https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33561

Are you fluent in a language other than English? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Are you fluent in a language other than English, passionate about AO3, and want to help us better reply to users all around the world? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We're excited to announce the opening of applications for:

• Translation Translators - closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC
• Fanlore Graphics Designer Volunteer - closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications
• Open Doors Import Assistant - closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 50 applications
• User Response Translation Translators - closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don't see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Translation Translators

If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you're fluent in a language other than English, if you’re passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!

Translation volunteers help make the OTW and its projects accessible to a wider global audience. We work on translating content by the OTW and its projects from English to other languages, such as site pages, news posts, AO3 FAQs and AO3 Support emails. (However, we do not translate fanworks.)

We really need volunteers who speak Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh—but help with other languages would be much appreciated. If you're interested in starting a team for a language we don't have yet, you're very welcome to!

(Please note that our Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian teams are not accepting new members at this time. If you are fluent in one of these languages and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The User Response Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as Russian. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)

Applicants will be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

Apply to be a Translation Committee Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Fanlore Graphics Designer

Would you like to help Fanlore reach more fans and get new editors? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? If so, we need your help! The Fanlore team needs designers to create graphics and banners for social media posts, editing challenges and other outreach projects to help us reach more fans and potential editors. We have a lot of amazing fan history and fandom content, but we need you to help others find out about it. If you think you might enjoy that, come and join us!

If you’re interested, please prepare a portfolio of your work to submit with your application. As part of our design review process, applicants will also be asked to create a sample graphic for Fanlore. Further directions will be given upon applying.

Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 40 applications.

Apply to be a Fanlore Graphics Designer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Open Doors Import Assistant

Do you enjoy spreadsheets, self-paced projects, and helping protect fanworks from getting lost over time? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Do you still guiltily--or not so guiltily--love the first fanwork that opened your eyes to fandom?

Open Doors is a committee dedicated to preserving fanworks in their many formats, and we’re looking for volunteers to support this goal. The work we do preserves fan history, love, and dedication to fandom: we keep fanworks from offline and at-risk archives from being lost, divert fanzines from the trash, and more.

Our import assistants contribute to our goal by:

• Importing works to AO3 from rescued digital archives and fanzines
• Searching AO3 for existing copies of works that creators have already uploaded themselves (to prevent us from importing duplicate versions when we import an archive)
• Compiling and correcting spreadsheets of works from an archive to be imported and/or tags to use on those works
• Copyediting/proofreading works from fanzines that have been scanned from PDFs (to ensure that the scanned works were transcribed properly by the software we used)

The training is self-directed, and so is the work for the most part, though we also have weekly working meetings/parties for people to all chip in and work on tasks together! Import assistants can generally alternate the types of tasks they work on. At any one time, we usually have several tasks of different types available.

To apply for this role, you must be at least 18 years old and legally of age to open explicit fanworks in your local jurisdiction.

If you're interested, click on through for a longer description of what we're looking for and the time commitment. For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within 3 days of submitting your application.

Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 50 applications.

Apply to be an Open Doors Import Assistant at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

User Response Translation Translators

Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, and want to help us better communicate with AO3 users all over the world?

User Response Translation (URT) volunteers help AO3 committees to correspond with users in other languages. URT translators will assist the Policy & Abuse and Support committees by translating correspondence between these committees and AO3 users into specific languages. URT does not translate AO3 or OTW site pages, news posts, or fanworks.

We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Applicants will be asked to translate and beta (edit) short text samples as part of the selection process.

(If you are fluent in languages that are not listed above and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

Apply to be a User Response Translation Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

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.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33561

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33291

Through the last year, the OTW Finance team has continued to ensure that the organization's bills are paid, tax returns filed, and standard accounting procedures met. The 2024 audit is wrapping up so the focus will soon be on year-end reconciliations!

The team has also been diligently working to meet the OTW's 2025 needs, and is proud to present to you this year's budget update (access the 2025 budget update spreadsheet for more detailed information):

2025 Expenses

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

• US$560,321.01 spent so far out of US$669,120.53 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• 67.4% of the OTW's expenses go towards maintaining the AO3. This includes the bulk of our server expenses—both new purchases and ongoing colocation and maintenance—website performance monitoring tools, and various systems-related licenses, as well as costs highlighted below (access all program expenses).
• This year's projected AO3 expenses also include US$450,000 to purchase new servers, as well as US$44,000 in server related equipment to increase the capacity of existing servers to handle expected site traffic growth through the year.

Open Doors

• US$3,891.60 spent so far out of US$5,131.78 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• Open Doors' expenses consist of hosting, backup, and domain costs for imported fanwork archives, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Transformative Works and Cultures

• US$4,653.17 spent so far out of US$5,090.67 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• Transformative Works and Cultures' expenses are the journal's website hosting, publishing, and storage fees, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
• Additionally, in 2024, the University of Amsterdam provided €1,000 (US$1,061) to Transformative Works and Cultures, which will be used to help fund the Fans of Color Research Prize. Three prizes have been awarded in 2025.

Fanlore

• US$31,602.78 spent so far out of US$37,565.43 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• Fanlore's expenses are its share of allocated server hardware, maintenance and colocation costs, as well as its portion of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Legal Advocacy

• US$427.92 spent so far out of US$2,927.92 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• Legal's expenses consist of registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Fundraising and Development

• US$63,522.51 spent so far out of US$137,998.95 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• Our fundraising and development expenses consist of transaction fees charged by our third-party payment processors for each donation, thank-you gift purchases and shipping, outreach work by volunteers at various fan conventions, and the tools used to host the OTW's membership database and track communications with donors and potential donors, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access fundraising expenses).

Administration

• US$116,916.42 spent so far out of US$134,924.67 total this year, as of September 30, 2025.
• The OTW’s administrative expenses include hosting for our website, trademarks, domains, insurance, tax filing, and annual financial statement audits, as well as productivity, management, and accounting tools (access all admin expenses).

2025 Revenue

• The OTW is entirely supported by your donations—thank you for your generosity!
• We receive a significant portion of our donations each year in the April and October fundraising drives, which together will account for about 41.1% of our income in 2025. We also receive donations via employer matching programs, royalties, and PayPal Giving Fund, which administers donations from programs like Humble Bundle and eBay for Charity. If you'd like to support us while making purchases on those websites, please select the Organization for Transformative Works as your charity of choice!
• Thanks to your generosity in previous years, we have a healthy amount of money in our reserves, which we can use to pay for larger than usual purchases and keep on hand for legal contingencies. As mentioned previously, we plan to continue to upgrade the capacity of AO3’s servers, which will significantly increase server equipment and server hosting expenses. The growth of AO3 and other projects of the OTW also requires more volunteers and administrative support, further increasing expenses. The budget spreadsheet projects a withdrawal of US$205,000 from reserves to cover the costs that exceed the amount of revenue projected to be received this year. This amount may be withdrawn as needed during the year.
• US$602,410.00 received so far (as of September 30, 2025) and US$790,202.01 projected to be received by the end of the year.

Got questions?

If you have any questions about the budget or the OTW's finances, please contact the Finance committee. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

To download the OTW's 2025 budget update in spreadsheet format, please follow this link.

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.

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33291

http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33196

cj2017 and feroxargentea, publishers of The X-Files fanzine Dreaming the Answers, are importing the zine’s fanworks to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

• A bit of background explanation
• What this means for creators who had work(s) in Dreaming the Answers
• And what to do if you still have questions

Background explanation

Dreaming the Answers (DTA) was a 33-issue The X-Files fanzine published from November 1997 to March 2001. The zine featured primarily Mulder/Scully fic with additional meta, reviews, and news of note. The publishers are still proud of Dreaming the Answers, and they’d like to make it freely available and preserve any of its fanfic that isn’t yet archived. For more information, refer to Dreaming the Answers’ Fanlore page and AO3 collection.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is to assist publishers of fanzines to incorporate the fanworks from those fanzines into the Archive of Our Own. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with publishers who want to import their fanzines and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with cj2017 and feroxargentea to import the fanzines listed above into separate, searchable collections on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the fanzines in their entirety, all art in the fanzines will be hosted on the OTW's servers and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from cj2017 and feroxargentea’s fanzines to the AO3 after November. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the task. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collections in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) in Dreaming the Answers?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.

Please contact Open Doors with your creator pseud(s) and email address(es), if:

1. You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than the publisher has a record of.
2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the fanzine collections.
5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the publisher or fanzine in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account the publisher has a record of, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with cj2017 and feroxargentea to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors website for instructions on:

• importing your works to the AO3
• adding your works to the new collections listed above

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Dreaming the Answers on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We're excited to be able to help preserve Dreaming the Answers!

- The Open Doors team, cj2017, and feroxargentea

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33196

http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33186

I. UPDATES TO AO3 COLLECTIONS

In late September, Accessibility, Design & Technology updated AO3's collections feature by introducing collections tags—allowing more granular filtering and browsing between collections. This update also generally improved collection performance, introduced the ability to mark collections as "Multifandom", and added Subcollections to the Collections filtering page.

For more details on recent AO3 releases and code changes, check out the most recent release notes.

II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN

Besides updates to Collections, AO3 committees also continued work in a variety of areas.

Open Doors finished importing My Mongoose, a The Sentinel ezine archive, and announced two new import projects: Faerie: Tolkien Fanfiction and Forging Ghost, a Spike/Angel archive.

Tag Wrangling continued their work on creating new "No Fandom" canonical tags and announced another batch of tags in mid-September. On the @ao3org Tumblr, Tag Wrangling also announced changes to Critical Role fandom tags in light of the upcoming Campaign 4. They hope these changes will help users in finding and filtering for the works they want to see.

In August, Policy & Abuse received 3,863 tickets, while Support received 4,319 tickets—the current record for the most tickets either committee has received in one month. Tag Wrangling wrangled over 579,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.

From mid-July to mid-September, User Response Translation helped Support and Policy & Abuse with 38 translation requests.

III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW

Fanlore's Stub September editing challenge was a big success! Thank you to everyone who took part. For October, Fanlore is currently running a book-themed month. Check out the Help page for how to take part and claim a book-themed badge!

TWC's Transformative Works and Cultures has released issue No. 46, a general issue! It includes the launch of a new special section, New Currents. This section collects articles on new topics or approaches at a smaller scale than a special issue. In this issue, New Currents focuses on how fans and fan studies scholars engage with AI as a tool for transformative engagement with fannish texts.

In September, Legal responded to a number of user queries; they also joined allies in filing an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court in the case of Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. The case deals with when internet service providers can be held responsible for the actions of their users.

Legal's brief discussed the importance of internet access as a practical necessity of daily life and argued that holding service providers liable for users’ copyright infringement based only on accusations of infringement, rather than actual proof of infringement, would threaten innovation and creativity by creating an incentive for service providers to deny service to creators without requiring evidence or providing due process. There is no date set yet for when the case will be argued before the Supreme Court.

IV. GOVERNANCE

Elections closed out the 2025 election—congratulations to the OTW's new Board Directors: Elizabeth Wiltshire and Harlan Lieberman-Berg!

In preparation for October's membership drive, Development & Membership has been organizing new donation gifts, Finance has been compiling the pre-drive 2025 budget update, and Communications and Translation have prepared the associated news posts.

Board coordinated with Communication's Con Outreach division to attend EagleCon in Los Angeles, USA, and received the Lemonade award on the OTW's behalf. Elsewhere, the Board Assistants Team (BAT) continued work on OTW website updates, prepared for the quarterly Board meeting, and completed a report on non-profit training.

Organizational Culture Roadmap, in conjunction with BAT, Board, and Volunteers & Recruiting, continued work on the cross-committee review of the OTW's Code of Conduct. A survey was sent out to all volunteers soliciting their feedback for potential Code of Conduct updates.

V. OUR VOLUNTEERS

This month, Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for 3 committees: Fanlore, TWC, and Tag Wrangling.

From August 21 to September 24, Volunteers & Recruiting received 171 new requests and completed 174, leaving them with 46 open requests. As of September 24, 2025, the OTW has 991 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.

New BAT Volunteers: Cait B, Deimos Crow, MelMel, MustardPot, and Sullie Tosho (BAT Volunteers)
New Communications Volunteers: 2 Chair Assistants
New Development & Membership Volunteers: Kae Coolen, Maddie64, and Mako (Graphic Designers); Danielle G., jennybug, LizLeaf, and 2 other Development & Membership Volunteers
New Open Doors Volunteers: AuroraT, Kayla G, and vinnawis (Chair Assistants); and Julie Bozza (Senior FSHP Volunteer)
New Strategic Planning Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
New Systems Volunteers: E.V. Moebius (Systems Volunteer)
New TWC Volunteers: 1 Review Editor

Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: 1 Board Assistants Team Chair
Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: 1 Editor
Departing BAT Volunteers: Harlan Lieberman-Berg (Cybersecurity Delegate)
Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: 1 News Post Moderator
Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer
Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Julie Bozza (Chair Assistant) and 1 Import Assistant
Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 Strategic Planning Volunteer
Departing Support Volunteers: SlantedKnitting (Support Volunteer)
Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Mayrin, Yuechiang Luo, and 7 other Tag Wrangling Volunteers
Departing Translation Volunteers: 1 Translation Volunteer Manager and 3 Translators

For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages 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.

http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33186

http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33031

We've just given the code for collection browsing and filtering a much-needed overhaul! In addition to some long overdue performance improvements, this update introduces collection tags — a new way to find collections featuring the fandoms, relationships, tropes, and other topics you enjoy.

How do collection tags work?

Collection owners can now use up to 10 tags of any type (What are the different types of tags?) to describe their collection. The tags are listed on the collection blurb, and the collection filters have a new "Filter by tag" autocomplete field to help users find collections matching their interests.

While it is possible to use brand new tags on collections, we strongly encourage owners to use existing canonical tags or their synonyms. This makes it easier for users to find your collection using the autocomplete options in the collection filters.

We've also added a "Multifandom" option specifically for collections that feature a wide variety of fandoms. Collection owners can select this option to help users find collections where the focus isn't a specific fandom, but rather a theme like fanvids of old films or fic written in first person. We think this will be particularly useful for users whose fandoms don't have their own prompt memes or gift exchanges, but who want to find challenges they might be able to participate in.

Please note that while we encourage collection owners to start using the "Multifandom" option right away, there are a few more changes we need to make before it will be possible to filter collections based on their multifandom status. We'll update this post when multifandom filtering becomes available.

What about existing collections?

Together with the collection tags feature going live, we automatically tagged existing collections with the fandoms from their works and bookmarks, as well as any works or bookmarks in their subcollections.

Additionally, collections with more than one unrelated fandom were automatically marked as multifandom. We used our tag wrangling system to determine whether fandoms are related, just like we do when marking works as crossovers. Collections with more than 10 fandoms (the limit for collection tags) were marked as multifandom but did not have any fandom tags added.

Collection owners are welcome to edit their collection and change any information we automatically added.

Other changes

As part of the browsing and filtering overhaul, there are a few other noticeable changes to collections.

• Subcollections are now listed on the main Collections page and included in the results when filtering.
• In order to make room for collection tags, we've combined the list of owners and moderators in blurbs, similar to the way they're combined on the collection profile. Because we know this distinction may be important to some users, we've made it possible to style owners and moderators separately by using the a.owner and a.mod selectors in a site skin. (Your styles will apply in the blurb and on the collection profile.)
• The Open Challenges page, including the Open Gift Exchanges and Open Prompt Memes pages, now list collections that are closing the soonest at the top of the page.

Update 12:14 UTC 28 September 2025: The multifandom filtering options have now been added to the filters!

http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/33031