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ao3_news_feed) wrote2025-12-11 04:35 pmResignation of OTW Directors, December 2025
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors is saddened to announce that Erica Frank and Kathryn Soderholm have resigned from their roles as Board Directors for personal reasons. Their resignations are effective as of December 11, 2025.
Erica was elected to her seat in 2024, and her term was set to end in 2027; her seat will be filled in the upcoming election as a one-year term. Kathryn was elected to her seat in 2023, and was already scheduled to be replaced in the upcoming election. In the meantime, both of their seats will remain vacant.
We would like to thank Erica and Kathryn for their service as members of the Board and for their years as OTW volunteers. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
ao3_news_feed) wrote2025-12-08 03:34 pmNovember 2025 Newsletter, Volume 206
I. SPOTLIGHT ON FANLORE
In November, Fanlore ran the Fanlore No Fault November challenge: a catch-up event for earlier badges editors missed! The challenge ran from November 16 to 30, with many editors participating and earning badges from previous months.
Curious about editing Fanlore? Check out the New Visitor Portal and Tutorial for getting started!
II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN
On November 14, we celebrated AO3's 16th anniversary! \o/
Accessibility, Design & Technology continued to prepare emails for translation and improved how the download and chapter index menus behave with each other on smaller screens.
AO3 Documentation updated the Contacting the Staff FAQ.
Open Doors finished importing Oz Magi, an Oz annual gift exchange, and Stayka's Saint Seiya Archive, a Saint Seiya archive. They also shared an annual roundup of the fanzine collections created in the last year for fanworks imported through the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) and announced the upcoming import of a Harry Potter archive, PhoenixSong.
In October, Policy & Abuse received 5,061 tickets, setting a record high for the third month in a row. Support received 3,043 tickets. Tag Wrangling wrangled over 600,000 tags, or over 1,380 tags per wrangling volunteer.
Tag Wrangling also continues to create new "No Fandom" canonical tags and announced a new batch of tags for November.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
TWC continues to prepare for the two upcoming 2026 special issues: "Disability and Fandom" and "Gaming Fandom". The submission deadline for the two 2027 special issues, "Music Fandom" and "Latin American Fandoms", is also quickly approaching on January 1.
In November, the OTW filed an Amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the Supreme Court should clarify the rules surrounding who can challenge a trademark registration application. In a case involving whether someone should own the trademark "Rapunzel" for dolls of the character Rapunzel, the OTW argued that the Trademark Office should consider the interests of the public—including fans—in deciding whether to award private ownership over a word or symbol that may be in the public domain.
Legal also worked with Communications on a news post about recent legislation and have responded to a number of comments and queries on this post and other issues.
IV. GOVERNANCE
Board continued work on annual turnover and meeting with all committees. They made progress on the OTW Procurement Policy and expected to get it finalized soon. They, along with the Board Assistants Team, also continued to work with Volunteers & Recruiting and Organizational Culture Roadmap on the ongoing Code of Conduct review.
Development & Membership has been catching up on post-Drive tasks.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
December 5 was International Volunteers Day! As a volunteer-run organization, the OTW would not be possible without the support and diligence of our volunteers. We thank all our volunteers, past and present, for the work they've contributed to the OTW.
If you're curious about volunteering for the OTW, we recruit for various positions on a regular basis, and recruitment will next open in January.
From October 25 to November 22, Volunteers & Recruiting received 287 new requests, and completed 270, leaving them with 63 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below). As of November 22, 2025, the OTW has 983 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Fanlore Volunteers: Luana and 2 other Chair-Track Volunteers
New Policy & Abuse Volunteers: Anderson, Araxie, corr, Aspenfire, Klm, Mothmantic, Nova Deca, vanishinghorizons, and 1 other Volunteer
New Tag Wrangling Volunteers: 90Percent Human, Aeon, Alecander Seiler, ambystoma, Astrum, Atlas Oak, batoidea, Bette, Bottle, bowekatan, Bruno, Chaosxvi, Destiny, DogsAreTheBest312, Dream, elia faustus, Ellexamines, Elliott W, Gracey, jacksonwangparty, Jean W, Kalico, Keira Gong, Kiru, lamonnaie, Lavender, Loria, Lucia G, LWynn, Max, Nikki, Nioral, noctilucent, Our Hospitality, Primo, Rie, Salethia, Sapphira, sashene, Schnee, Scylle, sneakyowl, soymilk, Thaddeus, TheCrystalRing, thewritegrump, Water, Wintam, yucca, and 1 other Tag Wrangling Volunteer
New Translation Volunteers: 1 Translator
New TWC Volunteers: Lys Benson (Copyeditor)
New User Response Translation Volunteers: Cesium (Translator)
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Irina, Paula, and 2 other Import Assistants; 1 Administrative Volunteer, and 1 Fan Culture Preservation Project Volunteer
Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Communications News Post Moderation Liaison
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Julia Santos (Tag Wrangling Supervisor); blackelement7, pan2fel, and 7 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: weliuona and 2 other Translators
Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: Alisande and 2 other Volunteers
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
wwdn_feed) wrote2025-12-01 10:33 pmfaster than a roller coaster
In just a couple days, I’ll get up at are-you-fucking-serious o’clock to get on a who-flies-this-fucking-early plane to go across the country, where I will land at you-just-spent-the-entire-day-on-a-plane o’clock, just in time for rush hour.
I know, I make it sound really awesome, and you’re all deeply envious of me. I’ll try not to flex about it too much.
I’m going to be on a little tour of New England to watch Stand By Me with my cast mates and a few hundred of our closest friends. It’s just three nights, with five hours days in a tour bus between them. It’s all going to happen so fast, it’ll be over before I know it, and that feels weird, since we’ve been talking about it for almost a year. I don’t know how the reality can match the buildup, but I’m looking forward to seeing what it brings.
If these shows go well (and we all expect them to go well) we have plans to do a bunch of cities next year, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of our film, and what it continues to mean to multiple generations of audiences. We already booked a handful in March, and if the stars and planets align, we’ll be doing something in a city near you, and something in Oregon, close to where we filmed the movie, next summer. Cross your fingers for us!
Once again, the locations for this week:
- December 4 at Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire
- December 5 at Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey
- December 6 at Lynn Memorial Auditorium in Lynn, Massachusetts.
Oh, also! We didn’t release a new Storytime last week because it was a holiday here, but there’s a new one dropping on Wednesday. ALSO! I have my very first host-read ad coming up, which is something I never thought I’d been excited about, but it turns out I am. It’s so cool that something I made, that I love so much, that I want to do until I retire, is working out the way I’d hoped! Getting sponsors is one of those things that creates its own inertia, and is the best way we can keep doing the show for years (unless I get super lucky and 100,000 people want to be Patreon supporters — not entirely unrealistic, but not very likely, either).
I’m super grateful to be doing something I love, that I do well, that matters to people. It’s easy to forget that, or lose sight of it in the *gestures broadly at all this fucking shit every fucking day*, so I’m making an effort to remember.
If you want to get updates from the road, updates about future shows, and never miss one of my posts, here’s the thing:
ao3_news_feed) wrote2025-12-01 02:38 pmFive Things AuroraT Said
Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with AuroraT, who volunteers as an administrative volunteer for Open Doors.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I'm an administrative volunteer with the Open Doors Committee, which helps import at-risk digital archives to AO3 in order to preserve fanworks that might otherwise be lost. I'm responsible for project management, walking an archive and its archivist through our lengthy import process. We put a lot of effort into keeping track of the metadata for each work and respecting creators' privacy, so a lot of what I do involves managing spreadsheets and communicating with the archivist, other committees in the OTW, and other teams in the Open Doors Committee. I also write documentation for the committee, updating or writing down our procedures and information about the archives I'm managing.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There's a lot of variety in what an import project requires, so my weeks tend to vary a lot. Sometimes, I'll spend one of our weekly meetings working on a single task, such as preparing the documents we need to initiate a new import or cleaning up a spreadsheet. Other times, I'll jump around from task to task: emailing a different committee, discussing a procedure change with other admin volunteers, responding to feedback on documentation I wrote, creating the AO3 collection where we'll add the works we imported, answering a ticket from a creator wanting to claim works we previously imported, and so on.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I'm a huge supporter of the OTW's mission to preserve fanworks and fight censorship, and I had been watching calls for volunteers for positions I was qualified for in order to contribute to those efforts. I'd recently gotten much more into fanwork preservation when I began working at a library with a zine collection, where I was managing cataloguing and shelving a backlog of donated zines. Project management and working with spreadsheets is a lot of fun! When I saw the application for the administrative volunteer position, it seemed in line with my interests and skills, so I applied.
(Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to me when I applied, the library I was working at is one of Open Doors' partner institutions for our Fan Culture Preservation Project, which helps connect donors with physical fanworks to libraries and archives with zine collections. Some of the donations I was processing were facilitated with the help of Open Doors!)
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
It's absolutely task management. Our process for importing an archive is over a hundred steps long and some of those require a lot of prep work and communication between people. And that's not even including documentation or other administrative work! Thankfully, through the miracle of digital checklists and automatic reminders, as well as the detailed procedure instructions Open Doors has written over the years, it's not too difficult to keep on top of everything. Plus, I have my lovely fellow committee members to help out when I need it :)
What fannish things do you like to do?
I read a lot of fanfiction these days, especially longfics—the one I'm currently reading is over 430k words long and still being published. I also really like to leave long comments on the fics I read. It's a lot of fun to get that sweet, sweet AO3 email that the author responded to me! Recently, I started writing fanfiction for the first time in several years. Joining a new fandom really helped get those creative juices flowing.
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
earthobservatory_iod_feed) wrote2025-12-01 12:00 amA Glimpse of History in Benin City
The ancient walls, ramparts, and ditches that wind through this Nigerian city are the longest known earthworks of the pre-mechanical era.