For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.
I. FANLORE PASSES 25,000 ENTRIES
Communications worked with Legal and Wiki to hold a celebration for Fanlore’s 25,000th article with a trivia contest. There were three winners, whose prizes have already been sent out by Development & Membership.
Comms, Legal and DevMem have also been working together on plans for a San Diego Comic-Con event involving both a meetup and news coverage which will kick off on July 17.
II. DEVELOPMENTS AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design and Technology has been hard at work fixing things. The AO3 is breaking traffic records every week and the critical Test environment is back in working order which will allow other work to move forward. For the details people, the Test change was an upgrade to the staging server so that it better mirrors the production archive servers; this should help with deploying code more smoothly and catch more bugs.
AD&T is also laying the foundations to recruit new coders by September.
Structure update: Accessibility, Design, & Technology now has a Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) sub-committee led by Lady Oscar. QA&T has recruited people and run its first induction / training session. Welcome to our fabulous new recruits!
Deploys: Two small deploys occurred in June making up Release 0.9.7, which included a few critical bug fixes, some TOS fixes, and the Diversity Statement page. Next up: Rails upgrade!
Internationalization & Outreach was delighted to announce that the Archive of Our Own’s Diversity Statement went live. This project was three years in the making, and they’d like to thank AD&T, Support, Tag Wrangling, and everyone else who contributed time, energy, and feedback to seeing it completed.
Content Policy completed another iteration of ToS/FAQ revisions which involved changes regarding meta and were recently posted for public comment.
Abuse has been extremely busy. They have received a tremendous number of cases of late, many of them alleging plagiarism. Also on the rise are incidents of the Archive being used as a blog or tumblr for announcements. They are considering expanding the committee soon to help with the workload.
Tag Wrangling has posted several more advanced tutorials for both new and experienced wranglers. They also made some guideline additions, the most significant being new rules for translated fandom tags, so you may notice Japanese, Cyrillic, and other non-Latin alphabets when browsing AO3’s fandoms lists.
III. OVER AT THE OTHER PROJECTS
Open Doors has been working on a few potential archive imports, continuing 852 Prospect tasks (helping authors claim stories, uploading stories that imported incomplete, and updating redirects), and committee documentation.
Journal put out a special guest-edited issue on Comics on June 15, right on time. Although TWC is listed in databases as coming out twice a year, Journal had been adding third bonus! issues. They are putting the finishing touches on the issue to be released in September, but mostly the editorial team is focusing on the first two issues of 2014. Meanwhile, Fanhackers is posting apace!
Legal co-signed a legal brief seeking rehearing of the case of Hart v. EA, supporting people’s ability to use public figures’ identities in expressive works; successfully helped an OTW member counter-notify against a DMCA takedown of her podfic, which is now back online (yay!); and responded to a number of queries for legal help, consultation, and information from Wiki, Open Doors, Support, Tag Wrangling, FinCom, VolCom, Comms, Abuse, and others inside and outside the organization.
IV. DOCUMENTATION
The 2012 Annual Report was posted mid-month and provides a summary of the organization’s activities during the past financial and calendar year, financial statements for 2012, and goals for 2013.
Strategic Planning’s report on Open Doors has been released to the public. Please send them any comments or questions. Support has volunteered to be their next team for review, so they’re putting together surveys and interviews for them now.
V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting put out an internal Quarterly Report for the first quarter of 2013. These reports are a new mechanism for the committee to keep the rest of the organization up-to-date on their work and on some of the numbers related to the overall volunteer program.
New Committee Staff: Jessica C. (Systems), Hak42 (Web), Ellen Fleischer (Web), Patti Reeves (Web), Annie (Support), girlmarauders (Support), 2 other Support Staffers & 2 other Web Staffers.
New Communications Volunteers: Natasha Rajendran
New Tester Volunteers: Leigh Berry, Kryptaria, Runt, Etharei, Camilla M., Eve Forbes, ljunattainable, Katy Armstrong, Key Foster, Northern_Star & 4 others
Departing Directors: Maia Bobrowicz
Departing Committee Chairs: Jay Bee (Open Doors)
Departing Committee Staff: Amy Wilson (Open Doors), and 2 Communications staffers.
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: KindKit, ar, Jessica, Stealth Noodle, spock74, Amber, and 5 others