For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.
I. ALL BUSY ON THE LEGAL FRONT
In May, Legal continued their advocacy work with a couple of larger scale projects. First, they filed a Notice of Protest with the U.S. Trademark Office against a registrant seeking trademark rights in the term “FANDOM.” They also continued our participation in the USPTO/NTIA “Green Paper” process regarding U.S. copyright law, this time participating in a multi-stakeholder meeting regarding standardization of DMCA “notice and takedown” procedures. Legal Chair Betsy Rosenblatt presented at that meeting, and the OTW has a seat on the Working Group that emerged from it.
Journal is quickly pushing ahead on their schedule. Issue No. 16 will be out soon on June 15, and they are hard at work on No. 17, which will come out in September. They are also already beginning work on two special issues for early 2015 and on issue No. 20.
II. OVER AT THE AO3
Accessibility, Design and Technology continued to work on code deploys, steadily chipping away at their backlog of bug fixes. Their first May release included a batch-wrangling tool for tag wranglers. This made for an exciting month for Tag Wrangling, as they are now able to do mass-wrangling from individual fandom pages. This makes wrangling much easier and faster, especially for large mega-fandoms. Tag Wrangling has also been collaborating with AD&T on a project to reduce server loads, and they helped Support resolve several tickets.
The new tag wrangling trainees have been doing a great job! Recruitment will open again in June, and Tag Wrangling will be targeting specific fandoms. If you missed out last time and want to join them, or just want more information, keep an eye on AO3 or OTW News as well as the Volunteer page for updates.
AD&T also worked with Open Doors on the Yuletide import. Open Doors has largely been handling claims, redirects, and other inquiries from the Yuletide import (which has generated almost 300 tickets so far). The outreach from the Yuletide import has also generated other archive import help requests, which they will be working on.
Abuse received almost 200 tickets in May. They’ve been training 13 new recruits who should be ready to start working on tickets in another couple of weeks. They now have about 20 staffers, which marks a real growth from 2013.
Support has scheduled another Open Chat for June 29. In order to hopefully reach more of our worldwide audience, they’ll be throwing open the chat room at 13:00 UTC, and will be around for about 12 hours. We’ll have links and more information posted closer to the date!
III. DOCUMENTATION AND POLICIES
Board is currently working hard on various projects, including putting together a retreat for October 2014 (and working with Legal and Volunteers & Recruiting on a conference anti-harassment policy to go along with it). Beginning June 7 (18:00 UTC), Board plans to hold the open session of their meetings in the Public Discussion chatroom. Those minutes will continue to be available on the OTW website.
Communications published the OTW’s Annual Report for 2013 after a period of internal review.
Translation’s language teams have been hard at work on all our projects. Two new language teams, Russian and Catalan, have started working. The teams have now translated the final Category Change announcement, which presented how fandom browsing will work on Archive of Our Own in the future, following deep changes in the way current ‘media categories’ are organized.
Translation’s co-chairs, Hele and Priscilla, have also joined AO3 Documentation as additional workgroup leads. The AO3 Docs FAQ redesign project is moving along.
Content Policy had an AO3 Terms of Service/FAQ update and new DMCA policy approved for inclusion, and AD&T has posted it to the Archive.
IV. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS
Volunteers & Recruiting welcomed two new staffers to their own committee in May, as well as continuing to process new recruits into and out of the OTW. As always, we thank those departing for their contributions.
New Committee Chairs: moonmagicks (Web Strategy, Design & Development)
New Workgroup Leads: hele braunstein (AO3 Docs), Priscilla Del Cima (AO3 Docs)
New Committee Staff: Anya (Volunteers & Recruiting), Sarah Sisk (Abuse), NadiaB (Abuse), Trey C (Abuse), PoppyPickford (Abuse) and 1 Legal staffer, 9 Abuse staffers, 1 Volunteers & Recruiting staffer
New Workgroup Members: Priscilla Del Cima (AO3 Docs)
Departing Committee Chairs: Emilie Karr (Tag Wrangling)
Departing Committee Staff: Jenny Scott-Thompson (Financial), Jaunita Landéesse (Wiki), Priscilla Del Cima (Internationalization & Outreach)
Departing Tester Volunteers: Jenny Scott-Thompson
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: AlixMason, Luzula, Tonko and 6 others