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These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on

fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.

The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—

Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.

they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.

To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community¹—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.

In 2006, the FLOSSPOLS survey (a broad survey of open source usage and development, funded by the EU) found that only 1.5% of open source contributors are women.

Some open source projects, like Ubuntu and Drupal, are known as more women-friendly environments. Ubuntu’s code of conduct, for instance, set expectations about appropriate behaviour and help foster an environment where women feel more welcome and less threatened. DrupalChix say that Drupal has 10% women on the project, thanks to the supportive environment that group helps create.

But to the best of my knowledge, there are only two open source projects in the world which a) have a significant number of developers, and b) are majority female. They are An Archive Of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) and Dreamwidth.

Though I’m loath to draw sweeping conclusions from these two projects, I do see commonalities that might help answer the eternal question of “How do we get more women into Open Source?”

• Start with women from day one, in leadership and other roles.
• Stand for something that women actually care about, and don’t be afraid to state it up front and loudly.
• Make efforts to recruit women regardless of technical experience.
• Recruit from existing, active, creative communities who know how to communicate and collaborate online.
• Offer training, peer support, and activities to teach coding from the ground up.

But then that’s an argument Henry Jenkins has repeatedly made, here, for example, that parody tends to be male- and industry-preferred whereas the more emotional engagement of fanvids is often dismissed out of hand.

Vidding thus is an art form that is both too subtly critical (because always inflected with fannish passion) and too polished aesthetically (because the aesthetic dimension does matter above and beyond the critical point being made) to, perhaps, fit into a quick overview of YouTube remixes. Still, as both a vibrant subculture of critical interpretive if not outright political remix culture and an sophisticated artistic subculture with its own aesthetic value system, fan vids certainly deserve to be included in any “Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing.”

The academy has often been accused of unrealistic attempts of objectivity in the humanities in particular but even in the sciences. After English departments in the seventies destroyed the idea of an objectively created value system that can separate great from merely mediocre and bad literature, after anthropology departments realized in the eighties that observers cannot ever remain neutral and always bring their own biases to their field research; after queer theory and gender theory and critical race studies have brought the personal into the academic in the nineties; after affect theory has established itself as a field of study since–it amazed me that vidding may indeed have been overlooked in its merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism.

there are different ways in which the idea of the commons has worked its way into being one of the most significant memes of the last few years - Pete Linebaugh is not Silvia Federici is not Toni Negri is not Lessig, and so on. Federici, for her part, signals a timely warning in Caliban and the Witch against assuming that ‘the commons’ was without divisions of labour, particularly a gendered division of labour.

Yet, as the idea of ‘the commons’ became resolutely attached to discussions over IP and various other forms of knowledge production it - much like the precarity meme - was often put to service as a way of reimposing a certain claim to ownership and division of labour, namely: the implicit assertion that knowledge-production only involved those who are marked (or mark themselves) as knowledge producers in a certain division of labour.

the concept of the undercommons is disruptive of claims that the commons was an idyll, without difference and without divisions of labour.