Building DocNow: The Team

The Documenting the Now project officially launched on February 1st, 2016. In the past two months we’ve been busy putting all the pieces in place as we prepare to build DocNow and dive into the ethical, privacy, rights, and access issues around collection and preservation of social media content. Ed Summers wrote a great intro to the project, which will give you an idea of our general road-map and will also introduce you to our amazing advisory board.

Keeping up our committment to transparency, in this post we want to introduce the core project team which consists of the project’s principal investigators and our newly hired project staff including the project coordinator and consultants. Each of us will play an equally vital role in the project’s success and we’re excited to be this far along in the process.

Chris Freeland serves as Administrative Lead for the project. He is an Associate University Librarian at Washington University Libraries where he oversees library technology services, technology infrastructure, instructional support services, scholarly publishing, and publishing production services. Chris will handle the administrative management of the project including hiring of contractors, grant financial management and reporting, and direct supervision of the Project Coordinator position which will be based at Washington University in St. Louis. He will promote project participation among Washington University faculty, students, and among members of the regional collaborative for the Documenting Ferguson project.

Bergis Jules serves as Community Lead for the Project. He is the University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside Library where he oversees collection development related to university history, African American collections, political papers, and also leads community archives projects for the library. Bergis will lead the DocNow work on a white paper covering ethics, privacy, rights, and access issues related to collection and preservation of social media content. This white paper is a key deliverable for the project, which will serve as a working blueprint for the functionality that is built into the DocNow application. Additionally, Bergis will be responsible for promoting the project and the DocNow application at conferences and also lead community building around DocNow as well as helping to foster a stronger community of practice around social media archiving.

Ed Summers serves as Technical Lead for the project. He is the Lead Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, where he participates in digital humanities research and development. Ed will be responsible for the overall technical development of the DocNow application, including contributing code development and coordinating the team’s technical work. He will lead the technical program meetings and oversee interactions with advisory board members and other users to gain their input and feedback.

We’ve also had the good fortune to hire four people who will help us build DocNow over the next couple of years. We’re extremely excited to bring these four super talented folks onto the project.

Desiree Jones-Smith is the Project Coordinator for Documenting the Now. She has several years experience working in media, non-profit and education industries managing projects designed to investigate the intersection of media, education, and civic engagement. She will focus on the details and the deadlines that help us produce a final product for the community. Desiree will work to integrate, document, and support the work done by the rest of the team across disciplines, roles, and geographic locations.

Alexandra Dolan-Mescal is a project manager, designer, archivist and artist who is currently working at the University of California at Riverside. Her experience in information and user experience design for libraries and archives will be essential to the DocNow team as we work with our advisory board and other stakeholders to determine what the DocNow application will be doing and who it will be doing it for. We’re particularly excited to have Alexandra join the team because of her work as an archivist and digital humanist working with Occupy activists to create digital archival records and helping make collections such as the Queens College Civil Rights Archive a reality.

Francis Kayiwa is a dev/ops engineer with over two decades of experience building out IT infrastructure for libraries. His work on systems administration, configuration management, and automating application builds/deployments will be an essential ingredient to helping make the DocNow application easy to install, manage and use. In addition, Francis’ work with community archives such as the Read/Write Library and his leadership role in the Code4lib community will be invaluable to what we are trying to achieve in Documenting the Now. We are very grateful to Virginia Tech Libraries who have enabled Francis to work with the DocNow team as a consultant.

Dan Chudnov has over 20 years software development experience in research settings. Over that time he has worked as a developer, designer, writer, architect, team builder, lecturer, and IT manager. Dan specializes in designing data pipelines for analysis, visualization and data integration. He has also managed the development of digital collections infrastructure at major research institutions. We’re really excited to have Dan join the team because he will help us create the data analytics platform that serves as the foundation for DocNow. Dan’s experience leading software development projects such as the Social Feed Manager will also be of considerable help to us as we look to integrate with other existing social media archiving tools, digital repository systems and emerging data science platforms.

The Documenting the Now team and our advisory board have been using Slack as a collaborative space for discussing the design and development of the DocNow application.

A big part of this work involves your ideas and input so we welcome you to join us in Slack if you are interested in social media archiving, Web archiving practices, and the progress we are making.