Dear all,
I apologise for the length of this e-mail, but I write regarding a series of fairly fundamental changes to the DM infrastructure that we have been planning for some time now. Given the scale of these changes, we on the DM Board think it is important to explain these in some detail and request feedback from the Community before we go ahead with them. They will also require a change of the Byelaws, and so again we need input from the Community for this.
Unfortunately the existing infrastructure has proven unmanageable. The wiki and mailing-list have both been subject to large-scale spam attacks, such that the wiki now contains many many thousands of articles, only 70 or so of which are genuine. The wiki has also had almost no activity beyond that of the Board, and so it has not been doing the job that we had hoped. Furthermore the website itself, which we have been hosting and coding ourselves (with substantial help from James Cummings and Dan O’Donnell) is also proving increasingly difficult to manage: it depends on the generosity of James and Dan to host and administer, even adding new pages is not trivial, and it has needed a dramatic overhaul for some time but to do this requires much more time and effort than we have been able to manage. For all of these reasons, we propose the following:
1. Moving the static website from the existing infrastructure (Cocoon + TEI + custom XSLT) to a standard CMS (currently Wordpress). 2. Closing down the wiki entirely and replacing it with a blog. 3. For the moment we are leaving the Journal in place, but we are very likely to move it to a dedicated open journal hosting of some sort. We have been discussing this in some detail with Revues.org but are not yet committed to this.
As most of you have realised, we have already set up a Wordpress version of the site at http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/, and this is already proving to overcome the problems listed above. The proposal is therefore to make this the DM site and close down the old one, except perhaps for the Journal.
However, the current Byelaws require that DM maintains a wiki (see http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/byelaws/#wiki). The Board is therefore not free to close the existing wiki without first changing the Byelaws. Even if we chose to keep the wiki, however, the Board feels that the Byelaws should not lock us into using any single technology, and so they should be changed even if we keep the existing infrastructure. The details of the proposed changes to the Byelaws will be posted shortly as a separate e-mail and on the new website, but in essence we propose simply to replace the term 'wiki' with 'information resources' and to adapt the containing sentences accordingly.
We would be grateful for any feedback about any aspect of this, preferably by e-mail to the list for general discussion, or alternatively to board@digitalmedievalist.org or any members of the Board directly. The next Board meeting is 4pm GMT+1 on Monday 2 June, at which point any comments will be discussed, and any changes in the Byelaws will be presented to the membership for vote shortly after that (as specified in §9 of the Byelaws: http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/byelaws/#amendments).
Thank you, and we look forward to receiving your comments.
Peter Stokes (on behalf of the Executive Board)
-- Dr Peter Stokes Senior Lecturer Department of Digital Humanities King's College London Room 218, 2nd Floor 26-29 Drury Lane London, WC2B 5RL Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2813 peter.stokes@kcl.ac.uk