not quite an Ada Lovelace post

I just realised the Archive of Our Own ohloh page was out of date - not any more!

Now stay with me for a moment, ohloh is a place where open source software projects can register themselves and it gives us a chance to compare our projects, how long they live, how active they are, how much code they're producing and so on. As of today there are 538,687 projects registered (that's a lot). Within that community the AO3 is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh is a relatively large team, putting this project among the top 10% of all project teams on Ohloh. (ETA: updated now I've aliased all the duplicate names which removed a good 10 - seems our devs like to contribute under multiple identities). For context, Mozilla is in position #1 on that list ;p

The AO3 team self identifies as 83% female, which, given that the Open Source community has something like 1.5% women participation (although I seriously hope things have improved over the last 5 years) is, well, fantastic.

For myself, being part of the project has been a source of passionate love, great companionship and constant learning. It was also an opportunity to do something I'm good at - and get better - that I could not get in my paid job. In my (new) paid job what I learned from the AO3 project has heavily influenced my knowledge, my skills and my confidence and it contributed significantly to my getting said new job.

I just want to stop for a moment and celebrate the drive, creativity and staying power of this project.