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

Part Two of Henry Jenkins' spotlight on OTW's vidding documentaries for MIT's New Media Literacies project is now online: Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love (Part Two). We'd like to thank Henry, as well as MIT/NML, for giving us the opportunity to showcase fan vidding.

Vidding News: The OTW wants to announce its support for the EFF's proposed DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] exemption for video creators--like vidders--who rip DVDs in order to use clips for fair use remixes. Members of the Board provided the EFF with background information on the petition to the copyright office (right-click and save), which explicitly cites fan vidders as an established creative community that relies on clips from DVDs to make works that are fair use: or what the petition calls "fundamentally transformative visual works."

Vidding News: Henry Jenkins has posted part one of his spotlight on the vidding documentaries made by the OTW for MIT's New Media Literacies project. The post, called Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love (Part One), profiles the first three videos and features excerpts from director (and OTW Board Member) Francesca Coppa. (Fans might also want to check out NML's introductory video on the new media literacies. The rest of the world is finally catching up with fandom; media educators want their students to be able to do what fans do, to know what fans know.)

The Organization for Transformative Works is run for fans by fans. The directors of OTW's board are all active in fandom, as are the more than fifty other people serving on committees. Other volunteers are signing on to work on particular projects or tasks. Interested? Find out here how you can get involved!

Board of Directors (2009)

Naomi Novik (Chair)

The OTW has its roots in a fan community with a decades-long history as a community made up mostly of women. Today, due to the internet and new technology, that community and its interests are rapidly growing in various ways and intersecting with other fan communities with different histories. We are excited and hopeful about the way our community is expanding and meeting with other varieties of remix culture, and we welcome anyone who wants to do what we're doing. At the same time, it is still important to us to acknowledge that this particular creative community is a place created and shaped so strongly by the tastes of women, because that is historically a pretty rare and amazing thing.

From Naomi:

Creative Commons licenses are not a substitute for the existing fair use rights that readers already have.…I feel that my readers already have the right to write fanfiction and share it noncommercially, and that I don't need to do anything special to make this happen.

From Naomi:

I believe that fanfiction is fair use and does not require my permission. I do highly encourage Temeraire fanfiction and am thrilled if anyone wants to write it.

The OTW is committed to protecting the privacy of fans, whether they are users of our services or not. We do not allow anyone to connect fan identities and real life identities on our services against the wishes of the individual in question. Our content policy committee and focus groups are working on policies and procedures to both prevent this and minimize the damage should someone break the rules.

No, not at all. In fact, we hope that other fans will use our archive software (which will be open-source and free to use and modify) to build their own archives.

Our first goal is to create a new open-source software package to allow fans to host their own robust, full-featured archives, which can support even an archive on a very large scale of hundreds of thousands of stories and has the social networking features to make it easier for fans to connect to one another through their work.

The Board is ultimately responsible for these decisions as part of its fiduciary obligation. For smaller transactions, the Board will delegate responsibility to OTW’s committees to determine what goods and services may be necessary. All expenditures are reviewed by the Financial committee to insure they fit the goals of the individual committee and overall goals of the organization, as well as the established budgets. The Financial committee is responsible for making payments.

There is a distinction between plagiarism (the unacknowledged use of someone else's words claimed as one's own), fanfiction (the acknowledged or obvious borrowing of story elements to tell a new story in the fanfiction writer's words), and quotation (the acknowledged or obvious use of small excerpts of another's work).

Fair use is the right to make some use of copyrighted material without getting permission or paying. It is a basic limit on copyright law that protects free expression. “Fair use” is an American phrase, although all copyright laws have some limits that keep copyright from being private censorship.

Because we are an all-volunteer organization, our staff can change frequently, as volunteers' available time may change unexpectedly or vary from month to month. Community Relations keeps a current staff list in the otw_news journal, but this may not always be completely up to date, so please note that the best way to reach us is via the shared addresses listed on our Contact page.

We are all fans first, and that is why we are giving our time to the organization.

There are currently around 100 volunteers participating in the OTW's projects as board members, staffers, and volunteers. Most of them did not know each other before their involvement with the OTW.

Naomi Novik put out a call for those willing to serve in the organization in June of 2007, and chose the first board from among those who responded.

A transformative work takes something existing and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression.