Welcome to our May 2010 newsletter. Get the updates on our activities, just beneath the cut!
Abuse:
No update at this time.
ADT/Archive:
AD&T have worked hard to bring another set of shiny improvements to the Archive. We’re super-excited about the new Advanced Search function – it’s still in its Beta stage, but it’s already a massive improvement on our old search function. We hosted two major challenges on the Archive during April/May – Final Fantasy Exchange and the multifandom Remix – and we’re proud of how well our teams and our servers rose to the challenge (thanks to the people involved in highspeed coding and testing!)
Board:
The Board has been coordinating & approving various OTW projects as well doing some financial planning for the coming years. (And paying our taxes!)
Communications:
Communications has been working with International Outreach and with our Development team to expand our communications in content and in venue – keep your eye out for more International Content and for announcements of new OTW venues.
Content Policy:
We are starting to review feedback on recent plans/proposals, including the breadth of the definition of fanworks and issues that will come up with the expansion of the Archive to host fanart. As the design for hosting fanart emerges, we expect to be seeking even more feedback.
Development:
This month, with help from Systems and Webmasters, we successfully updated our donation system software. This makes us more efficient and has made our receipting system just a little more awesome — it also meant that during the upgrade process, a few receipts were delayed, so please accept our thanks for your patience if you were one of the donors affected! We’re currently doing behind-the-scenes work implementing a new process to make it easier for our supporters to make donations in honor of other fans. We continue to work applying for grants to support OTW projects. We’re also making small changes to the way the OTW uses Twitter with the aim of making our OTW_News Twitter account more useful for sharing information.
Documentation:
Most of the Documentation committee has been dealing with RL over the past month, but in the meantime we’ve been getting feedback from the other committees on how best to tighten up our infrastructure to keep all our information where it will be the most useful. Over the next few weeks we’ll be putting that plan into action on our internal wiki.
Finance:
The 990s are DONE! Federal taxes have been filed, and for those number geeks among us, OTW brought in enough revenue in 2009 to move us from the extremely short postcard return to one with actual pages. Aside from that, the sharks have stayed busy providing assists on keeping our DNS registration current, working with Systems on acquiring a new back up server, and moving AO3 forward with more bandwidth.
Academic Journal:
The TWC team is working hard to put together issue No. 5, which is scheduled for September 2010.
International Outreach:
We’ve been planning future contributions to OTW News by drafting blog post guidelines (to keep things in context and intelligible for a diverse audience) and already got cracking on a couple of topics, so do expect news from us soon. Our subcommittee Translation and our volunteer translators have done amazing work by not only continuing to keep up with the OTW website, but also starting to translate the Archive release notes — see the 0.7.5 release notes in multiple languages. We’re really proud and hope this will be both useful to you and for spreading the word about the archive (and yes, we’re always looking for more translators!)
Legal:
All quiet, just the way we like it.
Open Doors:
Open Doors continues to shepherd collections to the FCPP and to help people transfer their digital collections/webpages/small archives into the AO3.
Support:
Support has mockups for our Support and Feature Request boards! They’re undergoing commentary and review, and it is SO, SO exciting! We’re hoping to finish that process up next month and, gasp! pass it over to the wonderful AD&T for coding. That is our big and awesome news, and we really cannot wait! As always, we’re hard at work answering support tickets — please feel free to contact us any time =D
Systems:
Nothing blew up. All systems are go!
Vidding History:
We have been adding volunteers to our new mailing list and will soon begin working on our resource pages. We are also putting together a proposal for tech specs for the dark archive and the TO3; stay tuned. (Torrent gurus! CALL US!)
Volunteers:
The Volunteers committee continued handling various staffing related tasks. If you’d like to get involved in the Org, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Webmasters:
This month we’ve been working with the Journal committee to set up the new Symposium blog (coming soon). We also upgraded our website software with help from Systems, and we’re continuing to work on style enhancements for the otw-news mirror sites.
Wiki:
We’ve been busy this month with several ongoing projects. We’ve refined the Fandom as Category policy and have been (along with a lot of other users) adding fandom categories and categorizing zine pages. We’ve done away with the policy on “breadcrumbs” and have been working with Legal to continue to revise the Image policy based on user feedback.