THATCamp Council Minutes Feb 17th, 2015 Meeting held via audio Skype, not recorded
Minutes taken by Micah Vandegrift & edited and posted by Amanda French

Present: Patrick, Amanda, Jeff, Anastasia, Micah
Absent: Frédéric, Tom

* thatcamp.org server move to Reclaim Hosting

RRCHNM has agreed to pay $40/month to move to Reclaim Hosting. See reclaimhosting.com. Patrick has been conferring with them and RRCHNM sysadmin Roberto. Reclaim Hosting can probably mitigate THATCamp downtime and bad server performance, especially since they have a lot of experience with mammoth WordPress sites like THATCamp.org.

Amanda has suggested that the problems may be due to a code issue, but she hasn’t been able to isolate it after lots of testing. Boone Gorges can be pulled in to look at things: he might give an hour or two of time for free. Moving to a new host should help the issues, but if it doesn’t, we might run a crowdfunding campaign to pay for Boone Gorges to give the codebase an overhaul.

N.B.: Although Reclaim Hosting is owned by Jim Groom and Tim Owens, who work or did work for UMW, Reclaim Hosting itself is an independent company that has no official ties to or conflict with UMW. Jeff McClurken, Council member from UMW, does not have any connection to Reclaim Hosting and therefore no conflict of interest. The idea to move to Reclaim came from Patrick.

Moving should happen in the next week or two, by the end of February, before large numbers of THATCamps happen in March.

* Trademark questions

The “THATCamp” trademark has been moved from George Mason to the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, which operates Omeka and Zotero — see digitalscholar.org. Should we try to trademark the “THAT____” prefix for Hum/Tech Ed events? Generally, we agreed that would be going too far.

Amanda will edit the THATCamp Charter to reflect the change of trademark ownership, and will write Tom Scheinfeldt to ask about nonprofit status of CDS so that the Council can give out accurate information about it. Will also ask about updating the CDS About page to reflect THATCamp.

Micah suggests that it might also be useful to know who/what org holds the copyrights for THATCamp-ery affiliated objects, images, logos, etc. — in general, GMU owns the copyright to THATCamp stuff, but code and logos and so on are all licensed CC-BY.

* Forums revitalizing ‹ surprisingly low traffic there. How to spark more questions and conversation?

Amanda admits she might have spoiled everyone by replying to emails sent to info@thatcamp.org for four years. Also, the website’s poor performance could be contributing to low forum use.

Micah and others suggest an information architecture point: the “Forums” menu item could be moved out to its own tab, rather than under “Help.” Generally agreed that this would be a good idea. Amanda will do it.

Some Forum items hidden from public view. For example, the Council’s Feb15 agenda not viewable unless logged in to site. Also, the home page is not updating with the most current data for THATCamps unless you are logged in. These issues are likely due to aggressive caching. Patrick and Amanda will look into it.

* THATCamp Prime

* Patrick reports that he is aiming to organize a THATCamp Prime for late summer 2015 so as not to conflict with THATCamp Virginia and THATCamp DC. It might be themed around providing guidance to the “THATCamp Nation.” Chances are it will be at GMU’s Arlington campus. Will it be a bigger deal, different type of camp? Some suggestions are made about different kinds of formats or themes for THATCamp Prime. Patrick will discuss it with Stephen Robertson, director of RRCHNM.

* THATCamp Council elections coming up!

Dude, none of us can believe it! Has it been a year already? We need to call for nominees ASAP! Tom, Jeff and Amanda were elected or appointed for one-year terms (just for this term, just so that Council member two-year terms will in future be staggered): they can run again if they like. Micah, Anastasia, Frédéric were elected for two-year terms and so will stay on for another year. Patrick is the RRCHNM appointee, so he can stay on or get RRCHNM to appoint someone else. Patrick’s term as Chair will also expire. We do want to make sure that the hosting move doesn’t affect the election process. Google Docs may be employed.

* THATCamp Proceedings

Micah reached out to ACRL DH Interest Group hoping to generate some interest in curating a Special issue of the Proceedings of THATCamp on DH+Libraries. See proceedings.thatcamp.org.

That’s it till next time! We forgot to schedule the next meeting, though …

Wed. Sept 17 11AM via Skype.

Any additional topics or clarification, please leave a comment

Anti-Harassment Policy
* language
* when to add to ask THATCamps to follow it
* vote!

Proceedings
* Issue 2 released
* Documentation?

that.camp domain
* redirecting, but oddly

thatcamp.org server work

Reports from THATCamps

1. Anti-Harassment Policy
drafted based on Code4Lib/Geek Feminism
Discussed next steps — ready to share with community?
Amanda will write a blog post and promote it.
Group decided that once draft is finalized, it would be the inclination of the council that all that camps would adopt this policy as one of the things they agree to when hosting a camp.

2. Communication Strategy?
Do we need one? What is the institutional knowledge on this?
Amanda says media contacts have been infrequent in the past.
Decided there wasn’t a pressing need for a strategy.
CHNM Rep will be the default person in this role.

3. Care and feeding of “Proceedings”

Frederic shared – books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/2181

– Patrick meeting with Amon to discuss strategies for turn over/website maintenance generally.
– Amanda discussed the details of how it works; much is automated from local TC sites. “Favorites” go to the front page.
– Current maintenance – change shortcode every 3 months to pull favorite posts from past three months.
– Possible to change the front page by hits/stats on a local THATCamp sites?
– We could make it clear in the Documentation of THATCamp that favoriting sends items to the Proceedings page.
– Amanda will release Issue 2 on July 1st and write a post about Proceedings uses and how-tos.
– Frederic can investigate different ways to curate the front page.

4. Move Counselors/organizers email list to Forums – unanimously agreed.
Who is the one contact person? Always the Chair?
Do we need a public email address for anyone to send email q’s to?
Use info@thatcamp.org for non-public questions – Redirect to the CHNM person.

Make clear on the About/Contact page that most questions can and should be directed to the Forums.

Amanda edited the About page to reflect these suggestions. Will forward info@thatcamp.org to Patrick instead of Amon.

5. that.camp domain
If we don’t jump on it someone else probably will. Patrick will investigate and grab it through CHNM, hopefully.

thatca.mp set up to have link shortener. How do we use that? Currently redirects to thatcamp.org

6. Templates for THATCamp merch
We already have that – www.zazzle.com/thatcamp

7. Changes to the Charter
Amanda will finalize.

8. Help page for Funding and Proceedings
Amanda will complete.

9. Plan next meeting
quarterly – early Fall
Mid-Sept, deadline for Anti-Harassment policy late Aug.

10. New business/Old business?
Patrick attended THATCamp New England
Micah attended THATCamp Gainesville

2014 will be THATCamp Philly’s 4th year. However, we have been having severe drop offs in attendance and pre-unconference participation the previous two years. We had our suspicions as to why, but surveyed organizers and participants to clarify why they were not coming and it was clear that many of the issues could be tied to fatigue with the unconference format. In order to try and answer these concerns and keep the event going we have decided to mix things up a bit, leaving/stripping unconference bits people liked/disliked while adding in traditional conference parts people appear to be missing.

We’re all fine with trying out this experiment this year, but it raised questions internally about whether or not it can still be branded as a THATCamp, so that is my question to the group. Below are how we are transforming things, so let us know what you think on the whole branding angle. The main concerns are with reduction (not elimination) of the self-organizing and spontaneous aspects. Not all of these changes are something outside of other THATCamps but I wanted to be complete:

-Moving from two day format (Fri/Sat) to one day format (Fri)
-Introducing a theme for the first time (TBD)
-Holding structured workshops in tracks throughout the day by pre-determined leaders
-Holding unconference sessions in simultaneous time slots with the workshops
-Adding additional networking opportunities during the day separate from sessions and workshops

There are other changes but are more on the detail side. I would like to add that the organizing group is not closed and we always encourage new people to join. With the workshops in particular, however, we have had to start planning months in advance and the vast majority of attendees show no interest in working on organizing until they arrive at the event and even then it is iffy. Last year we had a real struggle getting people to propose unconference sessions ahead of time through the THATCamp’s site or the day of.