Charrette Recap
Part 2: Establishing Values
Myriad gathered a group of creators and maintainers of born-digital, creative works to start defining guidelines and building a curriculum for sustaining access to complex digital creative works. We called the gathering a Charrette, which you can read more about in an earlier blog post, and you can read Part 1 of the recap on our blog too.
Many people we gathered at the Charrette had never met before, and never collaborated before! We brought together 20 people, with 20 individual perspectives, experiences, and relationships with born-digital, creative works. To build some cohesion across the group, set a base for decision-making, and guide our work throughout the Charrette, we facilitated an exercise to identify shared values. Through this exercise, we established a list of shared values that will guide us in our work on Maintenance Culture. The values are:
Accessibility
Authenticity
Collaboration
Experimentation
Personal Significance
Pleasure
Practicality
Sustainability
Transparency
We started with a long list of values that participants submitted in a pre-Charrette questionnaire, in response to the question “What are some of the values that underpin your work?” Participants then discussed values in small groups, building to bigger groups, and prioritized the list that you see above.
We established these shared values early in the Charrette, and used them to guide all the other work we did at the Charrette. When we started drafting guidelines, our value of collaboration showed up in recommended steps for collecting institutions like: “see if creator has opinions about whether e.g. migration or emulation would be a better long-term strategy,” “communicate with artist, document communication,” and “communicate what artists / creators can expect in terms of preservation, access, management of their collections over time.”
The guidelines are still a work in progress, and as we continue working on them we’ll keep coming back to this list of values. The values are also informing our approach to the workshops, tools, and resources we’re creating. Our value of experimentation led us to the idea of providing time and structure for experimenting with creative tools and digital preservation tools in the workshops in 2023.
The values provide us a shared root system to grow the rest of the Maintenance Culture work from - the workshops, guidelines, tools, and resources will all be rooted in these values. All of Myriad’s work is also guided by our organizational values, read more about them on our about page.
Maintenance Culture has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed on this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.