Michele Tepper

Fan
Name:	Michele Tepper
Alias(es):
Type:	former OTW Board member (2007 - 2008)
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Michele Tepper was one of the founding members of the OTW Board, serving from 2007 - 2008. Tepper helped create much of AO3’s “look” in her role as head of design in the early days.

In the Organization for Transformative Works' 2007 introductory post, Tepper was also announced as the liaison to Systems.

OTW Biography

Michele Tepper is an interaction designer and usability expert who helps companies create memorable and successful software, Web sites, and digital devices. She has published influential essays about online community and social software, and she is the former Web producer for Lingua Franca magazine. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. Tepper was one of the creators and designers of buffistas.org, a fan-built, fan-maintained site centered on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The site has more than a thousand members and has been active for five years.

Some 2019 Thoughts

I got involved with the OTW because I knew some of the other founders already. I had designed a discussion board for Buffy fans (buffistas.org) a few years earlier, and so I had an understanding of the challenges of working with a remote team of volunteers on a project for a fan community. Also, I was working for a digital product design studio, where I saw the wave of commercialization around “user-generated content”, and I liked the idea of doing something that helped keep transformative works in the hands of the creators. So I told Naomi Novik I was interested in helping out, and that’s how I ended up as a founding board member for the OTW!

What I remember most about the early days of the Archive was the collaboration. Naomi, cmshaw, and I spent long hours coming up with the core functions of the archive; technologists and user experience designer collaborating to find the best solution. We built out a roadmap that saw the Archive through its earliest years, as well as an experience that people point to as exceptional, and I’m proud of that.

My favorite thing about AO3 is the tagging and the tag wranglers. I have the tag page for “feels” as a bookmark on my phone, and when I need an emotional boost, I go and look at all the different ways people have tagged for feels, all listed out and merged by the wranglers. It makes me ridiculously happy every time.

I don’t pretend to know what the OTW’s future will be, because I couldn’t have predicted its past! Fanworks are much more accepted in the mainstream than they were 10 years ago, and the OTW and the Archive are a big part of the reason why.