OTW 2013 Annual Report now available

Banner by Ania of a manila file folder with the words 'OTW Report'

We are pleased to announce that the OTW has published its 2013 Annual Report (in PDF or in HTML). The report provides a summary of our activities during the past financial and calendar year, our financial statements for 2013, and our goals for 2014. This is the seventh annual report of the OTW (see previous reports).

The 2013 Annual Report highlights successes and achievements from across the organization and challenges we faced during the year. We encourage all those interested to take a look at the report and, if you have questions, please feel free to contact us here or through our contact form.

Thank you to all of our members, staff, donors and volunteers for your support!

2014-05-29 admin
Report
  1. pleasebekidding commented: Can't be prouder to be a part of this community, and I'm so glad it's been such a successful year financially. I'm proud to keep being part of the growth! Thank you so much!
    • Claudia Rebaza commented: Thank you for the support! We hope to continue making you proud to be part of the OTW community.
  2. RDphantom commented: I really enjoyed the report, 2013 was a big year for the org. I always love keeping up with the 'behind the scenes' things and the news I don't always hear. I was sad that there wasn't anything mentioned about directly hosting multimedia on the AO3 in the 'Stepping Stones for 2014' section. Nor has there been any news in the monthly newsletters since the new roadmap was posted. I'd love to hear about the progress of the Dark Archive, TO3, and integrating the TO3 into the AO3. Also, we haven't heard anything lately about different types of work templates. I imagine that the new Category changes are a precursor to that? I realize that the projects aren't ready to be rolled out and that they all will take a significant amount of work, but a little news here and there helps make the wait bearable.
    • Claudia Rebaza commented: We're glad that you found the Annual Report informative! Unfortunately, there is no news at present about the Dark Archive or TO3, and we expect it will be a few years before we are able to devote resources towards its development. This hiatus is largely a matter of human resources as we don't presently have the technical staff to be working on it. As you're probably aware, the AO3 has gone through some dramatic increases in use over the last few years, and this has resulted in a lot of code rewrites and extra work for our technical staff so that it can meet these demands. There have also been changes in the way other internal processes work (such as recruitment) which they have also been involved with, and which also reflect our expanded activity. However, yes, AD&T is definitely moving towards plans for integrating multimedia content at the site. This progress may seem slow, both in terms of what users see as well as for work behind the scenes. However, these changes can be quite significant. For example, as you'll see reported in our newsletter this coming week, our tag wranglers have had a dramatic improvement in the speed with which they can do their work thanks to some changes to their work interface. Since the expansion of format hosting at AO3 will likely bring yet another large surge of activity to the site, many of these preparations will be quite important to have in place before that happens. We're still in version 0.9 of the roadmap but that work includes preparation for both multimedia support and interface translation features. We know that many of our supporters are looking forward eagerly to these developments, and we'd also like to see them happen as soon as possible! Rest assured, there will be announcements about our progress towards this goal as pieces of it get developed, both in newsletters as well as future annual reports.