I. INTERNATIONAL FANWORKS DAY

This February 15th marked the fifth annual International Fanworks Day! Fans around the globe participated in the OTW's celebrations, hosted by Communications and including a variety of virtual events. These events included the 29-hour fan chat and games in the OTW's public chat, the week-long Fanlore Challenge of daily editing challenges on the Fanlore wiki (with prize badges for completion!), as well as short essays contributed by fans on the topic "What Fandom Means to Me."

Over at the AO3, the IFDrabble tag has more than 100 short fanworks created for IFD2019 in response to the prompt "characters and/or celebrities discover new fandoms," and the FeedbackFest post generated more than 300 comments discussing and recommending favourite fanworks (and there's even more on social media at #FeedbackFest).

If you weren't able to participate live in IFD2019, check out the roundup post and #IFD2019 on social media for more information, and we hope to see you next year!

A special shout out to Translation for translating International Fanworks Day posts into 25 languages. Also, thanks to all of the rock star volunteers across the OTW who helped with the fan chat, and to all the fans who participated and made IFD a roaring success!

II. AT THE AO3

During February, Accessibility, Design and Technology completed, tested, and deployed a major rewrite of the Archive's work download code. For more details on the updates to AO3's download features, including the addition of the AZW3 format, please see the release notes.

Policy and Abuse received approximately 750 tickets in February, a decrease from December (1,100) and January (1,000). Support received approximately 950 tickets in February, a decrease from from 1,165 in January and 1,518 in December.

Taking advantage of January updates to the wrangling interface that made it easier for wranglers to locate and sort tags on non-canonical fandoms, Tag Wrangling made massive strides on catching up on backlogged tags, decreasing the total number of unwrangled tags for the first month since monthly tracking of tag counts began. More than 260,000 tags were wrangled in January 2019.

III. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PEEPS

Volunteers & Recruiting

As of 26 February, the OTW has 724 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below:

New Translation Volunteers: Blue_posey, docmint, Filip Drnovsek Zorko, Hookedonthesky, Koteneko, northernstar, Panwonderland, Sofia, Soulful spark, Veggie, Paiyan, Akima Ras, and 8 other Translation volunteers

New TWC Volunteers: 1 Volunteer

Departing Committee Chairs: Priscilla Del Cima (Fanlore) and Rebecca Sentance (AO3 Docs)

Departing Committee Staff: VSSAKJ (AO3 Docs) and 1 other AO3 Docs staffer, 1 Fanlore staffer, Megan Diane (Policy & Abuse), Mandy Gooch (Strategic Planning & Tag Wrangling), and 1 other Tag Wrangling Staffer

For more information about the purview of our committees, please access the committee listing 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.