into the data analysis and report-writing stages. They are preparing for another round of surveys and interviews in March. They also made a minor correction to the appendices of the Wiki Committee/Fanlore report based on the feedback from a former staff member.
Translation is happily training new staff, and their teams are hard at work preparing the transformativeworks.org website for the upcoming April membership drive in all the languages they can cover. They’re also finalising procedures for collaboration between tag wranglers and translators, to bring the two volunteer pools closer and enable ways that they can help each other out.
IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting has once again been very busy. In addition to answering questions from individuals both inside and outside the org, they inducted staff from the January round of recruiting and opened recruiting for three more roles (Translation volunteers, Support staff, and Communications graphics volunteers). We were very pleased with the overall turnout and are grateful that so many people are interested and willing to give their time to help the OTW and support our projects.
Beyond recruiting, VolCom is completing the set up of their new volunteer database and preparing to do a final audit to make sure that all of the records made it over in the import. They are also conducting annual reviews of committee documentation and working on VolCom’s annual report for 2013 with plans to release a public version once it is completed.
New Committee Staff: Jennifer Radecki (Communications), Elise Thrasher (Communications), Rachel Weir (Communications), theteapot (Accessibility, Design & Technology), Helka Lantto (Development & Membership), DandalfTheWhite (Development & Membership), Rowan (Development & Membership), 1 other Communications staffer, 4 Translation staffers, 2 other Development & Membership Staffers.
New Coder Volunteers: 1 volunteer
New Communications Volunteers: Dogtagsandsmut
New Translator Volunteers: jerakeen, MayCSB, Nerine Luna Cyran, Nari, Snixx, Ulrika A, ACarrao, madamezou, IcePhoenix & 6 others.
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: 4 volunteers