For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.
I. FANS AND OTW IN THE NEWS
May saw an important accomplishment by the OTW: the successful importation of 852 Prospect to the AO3. Open Doors has been happily tying up loose ends since then by uploading any missing content, and helping authors claim their stories, remove duplicate stories, and update redirect links.
However other major news and activity came from other sources. The AO3 got some national kudos as one of TIME magazine’s choices for the 50 Best Websites of 2013. Later on, the announcement by Amazon that it would be launching a pay-version for fanfiction through its self-publishing infrastructure got a lot of media attention and Communications has been fielding a number of media requests from around the world seeking comment.
Legal staffers were among those who responded to press inquiries about the implications of Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program, and their post on the matter was awaited by many fans. Legal also passed along a request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asking for help from fans to combat a legal challenge to podcasts.
II. KEEPING YOU INFORMED
The Wiki Committee will be celebrating Fanlore’s 25,000th article in a few weeks. A trivia contest is in the works and fans are encouraged to stop by the site, whether they’re taking part or not.
Journal is right on track for the June 15 publication date for No. 13, a guest-edited issue about comic books. It is going through proofreading right now. Fanhackers is posting some great stuff, notably a series by Emma England on Worldcon (Emma is organizing the academic track for Worldcon/Loncon in 2014).
Strategic Planning received great feedback on their VolCom report. Their report on Open Doors is being prepared for release in early June. Reports on the Wiki Committee and Fanlore team should be ready for review by the end of June.
Category Change is currently gathering internal feedback about their proposal draft. After this is done, they will present this draft to the AO3 users.
Tag Wrangling inducted another 50 wrangling volunteers; we now have over 200 wranglers! The wrangling staff posted additional tutorials to train wranglers in more advanced actions. In addition to cleaning up most of our busier fandoms, our wranglers new and old have also made inroads organizing the vast number of cross-fandom Additional Tags, with almost 300 new canonical No Fandom tags added to the database in the last month (and many times more tags canonized or synned.)
III. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting has continued working with chairs and leads on opening roles for recruiting, passing along applications, and processing inductions. They also recently approved a project plan for developing Chair & Lead Training that will be prioritized over the next few months.
New Staffers List: C. Ryan Smith (Communications), Cynthia (Communications), 6 other Communications Staffers, and 1 Accessibility, Design & Technology: Quality Assurance & Testing Staffer.
New Workgroup Members: Wereleopard58 (AO3 Docs), bottledyarn (AO3 Docs), Shelley (AO3 Docs), and 9 other Ao3 Documentation Workgroup members.
New Tag Wranglers: Scheherazade, Kalle Kinnunen, maplewing, Masu Trout, Cake, TheEnabler, MightyKumquat, viennajones, ACarrao, Zoe, Titan, Love_82, antisock, cyanides, tinytransistors, Tonko, Crowley, Tylah, dafna, Milena Daniels, wolfpacklove, taliahale, lalalalalee, Mareen Fischer, Chaneen, FishieMishie, kensie, Dana Leigh Brand, birggitt, PeggyO, Faefyre, Exoplanetaryactivism, Aster Raven, Turboetana, Christina, Splashy, skyearth85, Itachi, Meninaiscrazy, AMary, Silver_kii, Katherine Sapede, CharlieBravoWhiskey, Sydni, fruitbat00, IShouldBeWriting, kyburg, and 1 other Tag Wrangler.
Departing Chairs: Natacha Guyot (Fan Video & Multimedia)
Departing Staffers: Natacha Guyot (Fan Video & Multimedia), Sole G. (Support, Tag Wrangling)
Departing Tag Wranglers: Karen Burkey & 2 others