October 2016 Newsletter, Volume 107

I. OCTOBER MEMBERSHIP DRIVE

The membership drive is always a massive collaborative effort, and this year’s was no exception. Our Development and Membership committee worked with Communications and Translation to produce three drive posts, each in a total of 23 languages! Many thanks to all the amazing volunteers who made this drive possible, and a big thank you to everyone who donated and signal boosted!

The grand total raised? US$139,159.45 from 5518 individual donations!

II. AT THE AO3

Once again, the AO3 gets a little bigger. This month, Open Doors announced three new imports, The Quidditch Pitch, Türkfanfiction.net and Due South Archive.

And, if you’re working on a challenge, you have Accessibility, Design & Technology to thank for the new and improved matching system. AD&T had just the one deploy in October, but the major improvements to challenge matching were big news.

Tag Wrangling have been making AO3 improvements too: they have been continuing work on the ongoing process of updating existing tags to be compliant with guideline changes, including updating relationship canonicals using “Other Characters” to “Other(s)”. Tag Wranglers also continued to work with Open Doors volunteers on tag mapping projects to help with archive importing. It’s these seemingly small changes and iterations that keep the AO3 in good working order.

III. LEGAL WORK FOR OCTOBER

In October, OTW Legal spoke up for fans in Singapore—we submitted a Comment to the Singaporean government in response to the nation’s Public Consultation on proposed changes to its copyright regime. Our comment covered a lot of topics, including fair use, technological protection measures, copyright duration, attribution rights for authors, and what to do when copyright owners can’t be identified. We also responded to a number of user queries including some about fair use and some in connection with the October membership drive.

IV. OTW WORK BY THE NUMBERS

Support is still going strong at around 900 tickets a month, and the committee will likely beat last year’s total number of tickets by the end of October. Thankfully, they have five new eager folks coming on to the team to help answer tickets in a timely manner.

Abuse has received 500+ tickets this month and their new recruits have started training; their help with the growing number of tickets will be much appreciated.

Our Finance committee is all about the numbers, all of the time! They have a new co-chair, the brilliant Yuechiang Luo, and the committee as a whole is liaising with the Board about a new payment request process. They’ve also created a page for Finance on the OTW website, so you can get to know the committee’s work a little better.

V. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

As of the 28th of October, the OTW has 567 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New Directors: Kristina Busse, Priscilla Del Cima.
New Committee Chairs: Yuechiang Luo (Finance), puckling (Systems), Matthew Vernon (Systems), Matty Bowers (Acting I&O Chair), Priscilla Del Cima (Acting Wiki Chair), Araise Solace (Elections)
New Committee Staff: Wania A (Strategic Planning), Lisa Schmidt (Strategic Planning), and 1 other Strategic Planning staffers, Amy Shimizu (Abuse), Svea (Abuse) & EllenW (Abuse) & CB (Abuse) & 3 other Abuse, Aalea (Support), Princess_Sachiko (Support), & 3 other Support, Rachel Pearl Bracker (Communications), Sarah Loch (Communications), Karen R. (Communications), & 1 other Communications staffer
New Translator Volunteers: TheReadingAce, Motheomar, Isabel Berg, vorkosigan, Ha Thi Ngoc Huyen, Sara N., Natalia Gruber, Alexis Amarth, 6 Volunteers

Departing Committee Chairs: Amanda Furrow (Systems), Karen Johnson (Systems), kiki-eng (Internationalization & Outreach), jsparc (Wiki), Tiyire (Wiki)
Departing Committee Staff: kiki-eng (DevMem), Laura Groeneveld (Support)
Departing Communications Volunteers: Robyn, 2 Volunteers
Departing Tag Wrangler Volunteers: Itachi, Nana, Allons-y, Lydiacatfish, Elijah, and 41 others
Departing Translator Volunteers: 1 volunteer

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing on our website.