Quick recap of the first DANG business meeting held in the history of humanity

Just wanted to give a quick recap on the business meeting for all of you who couldn’t be with us in person yesterday.  Matt did a great job of organizing us, and he’ll be putting together a summary of the results of our workshoping at some point. We had about 40 people at the meeting, thanks so much to everyone for your active participation!

Our meeting agenda was straightforward:

I. Call to order and introduction

This included a discussion of what DANG can and can’t do as an interest group within the AAA. Matt is in the position of ‘Convener’ for a two year stint, after which Daniel Lende will take over for 2 years.

II. Mission Statement SWARM

Matt created some brainstorming questions for us relating to 6 different aspects of digital anthropology:  Cyberstudies, Teaching, Research Tools/Methods, Open Access, Public Anthropology, Professional Interactions/Blogging.  These questions are available for you to see in our previous post, and we welcome your ideas in the comments there.  We were encouraged to THINK BIG, and everyone put their answers to these questions on post-it notes, which we then pooled together onto big sheets of paper.

Following the brainstorm we broke off into small groups and set about looking for themes within the answers to each of the questions – what are the most important issues to us right now?  Groups were then tasked with coming up with a mission statement relating to their topics, and a clear task DANG could aim to complete, relating to this mission.

Each group summarized their primary points for us as a whole. We had lots of suggestions for things like wikis, best practices, digital ethics statements and more.  We’ll post these in the near future to get more feedback on them and start making some task forces to work on them.

III. New Business

We never got to new business, really.  This involves figuring out what type of event we would like to organize for the 2013 meeting. The Society for Visual Anthropology did say they’d be interested in co-sponsoring a session with us.  We can sponsor other sessions as well, and we can have one ‘special event’ at the meeting.  So: your ideas. Do you have innovent ideas? workshops? mentoring and networking sessions you’d like to see? Specific themes we should create paper sessions around? I know we’re still at this year’s AAA, but think about what you wish you had here and maybe we can do something about it next year.