Since its launch in 2008, Archive of Our Own (AO3) has grown to amass nearly 750,000 users and over 2 million individual fan fiction works.2 Its code is open source, and the archive has been designed, coded, and maintained nearly entirely by the community it serves—a community made up mostly of women. Because the controversy that sparked its existence was surrounding a disconnect with the community’s value system, baking these values into the design of the site was a priority. As a result, the design of AO3 is a unique example of building complex values and social norms into technology design.
Fiesler, Casey, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman. 2016. ‘An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design’. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’16, 2574–85. Santa Clara, California, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858409.
AO3 and its design values