The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:
“I think this is needed and long past needed.
There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.
And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.
I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“
Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.
And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:
“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”
I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:
Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of
this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:
“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.
And here are some notes:
Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.
All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.
Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.
Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”
Because, damn it, why shouldn’t we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn’t we go out there and get it?”
I am so pleased to have been proved correct.
(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)
ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.
Asking for it and doing it!!!
So inspiring. And yes – at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!
Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.
God this brings it back. People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!) Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts – and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up. I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.
Anyway, I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.
You took back the servers; and that will always, always bring me to tears. Thank you for your work and your love—not a day goes by that I’m not grateful.
The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:
“I think this is needed and long past needed.
There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.
And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.
I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“
Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.
And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:
“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”
I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:
Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of
this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:
“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.
And here are some notes:
Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.
All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.
Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.
Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”
And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.
And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”
Because, damn it, why shouldn’t we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn’t we go out there and get it?”
I am so pleased to have been proved correct.
(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)
ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.
Asking for it and doing it!!!
So inspiring. And yes – at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!
Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.
God this brings it back. People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!) Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts – and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up. I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.
Anyway, I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.
You took back the servers; and that will always, always bring me to tears. Thank you for your work and your love—not a day goes by that I’m not grateful.
I volunteer for the OTW, the parent nonprofit organization that runs AO3. So do, as of the last monthly newsletter, 678 other people. The OTW has no paid employees; everyone there is a volunteer.
The average weekly work expectations for OTW volunteers run around 5 hours per week for most committees. Of course, in reality, people are all over the place. Some do 1-2 hours a week, some 30 or 40 or even more – a full work week without pay.
Let’s say that, hypothetically, a volunteer works only 1-2 hours per week, and their work is only worth $10 per hour. (It’s probably worth more – the opportunity costs of most skilled labor is worth more than that – but let’s low-ball it.) That means that every single week, that volunteer is donating $10-20 dollars of their time to the OTW. Some people are donating hundreds of dollars of their time each week, for months or years on end to help keep all its projects running.
Because of course there are multiple projects. There’s TWC, the freely available, peer-reviewed academic journal that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. There’s Fanlore, our fannish history wiki that has over 46,000 articles. There’s Open Doors, which rescues at-risk archives from disappearing. There’s Legal Advocacy, which donates legal expertise to help fans address copyright and other issues. And then there’s the AO3, which is currently listed as the 264th most popular website in the world (#98 in the US). Any one of those projects could easily encompass an entire nonprofit organization by itself. None of them has even a single paid employee. No OTW website shows any ads.
The real secret to the OTW’s success is not that it pulls in just enough money every year to cover its server expenses and overhead – though it does that, and every volunteer is grateful to our donors for keeping the lights on. It’s that the OTW somehow runs entirely on volunteer power. There’s no way we could pay for all the expertise and effort we receive. Other nonprofit websites like the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia pull in millions in funding every year to cover relatively small staffs. We survive without having to write grants or beg wealthy donors because of our volunteers’ unseen donations of their time, expertise, and effort.
Maybe this year you don’t have any money. Or maybe you do, but you’re saving for a rainy day, or you gave it somewhere else. No worries. People volunteer because we want you to enjoy this labor of love. We want you here, building the OTW with us by using our projects. If you did donate, much love to you. Your generosity is deeply appreciated, and we’ll continue being the penny-pinching, wait-is-there-a-free-option, do-they-give-a-nonprofit-discount volunteers we’ve always been, to stretch your donation as far as it can go.
If you want to give something that isn’t money, consider this: How often is a volunteer thanked by someone who isn’t a fellow volunteer? People volunteer because they want to know they’re making a difference. They want to build up the world. Think of how a kudos or a comment makes you feel, then consider how rarely volunteers get one.
You can read about all our committees here, and you can send one of them a quick thank you via the contact form, if you like. Or you can leave a comment with thanks on a Drive post on AO3. Maybe tell Finance how much you love the budget being available, or thank Development & Membership for all their hard work organizing the donation drive to keep the servers running, or show some love to our Communications Committee that’s keeping all these posts updated, or to the Translation Committee that translated them. Maybe you noticed that AO3 Documentation just put out a Tag Set FAQ in time for the exchange season. Maybe you’re wondering who keeps 679 people organized – that would be our Volunteers & Recruiting Committee. Maybe you want to thank the Systems Committee for getting out of bed way too early in the morning to fix the mailer (or whatever else decides to mysteriously break this week). However the spirit moves you, feel free to show some love. It goes a long way.
Thanks for being part of the journey.
i’m going to take this post as an opportunity to publicly say thank you to all the AO3 tag wranglers – not least of which is @wrangletangle, who has graciously explained so many aspects of how the tag system on AO3 works & been so patient with inquiries. Thank you: we’re so very grateful for your work to make the archive navigable!
I also want to second the suggestion to send a little ‘thank you’ message to the Transformative Works committee of your choice, if you’re so inclined. I’m gonna go do that right after posting this.
