alias_sqbr

Ah, see, I had a feeling you hadn’t 100% decided who you represent yet, and that’s fair enough.

But as it stands the website and the statements of people who support it’s language don’t give that impression, it gives the impression that it’s fairly obvious who you do and don’t represent, and there is a definite conflation of “works which are transformative”=”stuff we respect and value”=”fanfic/fanvids etc”. There’s a big difference between “we respect you but you’re not under the umbrella of this organisation” and “what you do doesn’t count”, and until your comment I hadn’t noticed any effort to make the distinction or express even hypothetical interest in other fandoms.

I think you need something on the FAQ/About us page like “We respect the diversity of all transformative works and their associated communities, and feel that they are all worthy of respect and protection. This particular organisation currently has a focus on the (largely female) community surrounding fanfic and fanvids etc (often called “media fandom”), and since we are in our early stages it’s not clear how far beyond that community we will be able to extend out reach. However, we welcome the input of everyone from the wider community of fannish transformative works, and are very interested in forming close relationships with other similar organisations.” Of course one of the reasons I Don’t Do Committees Anymoreis the trouble caused by my preference for unvarnished, pedantic truth versus simple, positive spin, so you might not want to take advice from me…

I like the “female history”, “creative community” change suggested boogieshoes.

I understand that you're just starting and can't be expected to know everything yet. And I understand that you also want to get the word out now, rather than later, so that people join and get involved and help you actually do stuff.

Unfortunately, this has led to an avalanche of unclear and somewhat contradictory information (the “Why I joined OTW” posts for example), which in turns leads to a lot of people asking questions, and there's only a small number of people who aren't sure of the answers yet to answer them. For example, I first asked about this on the official “Ask your questions here” post over two weeks ago, where only one of the seven comments has been responded to. This rather put me off giving further suggestions.

While I do think OTW is worthy and necessary, I don’t see myself getting very involved myself since I’m more interested in conventiony fandom and creating original works, fanfic etc is very much a sideline hobby for me and none of the OTW volunteer stuff I’ve seen has really been my bag. That said, I have been sticking up for you guys when people say blatantly untrue things like “None of them write RPF” or “I doubt any of them have any idea how to make this archive”. It’s been hard not just linking to those board members whose lj-nicks I know and going “See?” :)

As an aside: so you’re definitely not dealing with based-on-out-of-copyright stuff? That seems like a rather arbitrary distinction in all but the legal sense (where it’s perfectly logical) but fair enough.