From, like, four different talks and put them together and didn't bother to, like, make them match. So just a just a warning about the aesthetics of of my slide deck. And I even thought about just talking but then I realized that some of this is better if if you can see see what I'm talking about. So let me share this. You don't even get, like, a title slide. Jump right into it. And then there we go. So So I've discovered that, like, keynote does not do, presenter mode very well in Zoom, and so I've started, like, printing out a copy of my slides just so that I know which one comes next. Okay. So first of all, I'm I'm mostly going to be talking about, transformative fandom, which the slide doesn't even have a definition on it, but I will I will define it for you briefly for for folks who might not be familiar with this. So when you hear the word fandom, sometimes you think of, like, people talking about Star Wars on on Twitter or whatever. But but transformative fandom is very specifically people who, create fan works and participate in a community around fan works. So this is, fan fiction, fan art, fan vids, computational projects, in fandom, and basically things that constitute some kind of remix of media properties. And it's huge. It's also, been around for a very, very long time. So, as this first bullet point points out, it's this long standing technology agnostic community. So, you know, people were, writing fan fictions and zines in the, in the 60s, and they were creating remix videos using VCRs in the 80s. And so the technology changes and the community gets bigger as more people can come together online in affinity spaces. But this is a community that has been around for a very, very long time. So, so as mentioned, I I have a JD from before my PhD, and I actually started, doing some research around fandom in the context of copyright when I was a law student. And so, I wrote a law review article about essentially how social norms and fandom around copyright were doing a way better job of enforcing copyright than any laws were doing in other communities. And amazingly that ended up that that thesis basically ended up turning into my dissertation work. And so so some of this what, like, it's a really interesting community in which to study social norms and community governance because it's been around for so long. So this was the reason that I that I used this as a case study for my dissertation around social norms and copyright, and this slide is basically, the TLDR of my, of my dissertation. And a lot of a lot of my findings, and I did a lot of interviews and content analysis and some survey work around how people, make decisions about copyright in remixed communities. And one of the things that was really important was essentially this finding that social norms govern behavior in this community way, like, way more strongly than anything else. Not terms of service, not, you know, actual copyright law, and I ended up tying this into, some of Eleonore Ostrom's work around social norms, where there's a and she essentially proposed that, when the law is unclear, when there aren't clear rules, this is a space when, when norms can kind of fall apart because, like, you know that there's some rules but you don't really, you don't really know what they are and so it's hard to get, like, strong, collective action when you have this sense that they're external monitoring. So basically, she was talking about why this should not work. Like, this should be these circumstances under which, regulation should kind of fall apart. And the reason that I have the cow on this slide is because this also, relates to some work from, Robert Ellickson in the in the 80s about social norm enforcement, where he essentially said, like, Hey, when the when the law is gray, like, property lines for cattle ranchers was was the example, This is when social norms become really important. So essentially, I found that, there's a reason that social norms work so well in this community, and it's because it's really close knit and people care a lot about being part of the community and so norms are very internalized and people want to follow the rules in order to signal that they are part of the community. And so norm enforcement tends to be really sort of like, positive, like reinforcing gentle reminders, as opposed to, public shaming and other kinds of, more negative norm enforcement. Anyway, so the the the takeaway from all of this is that, hey, community based rules work very well because it means that the rules that you're following, like, fit your values as a community And that encouraging, people to follow those rules by telling them what the rules are and how they can be a better part of the community works really well. And you can even reinforce norms and values through design and through policy. And so based on all of this work that I did once I was done with my dissertation, I immediately dug into this last point, which was, how can we do this in design and policy? And it it so happens that transformative fandom, built their own platform. And so it became an a great case study for this. To give you the, like, really brief background of this, and I was actually, I was, I was personally very active in fandom around the time that this was happening, and so I remember it very well. But in, 02/2007, fan fiction heavy fandom was, largely on LiveJournal. This is sort of the major platform for fandom at the time, like, from, say, like, 2002 to 02/2010. And a couple of things happened around the same time that were a big deal. One was that, LiveJournal made some policy changes where they basically redefined what they considered obscene content and deleted a bunch of fan fiction and fan art journals without warning. And then also around that same time, and keep in mind this is right when YouTube was getting really popular, a startup decided to, like, create their own fan fiction platform and charge money for it. It was called Fanlib, and it was created entirely by men, which was really funny because the fan fiction community is, like, 90% women. And they were like, hey, people are creating all this stuff for free and no one's making money off of it. Let's fix that. And so the, the, the fandom community basically was thinking about the platforms that they're on and saying, you know, the places where we are, they don't want us there. Like, they're creating these policies that make us feel unwelcome. They don't want us there. Meanwhile, like, people are trying to create new platforms to exploit us. And so someone who was very active in the fan community wrote this blog post, and titled it An Archive of One's Own, an allusion to, a room of one's own and basically said, and I'll give you the sort of meaty quote from this. Oops. We have project managers in this community and coders and designers. We could come up with something that's way better than this. We we need an archive of our own. You know, and usually this kind of idea doesn't necessarily go anywhere, but amazingly, it did. I should also mention that the person who wrote this post, was Naomi Novick, who is a science fiction writer, in fantasy now, as well as a, at the time, a very active fan fiction writer. And she had been in grad school for computer science for a while. And so essentially Naomi and a few other women just started building an archive, like doing requirements gathering and just like building a thing, and, this is what it looks like today. Well, actually not today, because let me show you actually well okay hold on just a second. So this is the front page of the archive actually this is from about three years ago, when I first when I first gave a talk about Archive of Our Own. But it it houses fan fiction, some fan art as well. It doesn't host, images or videos, but you can embed them, but it is mostly, mostly fan fiction. And it has fan fiction from literally anything you can possibly think of. Like, go to the site now, think of something that maybe someone might write fan fiction about, and I guarantee you it's there. Like, everything from, you know, the big stuff that you see here to, like, progressive insurance commercials and candyland. And this is one of my favorite examples, anthropomorphized fan fiction about a romantic relationship between Harvard and MIT. And so there's there are millions and millions of of these on this website. This was the these were the numbers from when I first did talk about this three or four years ago. And this as of this morning, there are, 6,500,000 works on here and and over two and a half million users. And the the site is completely nonprofit. There's also a nonprofit organization that sits on top of it called the Organization for Transformative Works. I am on their legal committee, and this is entirely volunteer run. And again, just to to reiterate how different this is from some other online platforms, the general demographics of the users of ARC of Our Own is mostly women and very queer, which is quite different than say other open source communities. This is also an an open source project. And there we go. It's also an open source project. One of the key values is sort of welcomingness, that anyone is welcome here. And they also pay a lot of attention to things like accessibility. So this is like, the accessibility design for this website is really, really good. And they also have projects around, like, translation, for example. So, and I'm and I'm getting into governance, but let me give you something, that I think is a really important design feature, which is that the, search system for the site is a, a curated folksonomy. What this means is that there are tags on fan fiction, and you can, when you are uploading your fan fiction, you can use whatever words you possibly want to describe what is there. And then in the background, there is this small army of people called tag wranglers who are going in and, like, looking at the tags on your fan fiction and tying them to things that are in the search system. So that, like, if you want to tag your your, your fanfic with merman or merpeople or mermaid sherlock, then someone is in the background saying that that tag should be tied to the overarching tag of Merpeople. So one of those things that this means, and I talked to a lot of people about the design, of the system, etcetera, was that there are no there are no sort of specifications for how you can choose to describe things, which makes it quite inclusive while also maintaining a very robust search system. And there's some other design features that are also specifically designed to, like, embed the values of the community. Another one was that there's, oh, also it makes for a very, very good search system. And this there's this great article in in Wired by Gretchen McCullough about it. More about how how good the search system is. They also added assist something to be able to exclude tags when you're searching, which was a very requested feature for reasons I will get into in a moment. And, actually, let me go ahead and describe describe what you're looking at here. Here is one of what I think is one of the more interesting design decisions on the website site when it comes to, content moderation. So the sort of general value here is that, the the maintainers of the website don't want to make any value judgments about what kind of content is okay and not okay. This is a somewhat controversial stance. The line essentially for what content is allowed on the site is legality. If it's illegal, you can post it here. There are lots of things that are legal that are pretty awful. This is one of the reasons why this is a controversial stance. However, if you make if you draw the line somewhere else, then you have to decide where that line is drawn. And there have, you know, over many years been people in the fandom community who have drawn lines at say same sex relationships or any kind of explicit content at all. However, it's also very important that people don't see content that will be, triggering, for example. And so, the design decision here was that there are there is a set of required, content warnings, and they're not all on here. There's a couple more. So example here we have like graphic depictions of violence or major character death. There are some there are some other ones as well, and the idea is that if these things exist in your work, you have to label them as such. So you don't get in, so you don't get in trouble for, like, having some kind of content, but you can get in trouble for not labeling it properly. And then people can exclude these terms from their searches, etc, and they basically know know that the the content is there. I think this is a really interesting, way to do this, but again it does not make everyone happy because a lot of people think that there's some some types of content that should not be on the site at all. There's some other interesting kinds of design decisions just to sort of go through these quickly. One is is, again sort of going back to the values of the community. People should have control over their content, as someone said here like be able to wipe out their Fannish identity if they want to, but also like there's this big problem with fandom, sort of like Fannish history disappearing from the internet because say GeoCities went away. And so, they wanted to be able to encourage people to not delete their content. And so, there's a feature for, Orphaning Works, which is essentially your identity is completely stripped from a work. There's no way to tie it back to you, but it doesn't, but it's not gone. So preserving history while allowing people to wipe out their identity. Another interesting thing is that, this site is like, again, entirely volunteers, mostly women, and actually a lot of people learned to code so that they could, help build this this website, which is also a sort of broadening participation in computing thing that I've written a couple of papers about. So as Naomi said, we were like, they didn't want to bring in any outside developers. Like, okay, so if we want people to make this, then we're gonna have to grow our own, like, which has which has been challenging as well. But I think it's one of the reasons why the site is designed so carefully. So again, people sort of some people learn to code so that they could help with the website. And as a result, one of the things that I've noticed is, like, the users are so grateful and, like, nice to developers. So, like, imagine how mad people get when, like, Facebook is down for half an hour, but if Archive of Our Own is down, then people, like, tweet pictures of cats at them, and they're like, Thank you for doing all this work. We love you so we love you so much. So some some things that I've learned from, studying the site over a number of years, are, you know, ways that design can be used to reinforce values, or even, like, shift values in certain ways, that people are happy when the site's policies reflect their values, and feel like they have, a voice. And also, and this is something I've seen sort of in my work overall, is that, people understand rules and also are more likely to follow them if they had some stake in, in creating them. So so then to follow-up on this a little bit, some work that I've done more recently, we're looking at how, like, fan fan platforms have evolved over time in terms of, like, when people leave join them and when people leave them, etcetera. And, basically, what this chart shows is that, like, things like LiveJournal, Rise and Fall, and, you know, DeviantArt and email lists and and and all of these kinds of things. And then, a o three and Tumblr have kind of taken off together. And one of the reasons is because AO3 doesn't have any social functions beyond commenting on other people's stories. But, as part of this, I I talk to people about why they joined or left certain platforms, and one of the interesting things here is that policy actually matters and in particular a lot of people abandoned LiveJournal because of bad policies and a lot of people joined Archive of Our Own because of good policies. Policies that they thought reflected their values as a community. And these were just some quotes that that show that also people left fanfiction.net because they abandoned old content in in addition to some other things. And again, people really appreciated the the policies that that, AO3 had. And then this all came up a couple of years ago, when Tumblr banned adult content. If you don't remember this is like December 2018 and suddenly an an algorithm is going wild on Tumblr just like tagging everything as as adults and saying that it was going to be deleted, which did not go over very well in the in the fandom community. And, in fact, earlier that year so, before this happened I had done this big survey about, like, joining and leaving platforms, and a bunch and so many people talked about how much they hated Tumblr. And, you know, at the time, I was thinking about I was thinking about how this related to what had happened with LiveJournal. And so, you know, I've spent a lot of time since then talking to people about, sort of, the current state of socialization and fandom, and how they feel about Tumblr, and why they're still there. And basically, they really want a social platform that is like our 'Arc of Our Own' so that there is again the sense that like the policies and the governance and the values will actually reflect, will reflect their their community. And then most recently, this isn't a very useful slide, but, but, my my PhD advisee, Brianna Dim led, a paper that's, gonna be presented at CSW next month that's about what happens. So when a community like this is mostly governed by social norms, which it is, and it's mostly been it's, like, been pretty successful, like, it works really well for copyright, something that both of us notice is that like in the past five or six years, these norms seem to be less effective in some ways. Some things are kind of breaking down, in in fandom, particularly around things like privacy. And so, Brianna did a lot of interviews with people in fandom about this, and essentially what we found is that one of the reasons this is happening is because fandom has gotten so much bigger and it's bringing in so many, new people, that there's more, there's, there's more of a chance of norms kind of clashing, for lots of different reasons. One is, like, because, you know, Tumblr isn't just fandom and so, like, norms from different communities on Tumblr are clashing. There are some generational issues, like, people who are my age and older in fandom are very used to, like, Oh, God, you never tell anyone your real name. And, like, very, very, very strong privacy norms in fandom where, like, you know, 20 year olds are like, you know, I'm talking to my grandmother about my fan fiction at Thanksgiving. This is not weird. And so those kinds of things are starting to clash. There's also some issues around, like, clashes between,

kind of like the thing I talked about in terms of content. Like, you know, some, you know, some people think that certain kinds of content shouldn't be in fandom and so it's causing those kinds of clashes. And so we have some sort of general suggestions for maybe how platforms might design, to help with some of these things. Like, one of the things is that Tumblr is also a flat platform, so there's no sub communities, and that makes governing, pretty difficult. So that is so that's the sort of gist of, the work that I've been doing on fandom, though before I stop the the presentation part of this, I wanted to briefly mention some other things around governance I've done in case people want to ask me about that instead. One is that I've done a bunch of work around terms of service. So one part of my dissertation was about copyright licenses in terms of service for, user generated content. Also did some work around how harassment is defined, as a disallowed behavior in terms of service. And most recently, data scraping provisions in in terms of service in terms of thinking about ethics of data collection.

have also looked at community created rules and this came again kind of out of this idea that, like, when communities create their own rules, these magical things can sometimes happen. And so, did some work about, rules on Reddit, and looked at the rules on a very large number of subreddits, both qualitatively and then, quantitatively. And also my PhD student Aaron Jing led led some work on, moderation practices on Discord, which is also an example of community created rules. And I would say that in general, my sort of orientation towards all of this, and this is my my last slide from a talk I gave a couple of years ago, is that involving community members in the creation of rules, it's great. I think we should, like, be doing participatory design for terms of service personally. I think that there are ways to design to support instead of constrain the norms that exist in a community. And all this comes with a caveat that, like, some communities have bad norms. And then there are benefits in designing for visibility, comprehensibility, and ways to learn rules, thinking about how multiple sources interact with each other, and, like, being able to deal with expectations, etc. So that is my, pretty high level view, of the kind of work that I've been doing around community governance with a focus on my favorite place, transformative fandom. And with that, I hope we have lots of time for discussion.

Yeah. So, I I actually suspect that the term transformative started being used because of copyright. So, it's a term in, in copyright, basic transformative works. And fan works are considered a type of transformative works, and, transformative fandom tends to be the term used to differentiate it from, sometimes I hear it called curative or curatorial fandom. So basically the difference between, like, making things versus collecting collecting things. Alright.

Yeah. So, you know, in in, the early days of the design of the platform, there was, there was a huge amount of, kind of, requirements gathering. But I don't mean just technical requirements. I mean, like, what should this be? Like, the blog post that, that Naomi posted had, like, thousands of comments. It's, it's actually fascinating to look at. And, today there is So, the Organization for Transformative Works has a board. It has, sub committees. Like, actually, right so I mentioned I'm on the legal committee. Right now, we're doing, an update to the terms of service, mostly just, like, fixing stuff and clarifying stuff. And so that is a collaboration between, like, basically people on a ton of different committees on on OTW. And everyone who's part of OT OTW, including, like, the board, are all and everyone who's who's writing any code are all fans. Like, they're all, part of this community. Sometimes they do ask for input from users, though I don't think that happens as much now as it used to because things are pretty stable.

I mean, you know, this was something that, like, I proposed doing in a grant a few years ago and then didn't get the money. I you know, so I'm this is I'm answering a slightly different question than what than than what you asked, but I thought a little bit about how this would work pretty well in AO3. Like, I feel like if we got a bunch of AO3 users around the table and talked to them, like, and had them, like, write rules and, you know, sort of in the same way that you would design a system, like, designing a new terms of service, that it would work pretty well. I feel like if you got a bunch of Twitter users to do that, it would not work as well. And the reason is, and this is sort of one of the, like, whenever I talk about this as an example, you know, I'm a little wary of drawing two broad conclusions from it because, AO3 is such a tight knit community, and then, and the norms are pretty, are pretty well, like I said, they're kind of starting to break down a little bit, but they're still pretty strong. Whereas, like, Twitter is not a community. Like, Twitter is many communities that have many different norms and, and so having people decide on that kind of thing I think can be tricky. But that's also one of the reasons why it feels like a participatory design kind of thing would be would be insightful because you would get people talking about where, where their values are bumping up against each other. So when someone says, like, we should have a rule against harassment, and then they try to just and then they try to define what harassment means, they're gonna find out real quick, like, what the what the sort of problem is. But I do think that communities that and this is also one of the reasons why, like, you could do this in a subreddit, right? But, like, Reddit as a whole would be a lot more difficult. This is also why I think it's really good for platforms to have mechanisms to have sub communities, when when that makes sense because then you can because then you can create your own your own values. Right.

So there is, like, so so there's, like, an abuse, team and reporting content just like there is on any other platform, and, it it I don't see this a lot because it only it only gets elevated to the legal committee when it's, like, really bad. So, you know, there is there are enforcement mechanisms. So, if you do post something that is illegal, then it will get taken down. Or, you know, and often, like, mostly what we see is copyright infringement. So, for example, someone recently posted a, oh, I can't remember which one, a fan fiction for a Korean boy band that was a word for word, Nora Roberts book, but just with the but just with the names changed. And we got a cease and desist letter from Nora Roberts, and so they had to so we had to take it down. Or like if it if it's fan fiction about real people and it includes, like threats or something like that, that kind of thing will be taken down. Or, like explicit content about underage real people. That kind of stuff. And like I said, not everyone agrees with all of the values, and I don't think that could be possible in any community. And so, I don't think that there's any way that policies could reflect the desires of individual users. But I do feel, from discussions around it, pretty confident

generally reflects the overall values of the community. Though there are, I mean, there are some people who, like, would, like, you know, threaten to call the FBI on us with some with some regularity. And so, you know, you're not you're not going to make every everyone happen everyone happy. But we do have, you know, sort of terms of service and moderation rules such that things can be, enforced consistently. And beyond AO3, like, how are people on Tumblr enforcing norms around things? Like, I mean, that's a lot, that's a lot messier. And there are certainly still cases of things like, public shaming and calling people out and that sort of thing like there are in any community.

If me, I have a question, but I was not no. I wasn't trying to communicate.

Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, I you know, I think that some of the best case scenarios are, like, there is a there is a real emergent norm that is then formalized. So, you know, and actually some of the design things about AO3 that I showed are kind of examples of that. Like, so those content warnings, like, the required content warnings, those were, those came from a norm. So the, the, the way that they were chosen was they were the things that people were already typically warning for when they were posting stories on, like, LiveJournal. And this, I mean, I mean, actually a lot of the design things about how things are presented and that sort of thing came from, like, the ways that people were doing things normatively. And so I think that that can work pretty well. I mean there might be times when you don't want to, like, make a norm into a formal rule, like, if it's doing pretty well. I mean, a lot of things around copyright are actually good examples of that because, like, sometimes the norms are actually stronger than actual law, which is kind of weird. And, in fact, one of the design decisions that AO3 made, and this was an example of, like, like, purposely trying to shift norms in a different direction, which was that a lot of people wanted, like, a rule on the archive that you weren't allowed to, like, write fan fiction based on other people's fan fiction. And this was something that came up in those in the, the comments on there was, like, oh, you need to make a rule that, like, you can't, you know, steal someone else's characters from their fan fiction or, like, write a remix of their fan fiction. And the people who are designing the archive were like, No. That is not what we want, a value of our community be. Like, we have a very strong, pro fair use stance, and if we can make fair use of Harry Potter, then you can make fair use of someone else's Harry Potter fan fiction. And so what they did was they actually put, a field into, like, called inspired by, where you are encouraged to, like, say, you know, if you're inspired by another fiction on the archive or by something elsewhere, you can sort of tag it that way. And by making this part of the metadata, they basically were saying this is this is something, that you can do. But again, not something that everyone agrees with. The other thing, I mean, in terms of emergent norms, is like I spent six years during my dissertation work asking people where these norms come from and, like, never got any good answers. It's actually really hard, especially all the stuff around around copyright, like, why is it why is it this way? And, I mean, and people can speculate, and some of it kind of sounds right to me, but some of these norms have just been around since, like, the 70s, and that's just kind of how, how things are, how things are done, and they change too.

Yeah.

So you you brought up, something I thought was really interesting around the sort of phase shifts that occur, when the communities grew a lot, like, when

like, coming into a o three and I was curious whether there was some, like, insights about how you can sort of design for or manage the shift from flat to sub communities because it sounds like in terms of coherence of norms and sort of the sort of, you know, permissiveness when it grows, you're inevitably gonna get pockets of different sort of, you know, locally, but not globally coherent norms and it it seems like you're kind of touching on the edge of the okay, can we design it in such a way that you enter through the front lobby and there's some global norms that are sort of pervasive, but as you sort of get to, you know, sub communities, those sub communities might have different norms. And I'm curious a lot about how how one might design to make it so that you don't just say, hey, you have to do a sub community, but let the sort of sub let let sub communities grow off of a main community, sort of as needed. And I I realize I'm not, like, totally articulating it. I just it seems like you're right on the edge of that topic, and I think we need that pretty badly, actually, to make these things scalable.

Yeah. I mean, I so I'm not sure if I know the answer to that, but I think it's a very interesting question. I mean, and I'm immediately thinking of Reddit where there are, like, global rules. And there are also global rules created by the community in terms of reticot, but it's still so organized around sub communities. I mean, I guess they're sort of, like, your home page where you're, like, participating in a bunch of sub communities at once. And so, but then on, so that one's like mostly sub communities already, but then there's Tumblr which doesn't have sub communities, at least not designed for sub communities. And so, like, the, you know, the kinds of problems that we've seen is, like, you know, you're trying to, like, talk to people who are in your fandom and, you know, maybe there's, like, this thing in your fandom that other people don't like. And so you can, like, tag your post with your fandom and hope they see it. But also, the people who don't like it are searching for it so they can come in and tell you how much they don't like it. And, and we also did this paper about, research ethics in fandom. So the other thing is that because Tumblr is all public, there's no way to be there's no way to, like, only talk to your small community in the way that you could in, like, a friend in in a private Facebook group or a friends locked LiveJournal community. There's no way to keep your content safe from, like, researchers or journalists or or that kind of thing, which is the other reason I don't like, flat.

that I'm most interested in is, like, that the the the temporal transition of a community. Right? So we've talked a lot about this community versus that community versus that community, but you've sort of followed the whole arc of a o three. So you've seen it, like, evolve from smaller to sort of more technically enabled to larger to needing more support for potentially, you know, sub communities like we're talking about now and I I'm very interested in how we understand the the evolutionary process over its lifetime, not just like a versus b and these norms versus those norms, but making things a bit more adaptive and and designing for allowing the community to, sort of, collectively govern, not just originally, like, framing, but actually govern the thing to adapt to whatever the new circumstances are.

I mean, AO3 hasn't really I mean, AO3 doesn't have support for sub communities, so I don't actually think that it's made a change like that. I mean, it's it's it's mostly gotten bigger and brought in brought in more people. And so that has caught, like, one thing I'm thinking about is, like, you know, the ability to, like, exclude things, black, like, blacklist things when you're searching, etcetera. Like, those are the kinds of things that happened after the community got bigger and it became more necessary. So there are always, like so there are sometimes design things that you can do. But, yeah, I, you know, I can't really think of any of any platform that's gone from flat to sub communities. I mean, Tumblr instituted, like, group chat, but that didn't take off at all. I mean, nothing is coming to mind. Maybe Facebook? Well, no, because it looks actually more insular. Yeah.

I can leave it hanging. It's just, like, I'm recognizing in in in my in my own work, this is a, like, a critical, like, make or break point for a lot of communities, especially because they tend to start really small and managed by a group of people who are, like, intensely aligned on values and that as they succeed, like, there ends up being a sort of a a more header like, a more diverse or heterogeneous group of, like, sort of value subsystems even with some alignment and your conversations about the sort of subgroup versus not subgroup really hits on the thing that I'm seeing and I'm just looking for insights for how to manage the phase shift that seems to come inevitably with scale.

Oh, I I am now raising my hand. I I just wanna say that with the, N able community, we grew very rapidly, starting with a small core, and we reached the whatever that critical, mass is that Kulei Shirky describes in that essay if as a group is its own worst enemy, and it became quite conflictual circling the circular firing squad, etcetera. Our solution was actually to greatly decentralized, to try to minimize the essence of the global community and recognize that the essence of the phenomenon was a bunch of local chapters which work out their own norms in private working mostly face to face with each other. So we did go through exactly that process, I think, for exactly the same reason. We, in a sense, didn't know how to scale. So we found a way of, if you will, multiplying and cloning. Okay. And and I'm sorry. And so I was wondering whether in a o three, the you in fact have sub communities based on the genres. They're not they're not closed sub communities, but whether you, in fact, do get sub groups, anyway, which may have the same characteristic.

Well, I mean, there's maybe sort of in that, like like so individual fandoms, like, by which I mean, like, Star Trek versus Harry Potter, will often have, their own kinds of norms. And sometimes we see that on AO3 in terms of, like, tagging practices, or that kind of thing. But because there's not a lot of social interaction on the platform, it doesn't tend to be a place where norms form. That tends to happen outside and then impact, the platform, I think.

Yeah. Well, so, so so for the first one so I've so I've only been looking at, like, noncommercial transformative fandom, which is what a o three is. So, you know and we get we like, OTW Legal gets questions all the time from people who, like, email us and are like, I want to sell my fan fiction. We're like, We can't help you. I do think that norms around commerciality and fandom are shifting in part because of things like Patreon. And so there's kind of this question of, like, whether that counts as commercializing or not. And we don't have a strong stance on it, except that basically, like, if you're selling something, you're not allowed to advertise it on AO3. But you can, like, link to your website where you have a link to your Patreon, or whatever. And so I do think that some pockets of fandom are, like, have different norms because there's commerciality attached to it. But I will say, like, since you mentioned this first, like, 50 Shades of Grey is, like, a fascinating example because it is 100% not copyright infringement. And I feel very strongly believe that. However, it did absolutely violate the norms of fandom. Like, people were very upset that she pulled her fan fiction, took it away, like, from the gift economy of fandom, and sold it. So not copyright infringement, but people were very mad about that. If you want to hear more about copyright and fandom, Lindsay Ellis's new newest video essay on YouTube about the Omegaverse fan fiction lawsuit is just the most bonkers, fascinating pic you will ever hear. And then to your second question, I mean, a o three getting banned in China was actually a really big deal, and we had this huge discussion about whether we were gonna allow mirrors or not. And essentially, like, yes, as long as they're not, like, putting ads on them and we're and or doing anything to sell them, and it's clear that it's not official. So we're not, like, taking down mirrors or or anything like that so that people can continue to to watch or to to use a three if they if they want to. But that's definitely been an issue and, like, international law is also tricky around all this stuff.

Yeah. Totally. Thank you.

So, the board is the board is elected, positions, And, members of the different committees, come from volunteers. So often there are calls for volunteers for various committees. But the board is the are the only elected positions. Leadership, like so, yes, in terms of, like, OTW and AO3 specifically, like, because that is under that umbrella. However, like, in fandom in general I mean, I get like, you know, there aren't really leaders, sort of, of fandom. However, I have I did find, like, lots of cases of where people who were, like, important in the community, people who had a lot of followers, who were very popular, tended to have, you know, an oversized effect on on norms, which, you know, kind of which which certainly makes sense. And, you know, I I've thought a lot about, like, how how norms become rules, not in fandom specifically, but, like, I've started I I did a little bit of work a couple years ago on Reddit in term in terms of looking at posts about rule changes in communities to try to see where they come from. Like, what is, what is making a new rule or a rule change? And sometimes it's like, hey, we've been doing this thing, let's formalize it. You know, often it's like in reaction to, like, people are doing this bad thing. Let's, make a rule against it. And so maybe a little bit a little bit of both.

Sure. I was just curious what other platforms they're used to manage the platform. It's related to some work we've been doing with Josh on platforms being made by people using other platforms to make them.

Let's see. Slack is pretty active. Slack, I think, either Campfire or Basecamp. We had I was in a meeting for the fir like, an actual meeting for the first time, and I thought it was gonna be, like, on Zoom or something, but it was on Slack, and it was the weirdest experience. And, apparently, this is just, like, the way that the developers have been doing stuff is, like, having these, like, four hour long meetings on Slack, which is and I I'm guessing it's, like, time zones and coordination and and and, this kind of thing. But I can tell you that the legal committee operates entirely over email. Okay.

Yeah. That's cool. I we're out of time, but I actually think there's a lot of to be date dug in on the way that the communities are using tools, and it relates to a lot of things that this group is researching. So I don't know if it's a conversation that we can have in the Sure. Slack in the Slack. Thanks.

Yeah. I'll get it up. And thank you so much, Casey. Really phenomenal. And and thanks all for really

Thank you. Yeah. Feel free to reach out if anyone wants to talk to me more.

Alright. And and