NDSA:Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Innovation Awards Team Meeting Minutes - 12/21/2011, 3pm

In attendance: Rachel Frick, Jason Kucsma, Jennifer Ricker, Barbara Taranto, Jefferson Bailey

The next call will be scheduled January 12-17. On this call we will discuss the ongoing Google doc describing the awards and discuss project logistical details involving promotion, nominations, and evaluation.

Project timeline:

• Mid January – Coordinated plan for outreach, promotion, and solicitation of nominations will be ready by the end of January
• Mid January – Detailed guidelines on the nomination criteria and who can nominate as well as the process for submitting nominations
• Feb-April/May – Evaluation (and continued solicitation) of nominations
• May (mid/late) – Announcement of winners
• July (mid) – Awards presented at the annual NDSA partners meeting

Call notes

Conversation regarding Awards:

• Need to recognize an organizational awareness to defining “at risk” and highlighting the organizational process that goes into deciding what to save “preservation”
• Awards will be more effective if they award an exemplar, someone who develops a best-practice for sustainability
• Areas that people agree should be recognized:
  • content at-risk award (content, collection)
  • organization-focused award (modeling a community best practice)
  • student awards
• Suggested that this first round of awards not get too specific (should be rewarding innovation, risk taking, modeling best practices and community behavior, programmatic changes). Keep the awards at a higher level instead of getting too specific
• Awards should be described in a way so that there is wiggle room in the nomination. This will allow for a breadth of nomination. Don’t be too prescriptive
• Awards need to leave nominators “room to move” and ability to nominate many types of things that demonstrate an innovative approach, show community practice, how digital preservation needs to be a core mission
• Awards need a sustainability focus, emphasizing best practices, standards, behaviors, integration into core practice, budgeting, stewardship
• Innovative should be underscored and broadly defined and give attention to collaboration and group (consortial) efforts.
• Group agreed on award categories (done by recipient type instead of activity type):
  • individual: talented individuals who have shown innovation – this is why they deserve these awards, create recognition of excellence
  • project-based: projects that have made innovative contributions to the community
  • organizational-based: organizations that have helped establish inventive approaches, best practices, behaviors, procedures in digital preservation
  • Future stewards: broadly defined, but focused on students, educators, pedagogy

• Keep nomination guidelines broad as far as descriptions & justifications. Make the nominator tell us why this nominee deserves consideration.
• Nominations need demonstrable information on person/project/org/student-teacher such as URL, point person, and contact information as well

Future considerations:

• Viability of posting nominations publicly
• Ongoing promotion

Action Items

• Jefferson will compose and share a google document with a few sentences describing the awards program and 1-3 sentences describing each award.
• Team-members will suggest changes via the “insert comment” function.
• Jefferson will compose nomination guidelines and add to the google doc for comment
• Jefferson will compose concrete details on what nominators need to include and add to the google doc for comment
• Jefferson will compose a notification for people that have been nominated and add to the google doc for comment
• Jefferson will compose evaluation methods and add to the google doc for comment
• Jefferson will compose promotion & outreach plan and add to google doc for comment
• Jefferson will firm up logistical details, including submission email address, exact details of what winners receive (eps. travel subsidy) before the next call.