Welcome to the last issue of the OTW Newsletter for this year! As of December 19, the OTW committees will be taking a brief break over the holidays, then reconvening after the New Year to start back to work, so we thought we'd take a chance to do an end-of-term roundup for the various committees, focusing on what we've done over the past year and a half.

Committee Updates!

The OTW is proud to be co-sponsoring the 6th annual IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections Symposium at American University Washington College of Law on April 24, 2009. The theme of this year's symposium is Female Fan Cultures and Intellectual Property. Below please find the call for papers; abstracts are due December 19th. If you're interested in attending, the conference is free and open to the public, though registration is required.

Part IV: Narrative Description of Your Activities

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) was established to serve the interests of fans of various types of popular culture by providing access to and preserving the history of transformative works and fan culture in its myriad forms.

Transformative works (“fanworks”) are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original source material. They include but are not limited to fan fiction, fan videos, and graphics. The OTW was created to advocate for a future in which these fanworks are recognized as legal and transformative, and accepted as legitimate creative activity.

ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS

ANNUAL REPORT 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 2007 in review
  • A radical idea
  • Getting started
  • Building the OTW
• 2008: Opening the door
  • Voices of OTW
• Finances
  • Statement of Financial Information
  • Statement of Activities
  • Statement of Functional Expenses
  • Notes to Financial Statements
• About the OTW
  • Mission
  • Who we are
  • Get involved

2007 IN REVIEW / A RADICAL IDEA

The Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee needs help! We're coming up on the end of our first term, which means getting all our records in order, and we want ADT to keep coding, so we're looking for people to help them get their meeting notes in order.

No technical knowledge is required--all you need is the ability to summarize a two-hour meeting in a half-page of short, bulleted minutes.

We need five to ten people for the job, and to show our gratitude for your hard work, each one will be paid with a shiny beta account at the Archive of Our Own.

The term ends in two weeks, so hurry hurry hurry. Send us your name and email address!

Welcome to the first December issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Committee Updates!

Welcome to the first November issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

News: Vidding History Project

The OTW is pleased to announce the release of a series of six short documentaries on vidding made by Francesca Coppa and Laura Shapiro and produced by OTW for MIT's New Media Literacy project. These are part of a larger group of documentaries on remix culture, and the whole series is aimed at middle and high schoolers (so are very introductory to the art of vidding.) You can see these documentaries online here, and the OTW will also be hosting them as part of our new Vidding History project (you'll be hearing more about this in OTW's second year: if anyone wants to work on one of the OTW's vidding projects, please contact the Volunteers committee.)

Committee Updates

Welcome to the second October issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

Academic Journal Update from Mafalda Stasi

The academic journal team is writing a FAQ for the OTW Web site.

Submissions are arriving for the academic journal's second issue and are going through blind peer review. The editorial team is actively soliciting content.

Today is the last day of our donations drive. Thank you to everyone who has donated! We appreciate your support so much.

Good news: even though the drive is ending, you can keep on giving even without making a direct donation! We have a fabulous new widget to announce:

I Heart OTW Widget

This is a Firefox extension which adds our referral code when you browse on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.ca—that is, in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. (We’re working on adding this functionality in other countries too—stay tuned!)

It's that time again! As the end of the OTW's first term nears, we will soon begin putting together the next round of committees for our second term, which means we are once again in search of people who are willing to serve.

We did an amazing amount of work during our first term, and we have a lot of things planned for the next, both internally (more comprehensive documentation!) and externally (more features for the archive!) Many of our current committee members will be returning for a second term, and we are looking for enthusiastic, dedicated people to join them.

Welcome to the first October issue of the OTW Newsletter! We're constantly on the lookout for ways to keep fandom up-to-date and informed about what's going on behind the scenes here at OTW, so twice a month, Community Relations compiles updates about what the various committees are working on and we share them here.

All issues of the newsletter will be tagged accordingly, so you can follow our progress chronologically.

The Webmasters are pleased to announce the launch of the new website and blog.

http://transformativeworks.org

In addition to a facelift, the website now has several spiffy new features that increase the ease-of-use of the site. The most important of these is the blog, which will be taking over from otw_news as our primary information service. It will also allow all comments to be centralized in one (non-LiveJournal) location hosted by OTW itself.

Features

We’ve been working hard to introduce a number of new features for site visitors, including multilingual options (take a look at the language switcher on the left), a new site-based OTW news blog (you’re reading it), and the ability to comment on this blog, with or without creating a site account (or you can use an OpenID).

The OTW accepts donations by credit card or e-check through Paypal, and by check via mail to our post office box. See Get involved for the details.

Paypal does not reveal credit card or bank account numbers to the OTW. It is an automated service that processes payments and allows OTW to transfer the funds directly to the OTW’s bank. Paypal is administered by an outside company, which adds another level of oversight to the OTW’s financial activities.

Personal checks received by mail will necessarily have account information on them, but the information will not be retained.

Job: Systems Committee Member

Description: Systems is looking for a few additional committee members to help with backend support, keeping the operating system and the application software up and running.

We are currently using Debian, but if you are otherwise competent with Unix, knowing Debian specifically isn't a requirement. The software packages we administer are: Mailman, Apache2, Mongrel, Rails, Drupal, Mediawiki, Postfix, mySQL, Awstats, Nagios, Request Tracker, rsnapshot, S3Sync and Logwatch. Experience installing, configuring and troubleshooting any of these would be good—you need not know them all. Apache would be a huge bonus.

We are also looking for a systems architect. If you have experience in this area, please contact us!

Between nine and ten weeks before the election, there will be a public chat, hosted by the Election Committee and the Board, for any members interested in running for the Board of Directors. The date, time, and location of this chat will be announced in advance to all committee members and staffers. Members of the Board and Elections Committee will be available to answer questions. Afterwards, a transcript of the chat will be publicly available online.

No. You may not reassign proxy votes that you have received.

PINs for an upcoming election will be e-mailed about one week after the deadline for proxy assignments. At that point, if you have been assigned a proxy vote, you will be e-mailed that PIN in addition to your own PIN (if applicable), and you may vote each PIN, one at a time.

You may assign a proxy up to two weeks before a given election; the official date will be included on the election timeline for that year. Your proxy assignment will last for six months. Until those six months are up, we cannot revoke or change your proxy assignment. This means that, should there be a run-off for the election, your proxy must also vote for you in the run-off.

No. Elections can verify that we have successfully reassigned your vote, but we cannot verify whether or not your proxy used the vote, or show which candidates she voted for. Because of this, we strongly suggest that you confirm that your proxy received your assignment request and knows your voting preferences.