Are you interested in social media, community management or outreach? Or would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? Do you want to create videos and connect with fellow fans on TikTok? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!
We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:
Fanlore Social Media & Outreach Volunteer – closing 16 July 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications
Policy & Abuse Volunteer – closing 16 July 2025 at 23:59 UTC
Communications TikTok Moderator – closing 16 July 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 60 applications
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.
Fanlore Social Media & Outreach Volunteer
Do you have an interest in fandom history, or in fannish culture and the different tropes, ships, communities and viewpoints that make up fandom? Are you interested in social media, community management or outreach? The Fanlore committee is recruiting for Social Media & Outreach volunteers!
Fanlore Social Media & Outreach volunteers are responsible for writing and editing Fanlore’s promotional posts on social media, planning and running Fanlore’s editing challenges, maintaining Fanlore’s social media channels, and thinking of ways to reach out to and engage with new corners of fandom.
No extensive experience required—only reliability, teamwork, good communication skills, and an interest in fandom and Fanlore in particular. Join us!
As part of our application process, candidates who pass the initial review will also be asked to create a sample social media post for Fanlore consisting of a 280-character tweet and a 100-word Tumblr post promoting a Fanlore article. Further directions will be given upon applying.
Applications are due 16 July 2025 or after 40 applications
The Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is responsible for addressing questions and concerns about potential violations of the AO3 Terms of Service. We determine whether reports are about legitimate violations of the Terms of Service, and what to do about them if they are. PAC volunteers correspond directly with AO3 users and collaborate on projects both within PAC and with other OTW committees.
Our main goals as a committee are:
to adhere to the AO3 Terms of Service
to make our reasoning and processes as clear and transparent as possible
to handle all user reports consistently, no matter which volunteer is doing the work
to keep every case we work on completely confidential
We are seeking people who can:
Commit to working on cases regularly
Be patient with rephrasing explanations
Ask for help when needed
Collaborate both inside the team and with other committees
Act in accordance with established rules, policies, and procedures
Treat confidentiality and user privacy as a priority
You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. While English proficiency is required, we welcome applicants who are fluent in other languages, especially Spanish (Español), Brazilian Portuguese (Português brasileiro), Russian (Русский), Chinese (中文), or Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia).
Do you use TikTok? Do you like making videos? Do you want to connect with your fellow fans?
OTW TikTok Moderators create content for the OTW TikTok account, including drafting scripts, recording and editing videos, and reviewing other moderators’ scripts and videos. Moderators address user comments on videos by responding to user questions, removing comments that violate our policies, and flagging comments for video topics. Moderators also try to regularly engage with fandom on TikTok by interacting with relevant, appropriate videos and liking, reposting, and/or commenting.
You must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. We are looking for volunteers familiar with TikTok and passionate about outreach on the platform. They should be able to maintain a consistent level of work, collaborate inside the team and with other committees, ask for help when needed, and commit to making fair decisions about how to handle comments.
Applications are due 16 July 2025 or after 60 applications
The OTW Board will be holding its next public meeting from midnight to 1 a.m. UTC on July 20 (what time is that for me?).
This meeting will be held in the Board Discord server. The server will have a team of moderators, a set of rules (including question rules), and community guidelines. The server will remain open even after the meeting, but the channels for meeting and asking questions will be read-only. Board will be posting replies to questions that do not get addressed during the scheduled meeting two weeks after the meeting in the server’s #questions-answers channel.
The agenda will include:
Decisions made since the last public board meeting
OTW Board Election
Updates to the Board Year Roadmap
Updates to the OTW Culture Roadmap
Any other business (Questions & Answers)
Prior to this meeting, there is an opportunity to ask questions in advance to be answered as part of the meeting. This allows anyone who wishes to ask the Board questions, whether they will be able to attend the meeting live or not. (The Board will also accept questions during the meeting.)
Questions submitted to this Google Form will be accepted up to three days before the meeting begins or until 50 questions have been submitted. At that point, the form will be turned off. You need to be logged in to a Google account to submit a question. In the future, these rules may be amended to adjust as needed. Further information will be available in the OTW Board Discord server.
Open Doors has nearly finished importing FictionAlley, a Harry Potter archive. With approximately 29,000 works imported so far, it is Open Doors’ largest import yet. You can check out all imported works at the FictionAlley collection. Unclaimed works are currently locked to logged-in AO3 users only, but per Open Doors’ agreement with the FictionAlley archivist, they will be unlocked 30 days after the import is fully completed.
All FictionAlley creators should have received one or more emails with links to claim, orphan, delete their works, or prevent the import of any additional works of theirs in the future. If you were a creator and did not receive this email, please contact Open Doors for assistance. You can also contact Open Doors if you would like to prevent future imports of your Harry Potter works specifically.
Open Doors has two other Harry Potter archives currently in their queue: HarryPotterFanFiction.com and MuggleNet Fan Fiction. If your email address has changed since you were a member of either archive, or you would like Open Doors not to import your works, please contact Open Doors. Please refer to the import announcements for a full list of how Open Doors can assist you with either import.
II. ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN
Accessibility, Design & Technology (AD&T) coordinated with Board and Volunteers & Recruiting to formally decommission the Quality Assurance & Testing (QA&T) subcommittee—thank you to everyone who has served on QA&T over the years. Quality assurance and testing of AO3’s code will continue under the oversight of AD&T’s new QA Supervisor role. AD&T’s latest releases have focused on various bug fixes, code clean-up, and monitoring improvements: check out the release notes. Also, Systems has installed some new Elasticsearch servers and repurposed the old ones as application servers! \o/
In May, Support received 3,177 tickets, while Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 3,763 tickets—a nearly 40% increase which is likely due to PAC’s recent TOS spotlight series. PAC worked with Legal and Communications’ News Post Moderation subcommittee to review over 1,700 comments across seven posts, with more than 400 comments receiving a reply. PAC will also be recruiting soon, so look out for the upcoming recruitment post!
In June, Tag Wrangling neared completion of phase two of three of their committee-wide guideline discussions on fandom metatags. They also launched a new procedure which streamlines creation of new “No Fandom” canonical tags, which are canonical tags not specific to any particular fandom. The committee plans to post announcements periodically detailing new tags, including one in a few weeks.
In May, Tag Wrangling handled over 610,000 tags, or over 1,200 tags per wrangling volunteer.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanlore’sAnnual Bingo was a huge success! \o/ 25 participants completed at least one bingo, and 16 got a total blackout. Thanks to everyone who took part!
In July, Fanlore is running a themed month—Fandom in Color—which celebrates characters of color, the contributions of fans of color, and more! Check out their social media (Bluesky and Tumblr) for page spotlights throughout the month.
Communications is now overseeing the OTW’s Convention Outreach division, which was previously run by Development & Membership. If you have inquiries regarding OTW’s convention presence, Communications can be reached through their contact form on the OTW website.
TWC is finalizing their upcoming general issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, volume 46, which will be published on September 15. They are still accepting submissions for their Latin American Fandoms special issue until January 1, 2026.
IV. THE 2025 ELECTION AND GOVERNANCE
Elections announced the 2025 Election candidates; this year’s election is contested, with three candidates running for two open seats in this year’s election. Their platforms are available on the Elections website. Communications has been coordinating public posts, while Translation is working on translating candidates’ platforms.
2025’s OTW Board Election will take place on August 15-18. OTW Members who plan to nominate a proxy should contact Elections by August 6. Specific dates for Q&A and Candidate Chats will be made available on the 2025 Election Timeline page.
Development & Membership has been checking membership for Board candidates and donors who want to vote in this year’s election, while Finance has begun preparing for the 2024 audit.
Board uploaded minutes from the April 2025 Board public meeting to the OTW website. They also approved two new Finance Bookkeepers, held check-in meetings with Legal and the Paid Staff Transition Lead, and continued to work with the Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup. The Board Assistants Team’s work also continues on several projects, including the Procurement Policy and Board Discord Server Guidelines revamp.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
Volunteers & Recruiting conducted recruitment for two committees—Tag Wrangling and Support—and two subcommittees—News Post Moderation and Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution—this month.
From May 19 to June 22, Volunteers & Recruiting received 147 new requests and completed 139, leaving them with 53 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below).
As of June 22, 2025, the OTW has 944 volunteers. \o/
New Committee Chairs/Leads: 2 Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Heads New AD&T Volunteers: 1 QA Supervisor New Communications Volunteers: 2 Convention Specialists and 3 TikTok Moderators New Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: Mossie, Vihi, and 1 other News Post Moderator New Fanlore Volunteers: 90PercentHuman, Hobgirl, Sparrow, and 1 other Policy & Admin Volunteer New Finance Volunteers: Scott and 1 other Bookkeeper New Open Doors Volunteers: Bette, devinwolfi, Kelpie, korry, November_Clouds, Pat Zarzecka, scattered_coreopsis, Starlings and 6 other Import Assistants New Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Volunteers: 1 Goal Supervisor; megidola and 1 other Volunteer New Support Volunteers: 2 Chair Assistants New Translation Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Manager; Adri Jaimes, Lia404, ttom1323, and 5 other Translators New User Response Translation Volunteers: Felipe and friki (Translators)
Departing Committee Chairs/Leads: Nary (Support) and 2 QA&T Leads Departing AD&T QA&T Volunteers: runt and 1 other QA&T Testing Volunteer Departing AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Leja, Evolcahra, and 1 other Editor Departing Communications Volunteers: 1 TikTok Lead Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 Convention Specialist Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Policy & Admin Volunteer Departing Open Doors Volunteers: 2 Import Assistants and 1 Technical Volunteer Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Departing Support Volunteers: Sandra 002 (Volunteer) Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: ladydragona (Supervisor); Daniailís, MFY11EP, Barbara Thomas, and 3 other Volunteers Departing Translation Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Manager; Mirjam, DaisyJane, DanielUL, and 6 other Translators Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 1 Volunteer
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Rhine, who volunteers as a volunteer manager in the Translation Committee.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
As a Translation volunteer manager I mostly deal with admin work that surrounds the work our translators do – be it talking to other committees about things that are to be translated, preparing English texts for translation, making sure our version of the text is up to date, or getting texts published once they are translated – along with more general personnel stuff like recruiting new translators, keeping a clear record of who is supposed to be working on what and who is on break, checking in with translators and how they feel about their work, that kind of thing. Having been in this role for some time now, I also help with mentoring newer volunteer managers in how to do what we do, at the scale we do it.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There isn’t one singular stereotypical week in this role, but some different modes with different focuses that are more or less typical for me:
Going on-call for a week: Translation volunteer managers work from a shared inbox that serves as a first point of contact for all inquiries related to the Translation Committee. Each week, one or two volunteer managers go on-call as the ones primarily responsible for making sure everything gets actioned and squared away as needed. This usually means spending a couple hours each day working through everything in the shared inbox, including but not limited to assigning tasks to translators, checking on translators who were on hiatus, triaging translation requests from other committees, and responding to any questions translators may have in the course of their work.
Working on a bigger project, like a series of high-visibility posts (e.g. membership drive, OTW Board elections), opening recruitment, or internal surveys: When Translation does a committee-wide thing, it’ll by necessity involve most or even all of our forty-some language teams, each with 1–8 members. Coordinating all that takes some organisational overhead (and some love for checklists and spreadsheets, along with automations where feasible), which typically means sitting down for a few hours on three or four days of the week and chipping away at various related tasks to keep things moving, including but not limited to asking other people to double-check my work before moving on to the next step.
Working on smaller tasks: When I want to have a more relaxed week while still being active, I’ll sit down on one or two afternoons/evenings, and take care of a task that is fairly straightforward, like scheduling and leading chats to check in with translators or train people on our tools, creating a template document with English text for translation, drafting and updating our internal documentation, asking others to look over and give feedback on my drafts, and giving feedback on others’ tasks, drafts, and projects.
Weekly chair training/catch-up chats: We have a regular weekly meeting slot to sit down and talk about the few chair-exclusive things in the Translation Committee, as part of chair training.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I actually started volunteering at the OTW as an AO3 tag wrangler back in 2020, when lockdowns were on the horizon and I felt like I could pick up some extra stuff to do. Growing up bilingual and with some extra languages under my belt, I ended up hanging out in some of the spaces with lots of OTW translators. Then I found out that I could internally apply as a Translation volunteer manager, and the rest is pretty much history. At that point I was missing the feeling of doing some volunteer management and admin work anyway!
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
On a high level, I’d say it’s striking a balance between the expectations and the reality of the work the Translation Committee does, including the sheer scale. On a more concrete level, it’s like this: Being a translator in the Translation Committee is, by default, a relatively low commitment, with a number of optional tasks and rosters that we encourage people to take on, if they have the time and attention to spare. Part of how we ensure that is by dealing with as much of the overhead in advance as we can, as Translation volunteer managers.
This means that for instance, when the English version of a text is updated – which may take about two minutes in the original text – we go through each language team’s copy of the text, make the changes as needed in the English copy, highlight what was changed, and reset the status in our internal task tracker so that it can be reassigned to a translator. This way the changed part is clearly visible to the translator, so they can quickly pinpoint what they need to do and make the corresponding changes in the translated text.
For both the author of the original English text and the translator, this is a very quick task. On the admin side, on the other hand, it’s the same two-minute process of updating our documents repeated over and over, about 15 times on the low end for frequent news post series that we only assign to teams that consistently have some buffer to absorb the extra workload, and almost 50 times on the high end for some of our staple static pages that (almost) all teams have worked on, meaning it’s something that takes somewhere between 30 minutes to almost two hours even when it’s a tiny change and you’re familiar with the workflow.
(And that’s before getting to very last-minute changes and emergency news post translations with less than two days’ turnaround time, where we manually track everything across around thirty teams, usually. Each time that has happened, everyone’s dedication has blown me away. Thank you so much to everyone who answers those calls, you know who you are!)
What fannish things do you like to do?
I like to read, especially if it’s something that plays around with worldbuilding or other things that were left unsaid in canon. I wish there were more hours in the day so that I can pick up some of my creative projects again. I suppose some of my coding projects like my AO3 userscripts and my AO3 Saved Filters bookmarklet also count as fannish?
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you’d like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.
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.
do you ever just … picture a whole scene, a whole fanfiction in your head, you know how to place every single word of the english dictionary that you need (or your language dictionary), you know how to structure your sentences, you know just what your characters are going to say to each other and then… and then you just open microsoft word.
Its the doc! The blank document steals the ideas from. Your brain!!!! If you want to keep your ideas,, do NOT look at the doc when you open it, look STRAIGHT* AT THE KEYBOARD and write the first words to pop into your head! Once the document isn’t empty it, takes away its evil power over you
Elizabeth MacDonough doesn’t give fiery speeches on the Senate floor. She doesn’t pound podiums, tweet clapbacks, or beg for airtime on cable news. Most people couldn’t pick her out of a photo lineup. But this week, she did more to derail Donald Trump’s legislative fever dream than any Democrat in Congress. With nothing but a binder, a brain, and a spine forged from 230 years of procedural precedent, she calmly gutted the “Big, Beautiful Bill” — and sent the Republican Party into a frothing, incandescent rage.
Here’s the part that should terrify the GOP: she’s not even elected. She’s the Senate Parliamentarian, the nonpartisan referee responsible for interpreting the arcane rulebook that governs the world’s most dysfunctional deliberative body. She doesn’t write laws. She doesn’t vote. She doesn’t grandstand. Her job is simple: enforce the rules, no matter who’s in charge. And when Republicans tried to use reconciliation — a fast-track process meant for tweaking budgets — to shove through a far-right wishlist of land seizures, healthcare rollbacks, and anti-trans cruelty, she read the fine print and dropped the hammer.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” was supposed to be Trump’s magnum opus: a tax-slashing, Medicaid-burning, land-devouring beast of a bill that would reshape America in his image. It included everything from selling off millions of acres of federal public land to states and private developers, to gutting Medicaid for low-income families, immigrants, and trans people, to defunding Planned Parenthood and hacking away at environmental protections like they were weeds in a billionaire’s backyard. It was grotesque. It was rushed. And it was entirely dependent on sliding past Senate rules without a fight.
Elizabeth MacDonough was the fight. She reviewed the bill’s contents and ruled — piece by piece — that major provisions violated the Byrd Rule, which bars unrelated ideological junk from hitching a ride on budget bills. The land sell-off? Not budgetary. Out. The Medicaid provider tax cap? Out. The bans on gender-affirming care, immigrant coverage, and ACA subsidies? Out. The GOP was left holding a gutted husk, their legislative trophy reduced to a few tax cuts and a pile of redacted dreams.
This wasn’t sabotage. This was MacDonough doing her job — the job she’s held since 2012, appointed under a Democratic majority, and respected by both parties until it became inconvenient. She is the Senate’s quiet guardian of process, a civil servant who doesn’t answer to polls, Super PACs, or social media mobs. Her loyalty is to the rules — even as the people around her treat those rules like a hotel minibar. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t yield. She simply reads the law and applies it, with the precision of a scalpel and the force of a freight train.
And oh, how the GOP hates her for it.
Mike Lee, who tried to shove his public lands fire sale into the bill like it was a foreclosure listing, is already scrambling to rewrite the language and sneak it back in. Trump, fuming from whatever taxpayer-funded golf course he’s currently defiling, is screaming about “deep state rule tyrants.”Senate Majority Leader John Thune is getting asked uncomfortable questions about whether it’s time to “review” the Parliamentarian’s role — a polite way of saying, “Can we fire her for being smarter than us?”
Because that’s the rub. They didn’t lose because the Democrats outmaneuvered them. They didn’t lose because of public pressure or media backlash. They lost because a woman they barely understand said, quite plainly, “You can’t do that.” And when they asked why, she handed them the rulebook. And when they tried to argue, she pointed to precedent. And when they blustered, she didn’t even blink.
Elizabeth MacDonough has no political agenda. That’s what makes her so dangerous to people who do. She exists outside their theater. She answers to no party. And yet, she is currently one of the most powerful people in Washington — not because she makes the laws, but because she refuses to let anyone break them.
So no, she didn’t kill the Big, Beautiful Bill. The GOP killed it themselves — by trying to use budget procedure as a battering ram for authoritarian fantasy. MacDonough simply told the truth. And in 2025, that might be the most radical thing anyone in government can do.
Let the Republicans rant. Let them plot her removal. Let them rewrite their monstrosities and try again. But remember this: when the bulldozers were revving, when the Medicaid cuts were inked, and when Trump’s wrecking ball of a bill was barreling toward the American people — it wasn’t a senator who stopped it. It wasn’t a protest. It was a woman with a binder and a backbone.
Hey guys, remember when Fraser said he thinks love at first sight happens and the shot focuses on Ray ‘so this love at first sight is that legit’ Kowalski? Like.. do you remember? Do we all remember that? WOW
INCREDIBLE. AMAZING. SHOWSTOPPING.
Whenever I think of this bold and beautiful and blatant queercoding I’m just so happy this show exists!
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timeasmymeasure
