Dear David,
To the very helpful comments you've already elicited, I'll add a few nonduplicative ones (with apologies for stating the bits you personally already know about).
On governance, I am a pluralist, and I hope that DH projects adopt widely varying models of governance, and that the project managers share with each other their experiences. Entering as we are into uncharted territory on so many fronts, we scholars have to be a bit adventurous, and as forward thinking as we can.
This pluralism applies, I think, to the earlier question about forms of communication. In my experience, each project group conducts two kinds of communication: ephemeral and permanent(ish). With the first type we discuss ideas, share news, and ask questions, and hit the delete button frequently; with the other type we hammer out decisions or consensus, and to remind ourselves of what we've said and to help newcomers or the public get up to speed. My advice to any dh project is to pick any one or two venues most members are comfortable with, as long as both kinds of communication are supported. What specific venues are chosen will depend upon who's involved.
For my Guide to Evagrius Ponticus, http://evagriusponticus.nethttp://evagriusponticus.net// I established an advisory board of three scholars, and specified to them before they accepted that if anything should happen to me, they have all rights and responsibilities for the work (this is on top of the free culture license, which really gives this right to anyone). I intend to specify this arrangement in my will, as well. The advisory board, along with the bibliography board, has helped create co-ownership and turn what was once merely an individual's project into a stable, sound reference work with a modest level of peer review and better prospects than before for a sustainable future.
Each of our various scholarly societies should, in my opinion, set up a standing committee for digital publishing and research. This committee should, as a bare minimum, help members who are retiring, are struggling, or have died, to find caretakers for their digital projects, without burdening the society. Of course such a committee should do a lot more (I have quite a list going for the new digital publishing and research committee I'm involved in), but this bare minimum would facilitate experiments in governance and help contribute to answering your questions, questions I think many of us will puzzle over for some time to come.
Best wishes,
jk -- Joel Kalvesmaki Editor in Byzantine Studies Dumbarton Oaks 1703 32nd St. NW Washington, DC 20007 (202) 339-6435
From: <Michelson>, David Allen <david.a.michelson@Vanderbilt.Edumailto:david.a.michelson@Vanderbilt.Edu> Date: Thursday, June 20, 2013 11:28 PM To: "<dm-l@uleth.camailto:dm-l@uleth.ca>" <dm-l@uleth.camailto:dm-l@uleth.ca> Subject: [dm-l] After... Mailing List, Wiki, Blog or what?
Dear Colleagues,
I'd like to add a follow up question to this very informative discussion.
I am also in the process of building a DH sub-community for a specific disciplinary niche.
I would like to ask your advice on governance and standards.
I am looking for models and best practices to ensure long term sustainability of my collaborative DH project once it hopefully outgrows its incubation stage.
Could you please point me to long running DH projects whose protocols for governance, editorial oversight, institutional ownership/hosting I might emulate? I am thinking of medium sized DH projects as models, so bigger than one scholar publishing a digital project, but much smaller than the TEI consortium or Digital Medievalist.
Given the concerns over sustainability inherent in DH, I am also interested in advice on how to transition a project from the stage where a grant-funded PI is the leader in getting content online to where a volunteer editorial board (and institutional hosts) maintain a project longer term. Also, how do DH projects handle the preservation of content for such a project? The data will be licensed open source, but who should hold the copyright and renew the domain name after the project is launched? A university library? An s-corporation independent of any institution (like some non-profit scholarly journals or professional societies)? the public domain, the original scholarly contributors?
Please suggest links to examples to follow from existing projects if you are aware of them.
Thank you!
Dave
David A. Michelson
Assistant Professor Vanderbilt University www.syriaca.org