NDSA:Innovation Working Group NDSA Meeting

Innovators, NDIIPP/NDSA meeting to be held July 19-21.

Can you make it?

First, please let Trevor or I know if you are planning to attend, or if you need more information about the meeting. Second we're planning to sponsor two workshops at the meeting.

Workshops

The event will feature concurrent workshops hosted by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance working groups. All attendees are encouraged to contribute to one or more of the workshops which will help to push forward the tools, services, resources and campaigns to support a national community of digital preservation partners.

Workshop 1:Designing Digital Stewardship Challenges

There are a lot of exciting models for challenges and prizes that spur innovation in a range of fields. Projects like National Novel Writing Month are spurring all kinds of people to write their novels, Kickstarter is serving as a platform for funding and supporting all kinds of exciting creative and civic projects, Google’s summer of code is providing training and supporting a range of open source projects, and things like the x-prize are pushing commercial groups to innovate. In this workshop we will break into groups and translate these, and other examples of challenges, into short pitches for digital stewardship variations on these ideas. Each group will identify the key reasons that a given model works, how it motivates a particular group to accomplish a particular goal, and then attempt to translate that over to a new context. For example, NDSA Innovation group chair, Micah Beck, will lead one group in planning a specific technical competition, similar to the Top 500 supercomputer ranking (http://www.top500.org) focused on creating and promoting a metric and competition around the idea off bulk bit stability (stable bit-years). In some cases, the groups may well suggest ways that the digital stewardship community might use some existing initiatives (like Google summer of code, or Kickstarter) to facilitate some of these challenges. The results will include some projects which would require outside funding and some which would be viable strictly through the time and effort of NDSA member’s. Sponsored by the Innovation Working Group

Workshop 2: Let’s Give out Annual Awards for Digital Stewardship

The NDSA represents an impressive body of member institutions that collectively hold a considerable amount of knowledge and ideas. Creating a slate of annual awards related to stewardship the NDSA can use its’ collective clout to draw attention to and recognize particularly important and innovative projects, tools, services, and ideas being generated and developed by both members and non-members alike. Starting from work initiated by the NDSA innovation working group, this workshop will first decide on the specific set of awards we would like to start with and then break into groups to hash out the names and criteria for each of the individual awards. These individual groups will then each propose what they think to be the best way to nominate and decide on the winners. At the end of the workshop the Innovation working group will have enough of a plan for this project to put it in motion and in a year recognize award winners at the next annual meeting. Sponsored by the Innovation Working Group

Call for Participation - Poster or Demo

You are invited to share the innovative ways you are "making it work" in digital preservation by submitting a proposal for a poster or interactive demonstration to the first combined NDIIPP and NDSA digital preservation partners meeting. The theme for the meeting is Make it Work: Improvisations on the Stewardship of Digital Information (link to event info). We are looking for: Demonstrations of completed (or nearly completed) work in digital stewardship, including standardization, technical infrastructure, access, outreach and education or collection development. Examples of innovative, cutting-edge, or novel ideas for preservation and stewardship projects that could have significant impacts on work in the field. Stories of how digital stewardship projects adjusted to changing situations and lessons learned from those experiences.

To be considered please send 300 words or less describing what you would like to present to Abbey Potter at abpo@loc.gov by June 24, 2011. Accepted proposals will be notified by July 1, 2011.