Organization for Transformative Works: Part One

I was recently reading an article and it was mentioned that media seems to "see bronies as far more newsworthy that Organization forTransformative Works or the Vlogbrothers' Nerdfighter movement." Now, I see a lot of things about Nerfighters, and the Green brothers in particular, but have not seen much on OTW outside of those in the know. So I decided to fangirl all over one of my favorite organizations for a post. Then I realized that I would need at least a couple posts to fully share my love and appreciation.

The first thing you probably need to know about OTW is their mission statement. Their website states that their mission is to "serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate. The OTW represents a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture. The OTW will preserve the record of that history as we pursue out mission while encouraging new and non-mainstream expressions of cultural identity within fandom."

Basically what this means is they want to support fan culture and the history of fan culture any way they can, which is pretty awesome.

The second thing that is probably important is that the OTW has seven main branches: Archive of Our Own, their fanfiction archive; Fanhackers, their fannish news blog; Fanlore, a wiki to document fandom history; Fan Video and Multimedia, a multimedia fandom project; Legal Advocacy, legal advice and help to do with fanworks; Open Doors, a project to help preserve in danger fanworks and archives; and Transformative Works and Cultures, a peer-reviewed academic journal about fandom and fanworks. This does not include the social media accounts (Twitter and Tumblr among others) that keep fans connected with what is going on within the organization and how they can help.

I have a passing familiarity with all of the projects OTW has going on, but I am most familiar with Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, and Transformative Works and Cultures, so each of these articles will focus on one of those three.