I am glad to see there is still so much interest in what's up with the OTW!

The Organization for Transformative Works is a smallish, fannish, entirely volunteer-run community/arts/advocacy nonprofit with a staff and membership who are scattered around the world and communicate amongst each other entirely online.

If you have any experience with grassroots nonprofits that should tell you more that you want to know about what's been going on.

Oh, you wanted more than that?

Okay, then, but disclaimers first: I am a staff member on the OTW's Tag Wrangling Committee, who is writing this instead of overdue staff work. (I also did a very small amount of AO3 coding work, way back in the day.) My only contribution to the recent unpleasantness was reblogging stuff on Tumblr and filking "Do You Hear The People Sing" in chat. Everything I say here is my own opinion, may be various levels of ill-informed, and does not reflect the official positions of the OTW as an org or the opinions of any other staff member.

My usual policy is "if I post it publicly, link it all you want" but I would like to request for this post, as a kindness please don't link it publicly anywhere? Feel free to share with friends if you want but I'm not well-informed enough that I'm comfortable with being The Entire Internet's Source on this.

(Also the above probably gives the impression the rest of this post is going to be way juicier than it actually is.)

( Here's what's up with the OTW )

Anyway, so there you have it, that's what's up with the OTW. A lot of the basics above are covered on the OTW website, and I thought about linkifiyng it, but I'm lazy and you can probably find the information yourself if you want the less colorful versions.

You are welcome to ask questions in comments, but tbh pretty much everything I actually know (and quite a few things I don't actually know) are included above, so I may or may not be able to answer them.

This is the handout I wrote for Sunday's panel on fandom and copyright. I am posting it here because it is fifteen freaking pages long and I hope some people will read along on their netbooks and I don't need as many paper copies. But people not at con-txt are welcome to enjoy.

This is html-converted using OpenOffice; I apologize if it's ugly, I cheated because it's, um, 5:30 AM the day of the panel and I haven't slept yet. If you would rather download a .doc file, click this link: Copyleft and Copyright Handout.

( Fandom, Copyright and Copyleft: The Basics of Intellectual Property for Fans )

Last night I dreamed about Lord Peter Wimsey buying pot. I think it was a direct result of being trapped in a small room with both Harriet *and* Diana Villiers. Luckily, he had Elmo to back him up.

...right, no more reading crossovers before bed.

And before you ask, no, I have not yet found any crossovers with Diana and Harriet. Or Lord Peter and Elmo. Though if you know of any, let me know.

I have been reading a lot of crossovers, though. Because damned_colonial mentioned on age_of_sail that they needed someone to take over recc'ing AoS crossovers, and saying that around me is like saying to my roommate's cat, "Hey, Yzma, someone needs to eat that piece of paper on the carpet!"

So, yes, I have been looking at AoS crossovers. Because I am a sucker for crossovers. Way back in 2004, when I was just starting to be polyfannish, I was getting into PotC and XF at the same time, and reading Austen and Aubrey/Maturin, and I was like "Oooh, why isn't there an MSR Regency AU?"

(I did start to write one. But then I started wondering if the only way to explain Mulder's first name was to give his family Quaker connections, so I started looking into whether he could have a Quaker parent and still be a peer, or at least a wealthy landowner in high standing with the Crown, and what I learned is that the people who do British history on little_details don't even know who George Fox was, much less William Penn. Then I realized that what was going to be a silly crackfic would require figuring out how to write a romance between the disgraced bluestocking crypto-Catholic daughter of a Navy captain and an American Quaker aristocrat who was secretly a spy, and decided this might be a bit much. I did ponder changing the names and trying to sell it as an original romance and seeing if anyone would notice. Especially if I left in the crashed saucer. And the giant squid.)

Anyway, I never did find the Regency AU, but stellar_dust did find me a crossover with the Aubreyad, in which Mulder somehow ended up injured, disoriented, and in Dr. Maturin's cabin on the HMS Surprise. (This isn't as unlikely as it seems, given Mulder's tendency to take stupid risks in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.) I tried to find it for the crossover recs post. Google was unhelpful. Searching my LJ and e-mail were unhelpful. It pre-dates when I started keeping bookmarks. I vaguely remember it being on a specialty archive, which means it was probably in the un-indexed 'deep web', assuming it's even still up.

So. This is when I ( sailed off the edge of the map, mate )

ANYWAY.

/me goes back to looking for that story where Mary Bennett helps build a Zeppelin.

(this is why we need an Archive of Everything. Where we own the damn servers. And there is full-text search. Or at least really good tagging & folksonomy.)

I've been reading the inevitable blog arguments about whether fanfic is evil or not that came up in the aftermath of transformativeworks.org going live, and trying to make myself stop as I get more and more teeth-grindingly annoyed. And then one of the anti-fic commenters who's been trying to justify himself for pages actually comes out and *says* "okay, really, it's just that I think slash is a creepy fetish" and I go ^_^ . It's lovely when people obligingly live down to your expectations, isn't it?

And on that happy note, I'm putting the computer down to do the last bits of my packing. Because road trip to New England starting tomorrow! Cheer me on in my swinging bachelorette lifestyle! (Or just say "get a real job already, you lazy bum." Either one.)