I. PREPARING FOR VOTES
Elections has had a busy few weeks and is ready to receive OTW members’ ballots in a couple of weeks. Candidate Q&A posts were all posted by July 31 and voting instructions were emailed to all eligible members. Candidate Tyme LaDow withdrew her candidacy effective July 26. Elections also hosted two chats with candidates, and the transcripts were posted on their website in the days after the events.
If you have any queries, you can contact the Elections Committee through its website. The election will be held August 14-17, and your ballot will come via the email you gave when you donated.
II. AT THE AO3
AO3 Documentation has uploaded some changes to the AO3’s Invitations FAQ while
Accessibility, Design and Technology has been collaborating with other committees to wrap up testing of the admin roles code from our contractors. Systems are scoping some further email work, and starting to think about their next round of server purchasing.
Support estimates they will come in at approximately 1300 new tickets this month. Fortunately, their newest class of recruits have collectively closed 1500 tickets since the start of their training period, so they’re a great help! Policy and Abuse has received about 1100 tickets so far this month.
Tag Wrangling completed an update to the wrangling policies to describe procedures for wrangling some of the more straightforward non-fandom specific tags, as the next step in the ongoing process of overhauling how those tags are handled. In June, tag wranglers handled more than 333,000 tags across more than 37,800 fandoms.
III. PLANNING AND MOVING FORWARD
Legal has filed our petition to renew the “vidders’ exemption” to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, part of a process we do every three years. They are also preparing for a meeting with U.S. Congressional staff regarding copyright policy, and answering lots of user queries.
TWC is moving issue No. 34 (September 2020) into production. The editorial teams are working with authors to get manuscripts for the March 2021 issue. TWC anticipates on-time releases despite the coronavirus and the havoc it’s wreaking on people’s schedules.
Fanlore has been discussing some updates to their editing cheatsheet to help users quickly grab the formatting they need while editing pages, and are making plans for a “themed month” of social posts and graphics in October.
Translation worked on Elections platform content and voting instructions this month. They have also started a new language team — Sinhala!
Communications has replaced This Week In Fandom with a new monthly series, OTW Signal. We encourage link submissions for it from the public. Our OTW Tumblr account also has a new moderator, Szabo Dorottya. So if you use Tumblr, do stop by and say hello!
IV. GOVERNANCE
Board received 14 submissions of various kinds to their internal anonymous feedback form, which they have either passed on to the relevant committees or are discussing the best way to take action. Among the submissions that concerned the Board, they received queries and suggestions about paid employees, OTW diversity and the OTW’s founding principles. The anonymous feedback form has been extremely helpful in allowing them to hear from different volunteers who have a variety of perspectives.
Finance is continuing ongoing work for the 2019 audit, while preparing for recruitment and the budget update later in the year.
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting received 74 new requests, and completed 77, leaving them with 24 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 24 July the OTW has 883 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Staff: 1 Translation staffer, 1 Legal staffer
New Translation Volunteers: Dani Lee, farah, forestcat, Hali, Juliette, Leona Malfoy, nõiaelu, Noura Mu, Prerna A. Popat, Quality, and 4 other volunteers
Departing Committee Staff: Cyn (Open Doors), ExpatGirl (AO3 Documentation), Kendal GK (Support), Ashley Pancho (Support), and 2 other Support staffers
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Eugecapisce, g33k_magnet, Stephanie Godden, thomastelbon, 2 other volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Gil81, Tygermine and 1 other volunteer
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.