What’s a Charrette?
Collaboratively developing digital preservation training and resources
Collaboration is a huge part of the Maintenance Culture project ethos, and our first big collaborative gathering is coming up on August 1 - 2. Myriad is gathering 24 incredible Maintenance Culture stakeholders / preservation and digital art powerhouses to start designing guidelines, workshop materials, tools, and resources to support institutions preserving born-digital, creative works. We’re calling the gathering a Charrette, which is a term we’re borrowing from other disciplines - it’s often used in urban planning.
A charrette is “an intensive, hands-on workshop that brings people from different disciplines and backgrounds together with members of the community to explore design options for a particular area.” (source) It includes involving people who will be impacted by the results of the project in the design phase of the project. For our work, that means involving artists in creating guidelines that will become the basis of the zine, which is intended for use by other artists. It also means involving digital preservation practitioners in creating a workbook that will be used by staff at cultural heritage institutions to guide their preservation efforts. We are aiming for cross-pollination of ideas across fields to produce richer resources.
We’re planning on achieving these complex collaborations by drawing from established models for collaboration. The World Cafe method will help us answer challenging questions together. Principles from Emergent Strategy and The Art of Gathering will help us shape a generative, supportive, inclusive working environment. We’ll use the fishbowl from Liberating Structures to help us translate and learn across groups with different experiences, including museum staff, artists, library workers, and gallery directors.
The collaborative, iterative approach we’re taking with the Charrette will run throughout the Maintenance Culture project. We’ll solicit feedback from users and even more experts to build on and improve drafts of resources.
After the Charrette, we’ll share more on the blog about how the event went. As we continue on the project, we’ll keep sharing how we’re managing to cultivate collaborative communities around Maintenance Culture. Follow us here for lessons learned, successes, and results of Maintenance Culture.
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.