The results of the first THATCamp Council election are in, and no runoff election will be necessary. Thanks to the 89 people who voted. Here are the four who will be joining me, Tom Scheinfeldt, and Patrick Murray-John on the first THATCamp Council:

• Anastasia Salter
• Jeff McClurken
• Frédéric Clavert
• Micah Vandegrift

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to all who ran: we all know that this kind of service is driven much more by conviction than by systemic reward. All the candidates are people I’d be proud to work with.

As Chair pro tem until we appoint an official Chair, I’ll be arranging the first meeting (to be held sometime in April, most likely) and drafting an agenda. The agenda will be posted here on the blog and will be open for comment.

I’m still a fan of having fun and being productive in a informal and collegial gathering, even after all these years. Imagine that. Whatever happens next with THATCamp, that won’t change, I know. En avant!

Voting

Voting is now open for the first THATCamp Council. We have nine candidates for the four open seats on the seven-person council: read more about them below. The ballot will be visible at the bottom of this post after you log in.

• You must log in with your THATCamp account to vote.
• Vote once for exactly three (3) candidates for the four open seats. Choosing more or fewer candidates may invalidate your vote.
• Voting will be open for one week, until midnight on Tuesday, March 25th, 2014.
• Results will be displayed after the voting period ends. The four candidates with the most votes will serve on the THATCamp Council.

You can read more about the THATCamp Council structure and the “partial bloc” election process at Creating Community Governance for THATCamp. Write Amanda French at info@thatcamp.org with any questions.

Please try to elect a Council whose members are of diverse countries, ranks, fields, ethnicities, and genders.

Candidates

Craig Bellamy

I have been working at the intersection of the humanities and computing for most of my career as an educator, researcher, and practitioner. I ran one of the first THATCamps in Australia, THATCamp Melbourne, and plan to do another one this year with a pedagogical focus.

I was a co-founder of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities and have been the Co-Chair of the Program Committee for our first two conferences. Plus I have worked in the field at Kings College London, the University of Virginia, and the University of Melbourne. Recently I have moved into the eLearning field and am keen to build a level of understanding between eLearning and the Digital Humanities, especially through THATCamp Pedagogy.

Frédéric Clavert

I found in unconferences a very efficient way to mobilize and get in touch with the DH community. All the THATCamps I have attended (CHNM 2009, Switzerland 2011, Saint-Malo 2013) or co-organized (Florence 2010, Paris 2010 and 2012, Luxembourg/Trier 2012) gave birth to new projects, helped participants to discover the works of other participants, sometimes helped them discovering whole parts of DH they were not aware of. This is what makes THATCamp so great and interesting and this is why I wish to run for THATCamp council.

Furthermore – and this is the other reason why I am running for THATCamp council – THATCamps are very good tools to give the DH community a multilingual and multicultural dimension that is sometimes lacking in the DH world. In Paris in 2010, we collectively wrote a Digital Humanities Manifesto, which is today the basis of the future French-speaking DH organisation (to be created in Lausanne this Summer). It also helped getting in touch with many other actors of the French-speaking (and beyond) DH community. In Luxembourg, we could mix both German and French DH communities – two neighbour communities that were not in the habit of working together.

Diane Cline

Diane Cline is an Associate Professor of ancient Greek history who is also deeply committed to the development of GWU’s initiative to support innovation through cross-disciplinary collaboration. With her B.A. in Classics from Stanford and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Princeton, Diane became a tenured History Professor at CSU Fresno before she joined the University of Cincinnati’s Classics department, winning the University’s Dolly Cohen Teaching Award in 1999. She was involved in VROMA, an early Classics digital project in the 90’s and also was an early adopter of online syllabi, before BlackBoard and other tools made it easy. Her current Classics research focus is on the application of social network analysis to the study of ancient history, a digital humanities effort. The students in her seminar “Digital Humanities and the Historian” are hosting DC 2014 THATCamp on April 26, 2014. Diane has attended the University of Kentucky THATCamp in June 2013 as well as the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science in 2012 and the Case Western Freeman Symposium on Digital Humanities in 2013. Her passion is ”network weaving”: finding people with similar intellectual interests but who are in diverse departments and serving as a bridge to bring them together. Kind of like a THATCamp! Diane is also a cellist with the Washington Sinfonietta and the Avanti Orchestras in Washington, DC.

Kimon Keramidas

I went to my first THATCamp at George Mason University in 2010, and had one of the most interesting, enriching and enjoyable experiences I have had as an academic. As opposed to traditional large conferences I had attended I was greeted with a sense of collegiality, felt encouraged to participate and make my voice heard, and experienced environments of intensely enjoyable and stimulating intellectual discussion. But, most importantly I found myself immersed in a community that was was able to hold itself to high standards of academic rigor and investigation, while understanding that the rigors of exploring the intersection of the humanities and technology are best experienced in a humane and relaxed environment. Since that first trip to the Center for History and New Media, I have attended and organized THATCamps regularly hoping to both foster community growth within different sectors of the humanities, including pedagogy, museums, and the performing arts, and to expose more people to the possibility of more fruitful, constructive and humane environments. I believe strongly that the unconference model and the THATCamp project can be instruments for change in the humanities, can play a role in negating many of the harmful effects or rigid academic hierarchies, and can foster the sense of experimentation and freedom of thought that is necessary for us to truly tap the potential of new technologies in the academic realm. It is for this reason that I would like to participate in the THATCamp Council, as I would be honored to play a role in helping to shape the future and continuing the success of this truly worthwhile endeavor.

Jeffrey McClurken

From the first THATCamp at RRCHNM, I have been energized by the format, the opportunity to talk, create, and build with other digitally inclined people, and the chance to introduce new people to the digital humanities. I’ve attended nearly a dozen THATCamps, run numerous bootcamps/workshops, and helped to organize four THATCamps (2 iterations of THATCamp AHA and 2 of THATCamp Virginia). I want to join the THATCamp Council so that I can help to continue the open, non-hierarchical, inclusive, productive spirit that has infused THATCamp for so many.

Scott McGinnis

Organizing THATCamp Bay Area 2011 was one of the highlights of the last few years for me. A handful of us had worked all summer to bring together more than 100 people, many of them first-timers. Just ten months earlier, I was myself a noobie to THATCamp, and I was immediately impressed with the unconference model and the community it attracts. Sessions were energetic, conversations dynamic, participants diverse in view and background, and the whole time, the only pressure I felt was from my inability to take it all in. To me, this is special. So when I learned THATCamp will transition to a new governance model, I quickly decided to toss my name in the hat, that I might endeavor to help this great community continue to flourish and grow.

Serge Noiret

What I could bring to the THATCamp governing body, is my international experience organizing THATCamp’s and trying to understand how best rethinking and developing the program internationally. In March 2011, at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, I organized THATCamp Florence during three days and with more than 200 registered attendees together with a THATCamp in Digital Humanities; the AIUCD, Italian Association for DH and Digital culture was founded during THATCamp Florence and the Manifsto for DH written during THATCamp Paris 2010 was approved during the meeting. I attended, proposed and coordinated panels for THATCamp NCPH Pensacola (2011), THATCamp NCPH Milwaukee (2012), THATCamp Lausanne Switzerland (2012), THATCamp Luxembourg during DIHULU2012 and attended THATCamp Leadership in Fairfax (2013). I was asked University of Bologna in Rimini and the AIUCD to coordinate a THATCamp for 2015; other two THATCamp may be organized in Amsterdam in October 2014 during the IFPH annual meeting (International federation for Public History) and in Jinan, China in August 2015 during the CISH (Comite International des Sciences Historiques) and IFPH meeting. I followed THATCamp as a movement from its very beginning and was very much interested to its organization, it’s open, genuine and disinterested way to work collegially in the field of DH and especially in digital history, fostering the knowledge of the impact of the digital turn on the history discipline. I very much like to work with other people.

Thanks to the EUI, my university, the unique European post-graduate and post-doctoral university in the humanities and social sciences with members coming from EU countries and other continents, I am in contact with a very important international network of stakeholders and scholars. I know different languages and worked for many years with dozens of different professors, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers coming from many different academic systems.

I would very much like to contribute to develop internationally the THATCamp movement specifically with regard to Digital Public History issues if I would have the honor to be elected in the THATCamp Council Charter. I would be able to meet “physically” at least once a year during my bi-annual travels to the USA at the NCPH annual meeting and in NYC for Easter, although I don’t really think that living in Los Angeles or in Florence, Italy would be very different for participating in THATCamp Council Charter meetings.

Anastasia Salter

I’ve attended many THATCamps across the country and organized my own, THATCamp Games, which spawned a successor. I write for ProfHacker, a blog on technology and pedagogy that has its roots in THATCamp, so I’ve seen firsthand the ability of THATCamp to build projects and ideas that last long after any particular camp ends. I’m very interested in the many ways the model can evolve: I’ll be running a next iteration of THATCamp Games this year in conjunction with a conference, altering the formula to fit the new setting and bring together practitioners with the DH community. I’m very interested in ways we can play with the unconference model and keep our idea of what THATCamp is constantly evolving. I’d like to help other organizers experiment with THATCamp’s structures to create lasting value for DH “veterans” and “noobs.” This council is an important opportunity to build on THATCamp’s foundations and experiment with ways to further share, curate, and preserve knowledge generated by the community.

Micah Vandegrift

The formalization and governance of THATCamp underscores an important point in our collective history; we have reached the time when an idea has become an institution. The idea behind THATCamp inspired me as a graduate student, and now, as I grow into my career as a librarian I continually reflect on the THATCamp’s I participated in as wholly formative for the professional values I now hold. The ideas that all voices (untenured, non-academic, the public(s), diverse, ranked or not, etc) are welcomed in the debate, that the conversation is always developing, and that “yakking and hacking” can and should coexist define my approach to the academy, despite the fact that the academy does not often see it as so. I believe that TheseCamps will be/are a force for change and I’d be honored to play any role therein. I’d like to see THATCamp continue to grow, to be locally-invested while globally-digested, and to institutionalize the ideals that inspired me to become a rabble-rousing member of a system that teaches creative free-thought but rewards falling in line.

With that, I am very pleased to indicate my desire to run for a seat on the inaugural THATCamp Council.

Ballot

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Every THATCamp user can vote once only for exactly three (3) candidates for the four open THATCamp Council seats. Choosing more or fewer candidates may invalidate your vote.

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Now that we’ve revised the THATCamp Council Charter and have worked out the election process, I want to encourage everyone who thinks they might be eligible, able, and willing to run for the THATCamp Council to do so. In the last ten days or so I’ve been calling for candidates on the THATCamp organizers email list, and we do already have several excellent candidates for the 4 open seats, but I’m well aware that not everyone who has helped organize a THATCamp is on that list. If you haven’t been following the THATCamp Council Charter revision process, here are the answers to some questions you might have about the Council.

Who is eligible to run for the THATCamp Council?

Anyone who has helped organize a THATCamp will be eligible to serve on the Council.

What are the responsibilities of THATCamp Council members?

• Supporting THATCamp organizers, participants, and would-be participants, especially by
  • answering questions on the THATCamp forums
  • creating and revising help documents on thatcamp.org
  • managing THATCamp social media accounts
  • attending and/or organizing THATCamps
• Upholding core THATCamp values
• Setting the long-term direction of the THATCamp project
• Creating and revising community processes, policies, and governance documents
• Resolving community conflicts

How long is the term?

Council terms (including the term of the Chair and the RRCHNM representative) are two years long, but members can hold an unlimited number of terms if they are reelected or reappointed.

How often will the Council meet?

The Council will meet at least three times per year for the purpose of discussing and (if necessary) voting on issues of interest to the THATCamp Community. In general, meetings can take place online, via conference call, or in person.

How do I run for the Council?

Write info@thatcamp.org by Monday, 3/17 indicating that you’d like to run. Include a few lines about why you want to run for the THATCamp Council, perhaps also addressing why you think THATCamp is important and/or directions you’d like to see THATCamp go.

When will the election take place?

I’d like to open the week-long voting period by the end of the day on Monday, 3/17. I’ll post your reasons for running that day along with a link to your THATCamp profile, available from our People page at thatcamp.org/people. The election process is described more fully in the THATCamp Council Charter.

Please see the THATCamp Council Charter if you have more questions, or of course write me (THATCamp Council Chair pro tem) at info@thatcamp.org.

As the period of Mellon Foundation funding for THATCamp nears its March 31st, 2014 end date, it becomes time to set up a community-driven means of managing the overall THATCamp project. I won’t bother you too much yet with my thoughts about what it has meant to me to be the THATCamp Coordinator over the last four years, but I will just say here that it’s been a pleasure and a privilege.

The task of turning THATCamp over to the community is in one sense utterly simple: it’s already a radically decentralized project, and there are plenty of THATCamps I have literally nothing to do with. In another sense, though, it’s hard — maybe the hardest task I’ve yet faced as THATCamp Coordinator. This is something I want very much to do right. I’ve therefore spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to do it, helped by an initial consultation session last October at THATCamp Leadership. I also read Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community, which gives practical advice from the perspective of the Ubuntu development community, and even got a bit of help from @jonobacon himself.

The result of all that study is the below document, a 3-page draft THATCamp Council Charter that describes a system of elections and governance. And now here comes the begging: please comment on the charter by March 10, 2014. You can use the regular blog comment box here titled “Leave a reply” to let us know if the system herein described looks good to you. (Don’t forget to scroll.) I’m particularly interested in how to ensure a diverse Council: I had thought about instituting quotas of some kind dealing with race, gender, country, rank, and so on, but frankly the math got too complex too quickly because of all the variables that could attach to any of the seven members: I wouldn’t want a Council with six white male American tenured professors and one black female Belgian grad student. We might want slightly more specific guidelines than those I’ve outlined here, though. My ears are open.

Yesterday I read Brian Croxall’s post “Why the 2013 MLA Digital Pedagogy Unconference Isn’t a THATCamp” with interest. And although it may sound like unhealthily low self-esteem, I’d say that on the whole I agree with Brian that “within academia–or at least in the humanities, where I spend most of my time–unconferences have become synonymous with THATCamp. And I don’t think that’s healthy.” As I wrote a few months ago in a post called “The Unconference is Alive,” there are plenty and plenty and plenty of unconferences besides THATCamp, on all

When I first started as THATCamp Coordinator, I thought that people would be much more interested in “hacking” the THATCamp format than they have been. Most of the queries I’ve gotten from people thinking of organizing a THATCamp have been questions on what exactly they should do, not what else they might do besides the usual. Basically, I think, THATCamp has been as popular as it is partly because it offers a standard model that can be easily followed: set up a WordPress website, recruit participants, call for participants to post session proposals to the blog, organize sessions into a schedule during the first 90 minutes, have workshops, have discussions, have Dork Shorts, then repair to the nearby Irish pub for a few beers. Certainly I could take some of the blame for the increasing rigidity of that model, but I’ve found that most people are just unnerved enough by the idea of organizing a THATCamp that they’d like to keep it as simple as possible, go with what works, use existing templates. Even Brian and Adeline have used some THATCamp.org text on their own website, and more power to them — that’s why it’s licensed CC-BY. One of the real innovations of THATCamp, after all, is that anyone can organize one without needing the infrastructure of a scholarly association: one of the real difficulties of organizing a THATCamp, as well, is not having the infrastructure of a scholarly association. When you’re going it alone, it helps to have a model to draw on, even if you decide to alter that model.

I do think that people going to MLA might get a bit confused about what the difference is between THATCamp MLA and the Digital Pedagogy Unconference, or wonder why they might go to one instead of the other, but to those hypothetical people I say, go to both! THATCamp MLA is January 2nd and the Digital Pedagogy unconference is January 3.

What I also hope will happen is that more people in academia will try out more new kinds of meeting formats. You can make them up, of course, but if that sounds a bit intimidating, try the book Open Space Technology (e.g., get everyone in a circle and ask them to address one question) or the book Mob Rule Learning (especially the section on “Facilitation Styles,” including “appreciative inquiry,” “dotmocracy,” “birds of a feather,” “fishbowl,” and more). Happy unconferencing …

Since yesterday, the digital humanities blogotwittersphere has been discussing a post by digital marketer Mitch Joel somewhat misleadingly titled “The Death of the Unconference.” (Reminds me a bit of famed literary critic Harold Bloom, who apparently also likes to pronounce things dead.) Joel writes, “I was a massive proponent of the unconference movement (I still am!), but that word has been used so poorly by so many groups that it seems to have all but disappeared.”

I’ve had a most instructive Google Alert on “unconference” for awhile now, which has taught me that there’s an unconference on Christianity, an unconference on real estate, and an unconference on coworking. I like to tweet these unconferences from the THATCamp account when I find them, just to show support from one unconference to another, and to remind myself that it’s not just coders and librarians and digital humanists engaging in “mob rule learning,” as the title of the recent book has it. But that Google alert has also taught me that Mitch Joel may have a point: the term “unconference” is sometimes used in cases where it’s hard to see what’s so “un” about the conference. I specifically remember deciding not to tweet the otherwise intriguing-sounding “Indigenous Innovation Unconference” when I saw how much they were emphasizing their six eminent speakers and how little they were emphasizing any kind of participant-driven program. Similarly, plenty of events that call themselves unconferences seem to have whole slews of presentations, which strikes me as odd.

Early on in my position as THATCamp Coordinator I was surprised to realize that I would occasionally have to enforce — not just explain — the unconference “rules,” and that’s been even more the case as THATCamp and digital humanities general have grown. Some have wanted to limit THATCamp attendance to members of their own community, some have wanted to charge registration fees, some have wanted to name a facilitator and/or a note-taker for every session, some have wanted to have presentations and keynote speakers, some have wanted to vote on sessions online beforehand rather than in the first session on the first morning, and so on and so forth. Some of these ideas made me uncomfortable — they seemed rather unTHATCampy — but then the idea of saying yes or no to such ideas and determining what is or is not THATCampy also made me uncomfortable. Suffice it to say that when I first began, I would have entirely agreed with Timothy Burke’s impassioned declaration that “‘Do as thou wilt’ and ‘Ur doing it wrong’ don’t add up,” but these days I’m more willing to take the latter position.

That being said, I hope that the rules we (and in some cases I) have set up for THATCamp, the rules I’m willing to be Madame Enforcer about, are rules that allow the kind of fluidity Timothy wants: “Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do … ” You bet. And of course improvisation has rules. Always say yes. Give the other guy a turn to solo and don’t step all over him. Put all the leftovers into the pasta except the pudding. The rules of THATCamp, ideally, are like that, or like the rules of copyleft. They are rules that require you to be free. In fact, one of the seminal texts of THATCamp is Tom Scheinfeldt’s “THATCamp Ground Rules”, in which Tom violently demands that THATCamp participants 1) have fun, 2) get some work done, and 3) be nice to each other. (Fascist.)

We also developed some rules for THATCamp organizers, which, similarly, are pretty much rules that require you to be free:

I agree that our THATCamp will be

• FREE or CHEAP to attend (registration fees of up to $30 USD are fine)
• OPEN to anyone who wishes to apply or register (no institutional, professional, or rank restrictions)
• INFORMAL and participatory (no presentations, papers, or demos longer than 5 minutes)
• PUBLIC on the open web (sessions can be blogged, twittered, photographed, recorded, and posted)
• SELF-ORGANIZING (no program committee: all participants are given a chance to help set the agenda, either before or during the unconference)

As long as you adhere to those rules (and keep our logo in Whitney), you can pretty much do whatever you want at your THATCamp. I’m full of advice on planning a THATCamp and a little advice on going to a THATCamp, but you’re also free to ignore that. Mitch Joel gives a whole stern list on the topic of “Your conference is not an unconference if…” I’m glad to say that even according to his strict definition, THATCamp is an unconference. Long may it live.

Phew, what a year for THATCamp. In 2010, there’ve been seventeen, yes seventeen, THATCamps, and there are eighteen more THATCamps planned so far for 2011, including THATCamp Southern California, which is just around the corner. Much farther out are the ones most recently registered: THATCamp New York (yes! finally!), THATCamp Montréal, THATCamp NCPH at the National Council on Public History meeting in Pensacola, FL, THATCamp University of Western Ontario, THATCamp Switzerland, and THATCamp Saigon — which last will be our first THATCamp in Asia. If you’re interested in helping out with any of those, e-mail info@thatcamp.org or contact the organizer directly at the e-mail address listed in the registry.

There are a few things about this spate of THATCamps in 2010 that I find particularly awesome. First, it’s international. Working with THATCamp has put me in touch with an international community that I was simply closed off from before. This year, I helped to translate THATCamp Paris’s Digital Humanities Manifesto, I installed a translation plugin on thatcamp.org, and I am planning to teach a WordPress workshop at THATCamp Florence in the spring. And, of course, I spoke (virtually) at THATCamp Canberra:

Second, scholarly associations are taking notice; there’s an electricity about a THATCamp that’s simply missing from most annual meetings, and I’ve had plenty of correspondence this year with people on program committees who want to know how to bring some unconference energy to their conference. Whether or not that’s possible is another question — in some ways I think that a conference and an unconference might be as mutually exclusive as they sound — but what I do think is entirely possible and indeed necessary is for scholars to open up, in more ways than one. To speak with people in other disciplines and other professions, to publish hastily and informally on the free web, to be smart while wearing shorts and flip-flops, to admit ignorance and ask for help, to crack jokes, to make friends and make things. THATCamp is helping with all of that.

Speaking of admitting ignorance, another terrific thing we’ve seen with THATCamps in 2010 has been the addition of the “BootCamp” workshops, which are helping in a small way to teach humanists and their ilk new digital skills. What’s pretty amazing about that is that all of those workshops have been free to attend, and almost all of them have been organized and taught by people who were paid little or nothing for doing so, for the simple purpose of sharing knowledge.

And that’s the fourth, last, and by far most awesome thing about all these THATCamps: the passionate volunteers who did all the work of putting them together (and it’s no small amount of work, let’s be clear about that). Ave, THATCamp organizers. Hail to you, blithe spirits. We salute you. Here is a LOLpuppy for you.