Supporting local digital preservation practitioner groups

[anjackson]

As part of this set of proposed changes, while working on the Registries of Good Practice project, I am looking at using the digipres.org site to provide simple discoverable 'home pages' for local practitioner support groups dedicated to digital preservation.

You can see the prototype here: https://deploy-preview-58--digipres.netlify.app/communities/

To keep the initial experiment manageable, I've constrained it to small set of UK user groups. I am aware of the existence of "Aye Preserve - Digital Preservation in the West of Scotland", the Dublin community of practice, and of course Australasia Preserves, but I would rather they request inclusion rather than I assume they wish to be included.

I really want to focus this on supporting groups that cover a small enough region that there is some chance that some members may get to meet in person from time to time (no overnight accommodation, no high travel costs).

National or international organisations and things like vendor or interest groups are out of scope for now (although encouraging independent vendor user groups is a particularly interesting possibility for future work, IMO).

I have also been working with DigiPres North and MidiPres to pull together some help pages dedicated to starting your own local practitioner groups. Feedback and further resources on that topic are very welcome!

So, is this a good idea? What do you think?

[anjackson]

In a PR-SIG meeting, Roxanna pointed out that the site should make it clear that non-English speaking groups are welcome to add themselves. I've updated the site so entries have to specify the languages they speak, and updated the Communities page to try to make this clearer.

[anjackson]

I've updated the proposed Communities page to try and make it more useful and friendly. I've also adjusted the front page to match.