(Continued from Part One)

As I discussed last week, fandom is a democracy that's made of the people who show up, and it's run by the people who do the work. If we don't do the work to create our own space, we're doomed to live in other people's spaces.

Some fans have stepped up to do that work.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) was created earlier this year as a means for fans to create their own fannish spaces. The Chair of the OTW is Naomi Novik, author of the best-selling Temeraire series, and the entire board consists of people who have been in fandom for years (most under handles which may or may not be familiar).

Novik spoke with us this week about the project. "A lot of us have been talking about creating a fannish nonprofit for several years. You'd see a favorite archive shut down without warning, and wish there was a system to save the stories. Or read about fans being scared by ToS warnings and wish for a legal defense fund. Or follow the political debates about copyright and wish for a fandom lobby group. Certainly, the immediate trigger for this particular project was the FanLib launch, but FanLib was really only the last straw in a series of events that made a lot of us say, finally, 'enough.' Enough of letting non-fans define fandom; enough of not stepping up and defending what we've created. We began organizing in May, and by the end of the summer we had a board, several committees and a mission statement. We're still very much in the start-up process and like most start-ups, we have a lot of outreach and research still to do."

The OTW is the advocacy organization set up behind the Archive Of Our Own, a soon to be released multi-fannish fanworks archive. "The Archive is meant to be a central archive created by fans, for fans, and owned not by any individual or private corporation, but under the umbrella of a fan-run nonprofit organization -- one that presumes the legality of transformative fiction from the get-go. Many people are happy with the archives they're using now, and that's great -- there's room for a wide variety of archives, with different missions. What we want is to offer a space that won't back down the first time a lawyer sends us a letter and can't get shut down on the circumstances of a few individuals."

She continued, "In two or three years, we aspire to be a stable nonprofit organization doing advocacy work, in a good position to successfully defend a precedent-setting case, with the Archive Of Our Own up and running and full of fannish creativity, and the wiki and the academic journal both online and going strong."

The OTW and the archive are operating on the "public radio model," according to Novik. Donations will be the primary source of income for the site, with no advertising. "Just as NPR stations depend on ordinary listeners for support, we hope fans will be willing and able to support the OTW because we're doing good work and people are glad we're here. At the same time, just as anyone can listen to NPR without making a donation, the Archive and the other OTW projects will be open to all."

A recent post made on the OTW Livejournal community said: "At the moment, our server space is being provided free by one of the systems team, our legal team has handled the non-profit incorporation, and our code will be hosted on the free Google Code service." That last clause is important. Novik says one of the OTW's goals is "to create open-source code so anyone who wants to will be able to take the code and use it to build another archive, too (like eFiction or Automated Archive)."

The "gift economy" in fandom does not demand open-source code or free hosting and software, but those aspects tend to be the key things that drive fannish migrations. Livejournal originally operated on a "buy an account or have a friend bring you in" basis, and later became free to all users with the nicer bells and whistles reserved for paid accounts, but it was Fitzpatrick's offer of the source code to make similar sites that really sealed the deal for the "Brad is one of us" notion. FFN, for all its foibles, is still free to all, and there's been a handy Ad Block feature for years, regardless of paid status. Back in the Usenet and mailing list days, archives were almost always kept on school servers, partly because people were accessing fandom via universities, but also because the space was essentially free (after the tuition was paid, obviously).

Fans like free stuff.

In that vein, then, an up-and-coming site called MyFandoms.com is intending to offer its fanfiction publishing software for free starting next month. The software is called FanFicFan and like eFiction, it provides sorting and search functions, using handy pull-down menus.

MyFandoms.com site owner Jacky Abromitis spoke with us about her site and the software they're going to make available. "If users have the skill, they can customize the page so that it looks exactly like their sites," said Abromitis.

The unfortunate choice of site design at MyFandoms -- incorporating a little star like FanLib does -- plus the use of the phrase "user-generated" in their parent site's text has led some fans to speculate a link between the two sites. According to Abromitis, this is not the case. "[W]e're completely independent of anyone/everything. We have no 'venture capital.' We're not some corporation. It's just me and our programmer, Chad Horton. We're the quintessential fans -- he's a sci fi guy -- and we look at our fandoms and say, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we could ....' and then Chad programs it for us. We are truly a site BY fans, FOR fans. ... [W]e're fans with day jobs who are hoping that other fans will see that a) we've got *great* software and b) that we're not some venture-capital conglomerate with ad budgets and stuff." While that should assuage the suspicions of many skeptics, the thought of having privately-archived stories also being uploaded to MyFandom's servers is going to be off-putting to fans still leery from LJ's "strikes" against users who had already deleted their content.  Edit to add: Abromitis said, "[B]ased on input we've been getting this week, we've decided there WILL be an 'opt out' of having stories added to myFandoms."  Additionally, she said, "any story deleted/edited/updated via FanFicFan **is also** deleted/edited/updated on myFandoms."

Abromitis came to fandom via ER. "During Season 7 [of the series], there was a lesbian storyline with one of the main characters. That storyline was given about 3 minutes of air time every other week, but a huge fan community emerged around it. It was the first time I ever went online looking for fan information. I didn't know what fan fiction was when I first read it -- I thought it was an un-filmed script. But I became a fan fic junkie, reading every 'Kim and Kerry' story I could find. Fan fiction filled the gaping holes left by the show, and fan fic writers filled those holes in so many creative, believable ways. They made a very frustrating experience a whole lot of fun, in addition to satisfying. I saw what the lesbian community was capable of, from a fan and fan fiction perspective. Then, I read about The L Word in a gay/lesbian magazine. A few months later, August 2004, Showtime had a float in the Carnival Parade in Provincetown, MA. I can remember vividly watching the float go by -- it was really just a billboard on wheels -- and I immediately thought of the Kim/Kerry fandom. I looked at my partner and said, 'I think this show is going to be big.' But I sat on it. Finally, in December 2004, something brought it back to my attention again. We opened up a butt-ugly fan site. It pretty much just had news article links and a forum. I wanted fan fiction, so people would send me stories. I had an index page that linked to a web page, where I was adding the stories myself. Within 3 months of the show starting, it became evident that I wouldn't be able to keep up. I had someone write the initial software so that I could have people upload the stories themselves. I wanted an auto-populating index page. That's where our fan fic software started."

The impetus to create the central site is similar though not identical to the idea behind the Archive Of Our Own project. Abromitis said, "Once we noticed there was no one 'Fan Central' type of site, the desire to be that site drove us to acquiring and customizing a 'social networking' program that allowed us to plug in all our proprietary tools, like fan fiction, fan art, fan photos, fan videos. The software gave us a framework to start with -- it provided the communication tools. The rest [of the idea to make it a fansite] was ours."

As fans, we have been carving out our own spaces for years, be those spaces nudging against the terms of service on paid servers, or on borrowed servers at the whims of site owners who may or may not be fans themselves. No one wants a lawsuit. No one wants to be the test case. But still we keep writing, and we need a place to show off our work and get our cookies. Fanfiction.Net is here to stay, but while it's still the biggest place to shop, it's no longer alone for multifandom accessibility. FanLib and MyFandoms are setting up malls nearby, and we don't even know what model the Archive Of Our Own will eventually follow. What we do know is that wherever fandom goes, we need the space to be fan-positive, by fans and for fans. We need it to be easily accessible for old-timers and newbies, and we need to trust the people running it not to use us for their own ends, or duck and cover when TPTB come calling.

If there's an Orange Julius there, so much the better.