The Organization for Transformative Works

May 2012 Newsletter, Volume 59

I. OTW OUTREACH: US AND OUR USERS

Development & Membership has been busy debriefing after the incredibly successful April membership drive: discussing what worked well and what to improve, shipping premiums to donors, and working with Finance to record donations sent via physical mail. They’re also forming small teams within the committee to work on projects such as convention outreach, merchandise research, social media strategy, and improving our external and internal documentation.

After a year of development, the I&O committee launched and supervised the OTW Community Survey, which garnered nearly 6000 responses. A survey work group has been formed to evaluate those responses and Survey Sundays have been launched to share data with users and enable their input on results they’d like to see. I&O are also starting to look at search engine optimization (SEO) for the OTW and its various projects as a way to broaden contact with currently underserved areas of fandom.

II. FANLORE and TWC

Fanlore editors are working hard to document the fannish websites that will soon be lost because FortuneCity, a website provider, has taken down its free accounts. Any help is welcome, and the sooner the better! More information can be found at the Fanlore post about FortuneCity rescue.

Exciting things have been happening over at the Journal committee. Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is about to release issue No. 10 on Transformative Works and Fan Activism, co-edited by Henry Jenkins (June 15, 2012). The issue is going through the last stages of production and thanks to its online only status and tight production schedule they’ve have been able to include up to the minute updates on such recent topics as Kony 2012. It will be the largest issue ever with fourteen peer-reviewed essays out of more than two dozen initial submissions, and expands the scope of TWC yet again as it focuses on international political and social phenomena.

Journal is in the last stages of reviewing for No. 11, a general issue. If you’re interested in contributing to Transformative Works and Cultures, the next two special issues will be on Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies and Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books. They are still accepting Symposium submissions on both, so if you have things to say about either, just drop the committee a note or submit your 1500-2500 word essay directly through the web site.

Finally, the Symposium blog team welcomes new member Nele Noppe, who had previously helped informally with our Zotero Index. The committee is excited to have her join us officially and look forward to her posts on Japan, doujinshi, Avatar, and legal and cultural differences in publishing and copyright policies. Also, if anyone would like to write Symposium pieces or have experience in writing them, we would love to hear from you!

III. HAPPENINGS AT THE AO3

The Accessibility, Design and Technology committee is preparing for a May deploy which will include new user stats pages and some new tools for Open Doors to use in managing archive imports to AO3. Dedicated members have been working on improving our testing documentation, and they’re thrilled to have a number of new coding volunteers, some of whom have jumped right in already! Monthly training sessions for coders are starting, the first of which will be on May 19th.

Several committees are also providing input into a proposed AO3 Diversity Statement, and a category change workgroup is being developed. That workgroup will review the existing media categories on the Archive of our Own in order to come up with a more inclusive approach. Tag Wrangling is also engaged in plans to update the Tag FAQs on the AO3. Support reported that their ticket count for this month is at roughly 100 tickets. Meanwhile, they’ve been hard at work redesigning the Support form and are working on a FAQ to better explain the tools used internally to register and manage bugs, feature requests, and code to make them more accessible and transparent to the users.

Open Doors committee is continuing outreach to Sentinel fan communities and mailing lists about the 852 Prospect import. Two public chats will be held in the coming week. Expect upcoming outreach for the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP). In the meantime, take a look at the committee’s post on the MediaWestCon blog.

IV. PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

Vidding has been working closely with Legal on their upcoming DMCA testimony in DC or June 4, and working with the new Grants team to try to raise funds to speed up hosting of multimedia fanworks of all kinds. Grants has been working on a large National Endowment for the Humanities grant proposal. More material has been added and the team plans to eventually put together an application to submit next year. If anyone with experience in Grants would like to contribute or join the Grants team, please let us know!

Strategic Planning has also drafted and approved an internal member and board liaison agreement during the meeting on May 12. They’re preparing the first committee-specific survey, and are drafting their first update post.

V. GOVERNANCE

Board minutes for 28th April and 12th of May are now available online. We’ve set up a new elections workgroup to revise the FAQs and prepare for next year, and Jenny Scott-Thompson has been appointed as elections officer. The OTW’s IRC channel is also live now.

Finance has been researching Paypal alternatives and are looking into which options can be integrated with our site to give people more choices when donating.

VI. OUR TECH WIZARDS

As mentioned in our April newsletter, Webmasters have now launched an internal survey to gather feedback from committees about how transformativeworks.org can better meet their needs. This feedback will be used to help us plan the redesign of the site.

Similarly, Systems has been hard at work developing several projects, including the mail, wiki and new development test system.

VII. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting has continued to work hard to engage with and process a swell of new volunteers! Some additional changes since last month:

New Staffers List: Age (Volunteers & Recruiting), Anurag (Volunteers & Recruiting), Alexis Latshaw (Open Doors), Amy Luo (Communications), arrow (Open Doors), Charlotte (Translation), Christa Shishino (Communications), Freya (Communications), little_ruby (Translation), Nele Noppe (Journal), queerlyobscure (Open Doors), Shawnda (Volunteers & Recruiting), Stiney (Open Doors), Tuulia (Wiki)

New Workgroup Members: Cathtice (AO3 Docs), Claire Oberholtzer (Strategic Planning), copracat (AO3 Docs), Jessica Steiner (Strategic Planning), Maia Bobrowicz (AO3 Docs), MollyC (AO3 Docs)

New Tag Wranglers: Amaranth, Amber, ariadne83, Avery, Cassandra Chan, dlb42694, Eccles enchantersnight, lalejandra, MarcDelani, markey, MelanieW, Naghtielus, pawheart, Shannon Black, Spockside, theleaveswant, untitled102
New Coding Volunteers: Andreja, Ariana, caithnard
New Testers: Lena
New Translators: Aliya Agaeva, Ellie, Jessica A.
Departing Staffers: Lisa Schmidt (Journal)

Links Roundup for 25 May 2012

Here’s a roundup of stories about pros playing inside the fandom sandbox that might be of interest to fans:

• Dubbed the “world’s very first (and only) Science Fiction Football Musical Comedy!” Packer Fans From Outer Space recently ran in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Geared to a hometown audience with its “songs about love, Wisconsin traditions and our historic football rivalry, including ‘You Gotta Hate the Bears’ and ‘Winning is the Only Thing,’” it still provided insiderish/crossover/genre-hopping fannishness that lots of non-Wisconsinites could recognize.
• Not far away, Canadian Charles Ross performed a one-man show in Adrian, Michigan that was insiderish only to people who had never seen Star Wars (is there anyone left?) “It’s basically me onstage — with no costumes, sets, props or real talent — me, onstage, retelling the original, bad hair, 1970s-1980s ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, basically using my own body and my own impressions,” Ross said. His obsession with the saga came from a source many fan creators can relate to — wanting to know what comes next. As a child he saw a double feature of the first two Star Wars films made. “But [my father] didn’t tell me that it wasn’t the end of the story. I was convinced that the sort-of lame tone left over at the end of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ was the way the story actually ended. And I was like, ‘What a bummer of a story!’”
• Sony Music decided to employ fan fiction to promote the band One Direction. They partnered with a Wattpad writer who created a five-chapter eBook about the band members “designed to coordinate with the video for the band’s single, ‘What Makes You Beautiful.’” Fans then spread links to the books and video. The marketing effort is among the finalists for the GennY Award which “recognizes best practices of those who have applied new and innovative techniques to connect and communicate with youth.” The winner will be announced at a conference focusing on youth marketing.
• Then there are some creators who are writing their own fanfic. One that was widely circulated was a story about Lost co-producer Damen Lindelof writing Mad Men fan fiction as fictional sci-fi writer Ken Cosgrove. Another frequently republished story was about romance novelist Diane Story writing Britney Spears RPF, made all the more notable given that she is the aunt of Britney’s former husband, Kevin Federline. Story also “created a contest on her website where the winner can win an actual wedding invitation from Spears and Federline’s 2004 wedding.” And finally, Booktrib hosted an article on fan fiction that discussed Vampire Diaries actor Matt Davis writing fanfic on Twitter: “His crazy, sometimes smutty interpretation of the show he resides on is without a doubt the talk of the community. If the actors can write an alternate universe based on original content, why shouldn’t the fans?”

If you are a fan of Vampire Diaries, Britney Spears, Mad Men or One Direction, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Links Roundup for 23 May 2012

Here’s a roundup of stories about fanfic that might be of interest to fans:

• Fan fiction has been widely discussed online, but the recent discussions surrounding the highy visible success of Fifty Shades of Grey continues to take that discussion to new places with, unfortunately, new misinformation. One example is an aside in a discussion of changes in publishing that describes fan fiction as “author-approved online ‘mash-ups’ by fans of cult novels.” Another is the suggestion in a Huffington Post interview that fan fiction has only ever been written for sci-fi and fantasy genres. Still as this “concert preview” that focuses on fan fiction written for Def Leppard demonstrates, there are certainly going to be fewer people than ever who have never heard of it.
• That visibility suggests that efforts like Social Samba’s “SagaWriter” tool will become increasingly common, though also that fan fiction is going to be less about fans and more about marketing. “One day TV networks might have budgets to hire social TV teams as big as their main writing teams, but for now a show like The Walking Dead could easily make a Saga where you get to talk to your favorite character while trying to avoid getting eaten.” The platform allows for interactive storytelling, but not, it would seem, fan originated stories. Explains SocialSamba CEO Aaron Williams, “Within our tool you can’t use copyrighted material. We follow the same DMCA rules that everyone else does. We see TV shows and other storytellers have interest in creating fan fiction. The WB adding Big Lebowski characters to Xtranormal, the fact that they are taking steps like this was a good thing to point to for us. It means its good for the brand. For us we see that wave coming, brands or storytellers can skin to look like their brand and embed in whatever platform they use to reach out to fans.”
• Other people are being more thoughtful about the fan fiction that already exists. Wired Magazine contributor Clive Thompson posted ruminations on how fan fiction writers are creating “paracosms”, using the Brontë sisters’ early writing as an example, and cited evidence that “MacArthur fellows were twice as likely as ‘normal’ nongeniuses to have” created paracosms as children. Thompson warned though that “we have to stop denigrating it” if society is to reap the rewards of such play.
• Britain’s The Guardian in the meantime suggested that authors must value fan work in today’s marketplace. “[T]he success of a novel such as Fifty Shades of Grey is far less surprising to anyone who understands the dynamics of fandom than to the mainstream publishing industry…That it was fan-fiction based in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilightverse is beside the point. That it was chosen by fans and made successful through their support is far more significant. Because what fans want above all else – what in fact defines the very essence of fandom – is ownership of that which we adore.” What’s more “The publishers that survive will be the ones that understand that their role is to amplify the signal of those artists already chosen by fandom. The writers who succeed will be the ones who are there day in and day out, as much a part of fandom as any other fan, and on first name terms with the neighbours.”

If you’d like to help out people still learning about fan fiction, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.