Sustainability hangs like an albatross over many DH projects. Funding is short term, projects come and go. Granting foundations have made it abundantly clear that they expect continuity measures beyond the period of a grant to insure greater permanence to their investments. Moreover, many DH practitioners find themselves in conditions of contingent funding, one grant rejection from ejection from their field.

While it seems like a given that sustainability is desirable, we need to better unpack issues around what gets sustained and how. The current framing of “sustainability” centers around organizational and project continuity made possible by clever business models that market some sort of service for fees. (Those of us working on open access or open data efforts need to be especially clever!).

Ideas about what sustainability means and how we should attain it draws very heavily from neoliberalism. Grants are a kind of no-interest venture capital loan. They are there to seed a project, get it going, and then it is up to the project to maintain itself. Success means a project (and its associated institution) has enough continued income to continue or even grow through non-grant sources. The need for sustainability whips us into shape, making us hard nosed, rational cost optimizers and entrepreneurs. Such discipline has a value, but at the same time, many practitioners when into the humanities because their passions and skills happen to align to (sadly difficult to monetize) humanistic interests.

What do we lose if we demand entrepreneuralism in every walk of life, even (digital) scholarship? Is this kind of vision of sustainability always desirable?

One danger may be the encouragement of monopolies or oligarchies where “sustainability” is not just a means to an end (some sort of public service), it becomes an end unto itself. Dominating a market place and crowding out rivals is surely sustainable. But what is the larger community cost of that sustainability? Secondly, the humanities and social sciences themselves are inherently “unsustainable”. They do not turn a profit, but rely on continued philanthropic or public support. Both funding sources are now stretched to the breaking point as politicians, pundits, university administrators, and increasingly debt-burdened students demand tangible, easily monetized returns on investing in these areas of scholarship. Do finance-centric models of sustainability in DH further aggravate these problems?

One runs the risk of sounding naïve and highly entitled to even raise these issues, like spoiled children asking to be spared from the harsh discipline of the marketplace. However, a critical and more expansive perspective on “sustainability” may be very timely, since all areas of the humanities are threatened by the reductionist balance-sheets of neoliberalism.

What other dimensions do we need to consider when we discuss “sustainability”? Do we need to think more in terms of sustaining knowledge and information “ecologies” rather than single efforts that happened to dominate now? How do we sustain our community’s human resources, their expertise, dedication, and passion, when so many of them only have contingent employment?

When the grant funding for the THATCamp project runs out at the end of March 2014, my position as THATCamp Coordinator will also end. I personally am not too worried about the future of THATCamp: it’s already sustaining itself very well, and to some extent I think that even if people cease to organize or go to THATCamps, it won’t be a tragedy — the spirit of THATCamp cannot die, and I think THATCamp has already had some highly laudable effects.

So it’s getting near the time when we’ll need to give the THATCamp community an even greater degree of ownership than it has already. I’m proposing a session here to figure out how to set up a THATCamp Coordinating Council to take over the (very few) tasks that I’m currently performing as THATCamp Coordinator. Let me make one thing clear: I don’t want to use this session to actually *appoint* said Council; I want instead to use this session to figure out the best *process* for setting up such a Council. Should I call for volunteers and appoint the people I think would be best, or should we hold some kind of elections? How would we hold such elections? And if that turns out to be an easy decision, then we can also talk about what the demographics and duties of such a Council should be. I want this to be a highly-tweeted session as well, one that involves the virtual #THATCamp community as much as possible.

I did think about pre-scheduling this session at THATCamp Leadership, by the way, but I was actually worried that planning a particular session about the THATCamp Coordinating Council would be, well, un-THATCampy. So if you have ideas about how this should go, please comment here, tweet @thatcamp, and/or (if you’re coming to THATCamp Leadership) speak your mind in person during the initial scheduling session tomorrow.

I’ve got a very very drafty set of thoughts about the demographics, duties, and processes of the THATCamp Coordinating Council, which I will create a Notepad for and attach to this post. Anyone with an account on thatcamp.org (not just this site) can log in to edit that document. To get a THATCamp account, go to thatcamp.org/signup.

In a recent essay, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” Todd Presner identifies as the core Utopian idea of the Digital Humanities, “participation without condition.” For Presner this concept begins with how DH is making the walls of the academy porous through its “conceiving of scholarship in ways that foundationally involve community partners, cultural institutions, the private sector, non-profits, government agencies, and slices of the general public,” thus expanding “both the notion of scholarship and the public sphere in order to create new sites and nodes of engagement, documentation, and collaboration.” In so doing, DHers “are able to place questions of social justice and civic engagement, for example, front-and-center; they are able to revitalize the cultural record in ways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy into the expanded public sphere.”

Presner’s discussion of what might be called DH’s “Participatory Turn” can be reformulated for humanities scholars and teachers into a more specific and crucial question concerning how we might best reach productively beyond the walls of the literary classroom. Such a question gains added force from three relevant contexts: (1) David Marshall’s observation that the current academy is a 19^th century institution in which a 20^th century curriculum is taught to 21^st century students; (2) The fact that most humanities undergraduates don’t even know that there is such a thing as humanities research; and (3) The assertion made by Donald Brinkman of Microsoft Research that humanists don’t just need “big data,” they need “deep data.” These contexts raise at least three important questions: (1) How can humanists bring our research into the graduate and undergraduate classroom?; (2) How can we best curate and explore our datasets? and (3) How can we fruitfully engage the public, “citizen humanists,” in the work of the humanities, helping to deepen our data and the questions we ask of it?

I think these are key questions both for the future of DH and the future of the Humanities, well worth discussing at a THATCamp devoted to Leadership. They cut across many aspects of DH work, from teaching, to coding, to archives, to editing, to publishing, to licensing, and crowdsourcing.

THATCamp has opened up many opportunities for participants to share and develop skills in areas such as text mining, project management, material culture, and digital pedagogy (to mention just a few of the topics I’ve seen in browsing past THATCamps). But I want to take a step back and ask what are the skills important to digital scholarship?  My interest in the topic comes in part from my work with colleagues on a Mellon-sponsored global benchmarking study examining the skills and competencies necessary to support (and practice) digital scholarship.  I think there are some important commonalities between this proposed session and Rebecca Davis’ proposal to explore “Learning Outcomes for a Globally Networked World,” but the focus here would be more on scholars/librarians/technologists/professionals than undergraduates. (It might be interesting to compare lists of skills and competencies important to these different constituencies.)

In addition to understanding what skills and competencies are important to digital scholarship, I’d also like to explore how best to cultivate these skills. How do digital humanities centers and programs help their members to gain the skills and knowledge to do innovative, significant work? I love the spirit of exploration, collaboration and play embodied by THATCamp, but I also see the need to enable digital humanists at various levels of experience to hone their skills over a longer period of time than a day or a day and a half. (Ryan also points to the need to go beyond 101 in some THATCamp sessions.) Could we imagine new variants of the THATCamp model? Are there possibilities for online/ hybrid training, mentoring, local reading groups, partnerships with DH centers, iterative THATCamps, etc?