I. INTERNATIONAL FANWORKS DAY
On and before February 15, Communications celebrated the ninth annual International Fanworks Day, including a fanworks challenge, rec fest, and fan chat and games on Discord. Fanlore also celebrated with its sixth annual IFD Fanlore Challenge, and Translation translated several IFD news posts into a whopping 32 languages. Thanks so much to everyone who helped make it happen!
II. AT THE AO3
AO3 Documentation has uploaded an updated Accessing Fanworks FAQ, including some new questions to better guide our users.
Meanwhile, Open Doors is off to a good start in 2023, with three archives recently imported: Dragonfayth (Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfiction), Lord of the Rings Fanfiction, and West Wing Fanfiction Central. It also announced the import of A Priest in Korea memorial archive, and posted its annual round-up announcement, giving details of the 17 archive imports it completed in 2022, totaling over 18,500 works.
After much experimentation, debugging and hardware reconfig, Systems has finally moved the Archive to some beefy new database servers!
Policy & Abuse got 2,200 tickets to start off the year in January, which is quite a lot! Meanwhile, at the time of this writing, Support was on track to receive about 1,600 tickets in February, down from the highs of December/January.
2022 was a big year in Tag Wrangling. Its volunteers wrangled more than 4,850,000 tags over the year, an average of more than 10,500 tags per wrangler, while the Archive itself grew by more than 7,400 new fandoms!
III. LEGAL ADVOCACY
Legal is closely following and participating in some important cases currently pending in the U.S. Supreme Court about copyright fair use, content moderation, and trademarks and free expression. It’s also answered a number of user queries and participated in several activities surrounding Fair Use/Fair Dealing week, which took place on February 20-24, 2023. Read an interview with Legal Chair Betsy here.
IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From 25 January to 24 February, Volunteers & Recruiting received 111 new requests, and completed 114, leaving us with 39 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 24 February 2023, the OTW has 903 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New AD&T Volunteers: Brian Austin (Coding Volunteer)
New Development & Membership Volunteers: Chelsea Cheyanne (Membership Data Specialist)
New Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Gardener
New Open Doors Volunteers: Elf and 2 other AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) Volunteers
New Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 volunteer
New Translation Volunteers: Anastasia Rey Reed, Anastasija Vasilevska, applebear, darksideofthemuse, Lexi20, Mercy and taender_kisses (all Translators), 4 other Translators, and 1 Volunteer Manager
Departing Committee Chairs: briar_pipe (Tag Wrangling), CJ Record (Support)
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Alyndra (Editor)
Departing Elections Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: memorizingthedigitsofpi (Graphic Designer), Elf, Mohini (both Policy & Admin) and 1 other Policy & Admin volunteers, 1 Gardener
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Beth B, Goodwin, Rosa V (Import Assistants) and 10 other Import Assistants
Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: Zoë Renee
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Anggi, Ashling, Deifire, Glasses, Leevie, Liekinloimu, Rav, Sammy G, SoVeryAverageMe, woyo (all Tag Wranglers) & 33 other Tag Wranglers; Megan Q, Zoë Renee (both Supervisors) and 4 other Supervisors
Departing Translation Volunteers: Elif Köylü, Eugecapisce (both Translators) & 10 other Translators; Antonius Melisse, Cyn, Laure (all Volunteer Managers)
Departing TWC Volunteers: 2 volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.