I. FANDOM IN COLOR AT FANLORE
In July, Fanlore had a great Fandom in Color themed month, featuring pages of all kinds related to characters of color; events and communities that celebrate them; and articles, discussions, and fan activism around race and fandom. You can check out all of the great pages and topics Fanlore highlighted using the Fandom in Color dedicated tag on Tumblr. (Or #FandominColor if Twitter is your preference!) Fanlore also held a Discord editing chat on the same theme that gave rise to some excellent discussion, edits and new pages — thanks to everyone who came along!
II. AT THE AO3
AO3 Documentation completed updates to two FAQs in July: the Profile FAQ and the Pseuds FAQ. Meanwhile, Open Doors completed the import for FrodoHealers, a Lord of the Rings hurt/comfort and angst archive.
AO3’s Policy & Abuse and Support teams continue to be impacted by the malicious email attacks from May 2022. Policy & Abuse received 1311 tickets in June, while at the time of this writing, Support was on track to receive approximately 1400 tickets in July.
In July, tag wranglers began the process of putting in place new procedures to allow them to reopen the discussion process for significant guideline updates. This will allow Tag Wrangling to stay current with improvements in how to handle unusual situations as the archive continues to grow. In June, wranglers handled more than 390,000 tags across more than 50,500 fandoms!
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanlore announced the creation of a new user group on Fanlore, ExtendedConfirmed, which should help guard against misuse of the file uploading function by awarding upload rights to new users after they’ve been on Fanlore for a little while and made a few edits. You can read more about this in an update on Fanlore:News.
Legal Chair Betsy presented on two panels at San Diego Comic Con in late July. One presentation was about fan clubs and intellectual property law, and the other was about intellectual freedom for educators. Legal also responded to a number of user queries in July, including helping fans figure out how to prevent their fanworks by being exploited by entertainment companies without permission.
Systems‘ datacenter has received some of its new database servers, and it is doing some testing before moving to prep them for service. In addition, Systems is working on some faulty hardware replacements, collaborating with Volunteers & Recruiting on upcoming changes to our mail infrastructure, and joining Webs in making sure fewer emails from the OTW’s sites (hopefully) will be caught in spam.
TWC‘s September 2022 issue is now in production. In addition, TWC is looking forward to working with two new review editors who came on board.
IV. GOVERNANCE
This month, the Board of Directors has continued liaising with other committees to deal with the aftermath of the email attacks. It also held a public Board meeting for this quarter on July 15th, and the minutes for this meeting will be posted on the OTW website. Among other things, the Board answered several questions about our Diversity Consultant Research Officer role.
Elections (and this year’s Board of Directors election candidates) had a very busy month, posting three sets of candidate Q&As and hosting four candidate chats. You can find the Q&As and chat transcripts on the Elections website.
If you are an OTW member eligible to vote in this year’s election, you should have received your Voting Instructions via email from Development & Membership. Translated versions of these voting instructions will also be available on our website thanks to Translation, whose teams have also been translating candidate bios and platforms. If you have any queries, you can contact the Elections Committee through its website contact form. The election will be held August 12-15, and your ballot will come via the email you gave when you donated. Elections would like to thank our candidates and wish them all very good luck!
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
From 25 June to 24 July, Volunteers & Recruiting received 49 new requests, and completed 68, leaving us with 47 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of 24 June 2022, the OTW has 955 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Committee Chairs: Frost the Fox (Systems)
New Open Doors Volunteers: Jennifer D2, Moony & 4 import assistants
New Strategic Planning Volunteers: Dan-i & Emilie Waggoner
New Support Volunteers: Ruquas (Support Volunteer)
New Translation Volunteers: Rhea (Translator)
New TWC Volunteers: Melanie Kohnen and RY Lee (Review Editors)
Departing Committee Chairs: Matthew Vernon (Systems)
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 2 administrative volunteers
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: Zhal
Departing Systems Volunteers: 1 Technical Writer
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Alastaire, Putri, ragingrainbow, Reginahalliwell, Sarah Jacobson & Zhirong
Departing Translation Volunteers: Rucha and 2 other translators
For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.