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 …