samvara

The AO3: Fan fiction is one of the great unsung popular literary movements of the past 50 years, but finding what you’re looking for online can involve sorting through mountains of inadequately-tagged and frequently dodgy text. Archive of Our Own makes it easy: it’s the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the web, and it serves all fandoms equally, from The A-Team to Zachary Quinto and beyond.

We're doing amazing things and we need every $ to keep doing them. If you are in a position to donate, please consider doing it.

The OTW community, and the fannish community it is part of often expresses love directly through action. We've started a not so tiny organisation of our own, the Archive of Our Own, a wiki of our own Fanlore, a journal of our own Transformative Works and Culture, we're doing Legal Advocacy of our own, and one day we plan to have a Torrent of Our Own to preserve multi-media as well as what is currently hosted on the AO3.

Act now to support the projects you love.

• Hobbit again last night with zorana - made better by giant beanbags. Still fun, Thorin's constant smouldering makes me giggle though.
• Doing all the personality quizzes! Colour Personality Enneagram
• OTW update: Five weeks so far… did I tell you I have a manifesto?
• The Redcaps are blossoming again \o/ I also saw a tiny little cocoon - hard to photograph in the wind but so delicate! So precise!

The official announcement is on the Transformativeworks website and I offer my thanks to Francesca and Naomi (who are stepping down) for the many hours they have devoted to both creating the OTW and keeping its many balls in the air.

I've created a legal-name DW for all things boardy although I chopped off some letters. The urge to use one of my childhood nicknames was strong, alas, using Miss MasieMoo or Captain Maia Skye-Cloud is probably pushing it.

Come chat if you have burning questions (which I shall probably answer with I don't know but I'll find out and get back to you) unless they are about me in which case I shall ramble and hopefully pass on useful information.

I kind of fail at writing up my most recent couple of AD&T meetings, is being ridiculously busy an excuse?

These are not official communications, this is me keeping a diary and being open about what we do. People are welcome to ignore the fandom:archive and otw tag if it's not interesting to you, or to come chat about stuff if it is :)

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It's the time of year when the OTW runs a membership drive and asks for donations again. There are many wonderful projects supported by the OTW including my pet love, the Archive of Our Own which has grown from a tiny, tiny thing to a far less tiny thing with over 40,000 users. The AO3 continues to need money to pay for hosting, hardware, backup space and bandwidth - help keep us viable please!

If you're in an position to help support financially, now is an excellent time.

Second Accessibility, Design, and Technology (AD&T) meeting attended by me, hopefully I will do better now that various life pressures are easing.

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First Accessibility, Design, and Technology (AD&T) meeting for 2012 at the exciting time of 11pm - 1am on Saturday night. We'll be alternating times so I can attend at least every second one if the other time is inaccessible.

These are not official communications, this is me keeping a diary and being open about what we do. People are welcome to ignore the fandom:archive and otw tag if it's not interesting to you, or to come chat about stuff if it is :)

• Admin. We're still gearing up for the year so this meeting was about when we'll meet (11pm Sat + TBA), how often (weekly), what we want to have in the meetings (fun! ponies!, a manageable way to handle design issues; earlier in the meeting? in clumps by area eg skins?
• Docs. We've got (in the early stage right now) plans involving organising and beefing up both internal and external documentation - this is exciting to me as I'd love to see more of the AO3 documentation become more visible and more collaborative.
• Tools. We also talked about a new (to me) tool called Trello which I need to spend some time with and get comfortable with. It manages projects into Boards and tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process. Fun! I'll probably talk more about it when I have a better understanding of it.
  
• Design - Emails and User Stats. Our one design topic was Emails and the related issue of Stats. We're now sending something like 600,000 emails per month which is a) increasing over time b) costs money c) impacts on performance.
  • We're looking at introducing email batching where you get a digest per work / author rather than one email per Kudos and possibly one email when someone posts multiple chapters all at once... it's coming together.
  • Since batching involves taking something away, now is an excellent time to create a User Stats page as an alternative way to track activity around your works. We can launch it as an alpha feature and request feedback for further development.

I was planning on doing very little for AD&T this week as I've MBA stuff to do but I finished early and wrote up the minutes - they will contribute to a monthly newsletter to replace the AD&T meeting write-ups that were posted to the AO3.

This marks the first year where browsing Yuletide just... happened. Easily. Responsively.

I know we tend to assume things will just work, and they should! Work, that is. I just want to pause and celebrate how much love and effort went into this, how wonderful it is to have this resource, and to point you at this years run away hit

• Texts From Cephalopods It is a well-established fact in marine biology that the octopus is the drunk texter of the cephalopod family.

Archiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive

The Archive of Our Own is 3 years and 8 days old today if you count from launching the Closed Beta site (3rd Oct 2008). We had 93 users which was probably every OTW volunteer in existence and the ability to create accounts and post works... just.

Wow.

It took us another year and a bit to nudge the Archive into good enough shape to go to Open Beta (15th Nov 2009) and then of course Yuletide happened, anon kinkmemes happened (build more features!), LJ DDOS attacks happened (massive influx of people), Delicious got sunsetted sold (and again!) and I'm sure something newly interesting is just around the corner.

We bought servers back in 2009 - they arrived around the 10th Nov 2009 and we gloated over them a lot and I recall during the initial planning the OTW Finance Committee said that was our hardware budget for the next 3 years.

*grins*

The fannish support for the AO3 was amazing and we outgrew them in just over a year - the second round of hardware arrived around the 23rd Jan 2011 (1 year, 2 months later) and while we constantly work to improve the performance of our code we also need those machines to continue to do what we do.

Since I get ridiculously excited in the presence of graphs here's one showing how much code we've written so far - it goes up and down because if we find a tidier / faster / more elegant way of doing something we squee and replace our old code - and we do that all the time \o/
I am in the fortunate position of being able to donate money, and if you are as well it would be very welcome; you'll be supporting a fantastic project. Make sure we can continue to own our own servers! Donate to the OTW now!

Supscriptioooooooooooooooons!

Brought to you by the amazing, dedicated volunteers who work on the AO3 and by you, the people in fandom who made this possible through your generosity in contributing to buy more servers.