I. ELECTIONS UPDATE
Elections had a very busy July, posting three sets of Q&As and hosting four chats on Discord with the candidates for the upcoming Board of Directors election. If you were unable to attend any of the chats, you can find the chat transcripts on the Elections website, along with the Q&As and the Bios & Platforms.
Voting instructions have been emailed to all eligible members, thanks to the work of Elections, Communications, Development & Membership. Translated versions of these voting instructions are also available on the Elections website. If you have not received your voting instructions by email, or if you have a different query, you can contact the Elections Committee through their website.
The election will be held August 13-16, and your ballot will come via the email you gave when you donated.
II. AT THE AO3
Open Doors has announced the upcoming import of The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive, with help from Communications and Translation, and has completed the import of Rawhide-fic!
In June, Tag Wrangling handled more than 390,000 tags across more than 44,000 fandoms. At the time of this writing, Policy & Abuse had received about 1500 tickets in July so far, and Support was on track to receive about 1200 tickets in the month of July.
Accessibility, Design & Technology has been testing the next release, and fielding database requests from Support and Policy & Abuse. We’d like to give a special shoutout to all of our GitHub contributors, new and old! We’re extremely grateful for their contributions and their patience as we try to finish up this release and start merging some of their changes.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
The Board of Directors hosted a public meeting on July 11. The main discussion involved the creation of two new officer roles: to aid us in introducing paid staff, and to research options for diversity consultants. Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting and gave their input! As always, if you have any feedback or questions about their work, you can email the Board.
Fanlore has been hard at work creating posts for their Fandom in Color spotlight, and they’ve had a great response so far — check out their Fandom in Color tag on Tumblr and #FandominColor on Twitter to see the posts! They also announced an upcoming addition to their Identity Protection Policy that will allow for fans to remove associations between two fannish identities that they wish to keep separate, even if there is no link to a real-life identity. You can check out the full text of the policy update on Dreamwidth!
TWC has also been busy. The September 2021 issue of Transformative Works and Cultures is currently in production, and editorial acceptances are accelerating for the March 2022 issue. TWC also has a new Twitter account! Soon after it launched they tweeted about the site going through some updates on July 26, so follow them to stay informed about TWC activities. Just a reminder that you can find links to all the OTW’s social media accounts at our Where to Find Us page on the OTW website.
IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From 25 June to 24 July, Volunteers & Recruiting received 69 new requests, and completed 69, leaving us with 28 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 25 July 2021, the OTW has 1007 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Translation Volunteers: DFM, Llio, Luthfia, QT, ru, snjeguljica33, Tear, Tiass, yaghma, Åse Gjefsen and 4 volunteers
New TWC Volunteers: Emily Cohen and 1 volunteer
Departing Committee Staff: inimitablereel (Systems), J. Quadrifrons (AO3 Documentation), MorningStarlight (AO3 Documentation) and 1 Policy & Abuse Staffer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Colercw, haru and 2 other volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: Filip Drnovsek Zorko & 4 volunteers
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.