ANADP II Part 3: Day 1

Panel 1: Community Alignment (& Formation)

Conveners: Martin Halbert, Juan Bicarregui, Lluís Anglada, Luciana Duranti

Discussion of the topic “what makes a community work?”: brief outlines from panelists, followed by group discussion.

Juan Bicarregui began by discussing the Research Data Alliance and the APA (Alliance for Permanent Access).

Lluís Anglada asked, how do we align people around digital preservation? He has 12 different programs, working with ~150 institutions. He uses 3 tools:

1. Remembering effectiveness: shared cataloging, ILL, shared storage all examples of how we already know how to work together well.
2. We are a community, both local and international–we need to be specific about that, and address both sets of needs
3. Introduce challenges slowly into the core of business. We already collect & preserve print, collecting & preserving digital is clearly also part of our job.

Luciana Duranti (InterPARES/University of British Columbia/CISCRA)

“Among Peers” became an acronym: InterPARES. It’s multinational, multidisciplinary, multisectional, covering a multitude of issues: cultural, terminological, financial, collaboration, logistic & production related. What works for them:

•  Organizational policy agreed to at the outset
• Agreed-upon terminology & concept framework
• Regular face-to-face meetings
• Clear expectations & deadlines
• Fulfillment of complementary agendas
• Strong interpersonal relationships
• Strong sentiment of ownership of work
• Any failure is shared along with successes. No one wants to let the group down.

Question for the panel: Best ways to develop a sense of community?

• Deepest concern needs to be identified first: address how working with the organization gets the concern dealt with (what’s in it for them?)
• Former students end up becoming representatives for their new institutions (work the network!)
• Communities built around facilities or research areas
• Infrastructure: physical or computing, clustering around technologies
• Empower local communities
• Be clear what people get out of it
• Champions needed: a small group that leads to dissemination: they are the drivers, who move the followers forward
• We need to foster better leadership: but how?
• Go to THEIR (government, big data) conferences
• Clear articulation of the job that needs doing

Lynne’s commentary: Many of the themes above seem to me to be good management & leadership practices in general. Convincing people to participate in larger projects is often about framing it so they know what they get out of it for their efforts, right? It was refreshing to see this spoken about candidly, though. I’ve been to an awful lot of conferences where leadership is referred to, but there isn’t as much discussion about how to actually get people to act.