hJc: A translucent, dusty gold powder

07:40 pm: Organisation for Transformative Works (aka "An Archive Of Their Own")
Way back in the summer, someone mooted the idea of an independent fannish archive, a project called "An Archive Of Our Own". I had already left livejournal, and all discussions about it were taking place on livejournal, so the only comment I remember making about it was to the effect that the lesson I thought Six Apart ought to have taught us was that fandom needed more de-centralisation, not less.

As far as I can tell, all the fans involved with OTW stayed with Six Apart to the very end, and are intending to stay with SUP now it owns livejournal, so self-evidently they find the benefits of centralisation outweigh the disadvantages of being vulnerable to central control.

This is a kind of dry-run post for feministsf: I'm not feeling quite smart enough to think out the ramifications of what's going on with OTW, which seems to have acquired a fair amount of structure and policy without actually having done a thing, yet.

But one of the things that definitely puts me off getting involved in any way with OTW is the fact that while the OTW crew mirror otw_news to IJ and GJ, they disable comments there, so that no community of fans interested in OTW can form anywhere other than on livejournal. It is a very pro-centralisation tactic, and very much in opposition to what I see as the major strength of fandom, which has been considerably weakened by so many fans becoming so completely dependent on livejournal: that fans are not normally a centralised group. This is not just a petty "Grr, they won't let me respond!" though I think that either deliberately or through indifference offending fans who have already left livejournal is probably not good strategy. It's an example (I think) of an underlying philosophy that I just flat disagree with: that fans can't be trusted without a strong central directive. That you don't want groups of fans going off and talking about stuff all on their own because who knows what they might come up with?

PS: I really have moved over to insanejournal. Consider this journal a backup.