As we celebrate the past ten years of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), let’s also take a moment to look towards the future. Thanks to your donations, there’s a bright path ahead of us! Your continued support funds all our projects, from the Archive of Our Own (AO3) to the Fanlore wiki, from Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) to our Legal Advocacy team. Here’s a taste of what you can expect from some of these projects soon:
The near future for AO3 includes continued expansion of site stability. Your donations have allowed us to hire contractors to help upgrade the Archive, and we will be continuing those infrastructure improvements. Keep an eye on our release notes for more information! The Archive will also continue to work with Open Doors to import and preserve at-risk fanwork archives, using a new and improved importing process.
Meanwhile, in addition to their everyday work helping fans with questions about fannish legal issues, Legal Advocacy is preparing once again to renew the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) exemption for vidders in 2018.
Also in 2018, TWC will publish its historic tenth anniversary issue, which will bring the journal’s total number of published essays to nearly 500! As part of the OTW’s ten-year retrospective celebration, that TWC issue will focus on The Future of Fandom, illustrating how our networks of communities have evolved and will continue to do so. Keep an eye out for announcements about this issue on TWC’s Tumblr and their website.
As we look to the future, 2027 might seem very far away. Untold numbers of fandoms will emerge between now and then, and untold numbers of fanworks will be created within those fandoms. But 2017 once seemed far away too, and yet here we are! We hope that in the coming decade we will be able to serve not only those of you who have been with us all along, but also all of the creators who may not even have discovered their first fandom yet. Here’s to another ten years of new fans, new fandoms, new goals and new achievements!
We hope that you will continue to support the OTW and its projects for years to come. We have many things in store for the future, and we can’t wait to share them all with you!