Spring 2017 Sojourn Report

March 13-17, 2017

 

Time Design

	Monday 13	Tuesday 14	Wednesday 15	Thursday 16	Friday 17
Collegium 7am	TED TALK Nationalism Vs Globalism What is happening today? Jack	NSV What did we say and do about the New Social Vehicle? Jack	NRM Our work on the interior. Jack	New Audience Who is the audience of our work for today? Jack	The Profound Intent of the Archives Website Doug
Morning 9am	Ted Wysocki Week Overview	Website planning  – Reflection on class Doug	Brainstorm Fall Sojourn HDP celebrate with Ted HDP / WEB	HDP / WEB	Report Preparation
Afternoon 1pm	Archive work plan HDP / WEB	HDP / WEB 1:00  Beret & Wendell Meet with Interns	HDP / WEB	HDP / WEB	Final reports- Closing Celebration Lunch at 1:00 PM  Reports and Celebration til 5 pm
Evening 5pm	Website class presentation Danny & class	8 pm arrive / 9 pm Green Mill – Jazz   The Fat Babies	Greenrise Tour MLK Room for presentation & program support pitch.	Movie Night “An American Conscience” Reinhold Niebuhr film

 

Participant Teams:

HDP — Paul Noah, Oliveann Slotta, Mary Laura Jones, Terry Bergdall, Mark Poshepny, Ed Feldmanis, Pat Druckenmiller,

WEBSITE — Jean Long, Beret Griffith, Jack Gilles, Doug Druckenmiller, Wendell Refior, Marge Philbrook

Collegiums

The Spring Sojourn of the ICA Archives project had a new component in it called the morning collegium, which was a one hour event each morning from 7 to 8. They were overview contextual presentations and dialogues of our historical work and its relevance to today’s world. We were out to begin to identify the “gifts” we had to share, and just how we would do so in the new Web Site we are developing. Besides those attending around the table we had people joining us via Google Hangout who had a chance to contribute as well. Each session was recorded and they are available on YouTube for viewing.

The first was about what is happening in the world today?

The second topic was about what we called The New Social Vehicle, which is the “old name” for the research and demonstrations we did. But the focus was on the role of being “The People of the Question” and that the gift was really in the Methods and Spirit we used.

The third was on the New Human Consciousness, which was about how to understand all our work on the interior and how it can be understood; this included newly found charts of Joe Mathews on The Other World and his work on how they all interrelate.

The fourth collegium was about The People of God, or how we saw the emergence and sustaining of them as change agents. The key was identifying Communities of Practice. (COPs)

The fifth was about how to understand the dynamics of COPs and how we need to understand their language so that our archived material can be found by a search engine.

Here are the YouTube links where you can watch each of these collegiums.

1.  What’s Happening Collegium
2.  New Social Vehicle Collegium
3.  New Human Consciousness Collegium
4.  Emerging Change Agents
5.  Communities of Practice Dynamics Collegium

HDP team report

The HDP team developed a plan for a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Band of 24 to take place during the Fall Sojourn, October 9-13.  It discussed having the  event either on Wednesday and Thursday (October 11-12, 2017) or on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of that week. The team also planned to invite the whole group to attend the entire week and help set up and debrief the event itself. All of the Archive sojourners brainstormed with Ted on Wednesday morning what the celebration could be.  Following is a YouTube link to the brainstorm:  Band of 24 brainstorm

The team then went to work to identify 10 projects to consider for the celebration.  Later, this list may be reduced to 4 or 5 projects. Selection criteria were based on

1. Relevance to current issues, especially climate change and refugees
2. Availability of documentation.  
3. Recent and continuing contact with the community by former staff
4. Geographic representation from each of the nine geo-social grid continents
5. Residents from the community still live at the project location

Based on that criteria, the following projects were initially selected.  Relevant documents from the archives were retrieved for scanning.

1. Ombulgurri
2. Inyan Wakagapi
3. 5th City
4. Hai Ou
5. Sol de Septembre
6. Murrin Bridge
7. Kreuzberg Ost
8. El Bayad
9. Kawangware
10. Majuro

The team examined both the consult document and the report 2-4 years after the initiation of the project, as well as other documents in the files,  to write short articles about each project. (The team even phoned some former staff to learn more about the project.)

Further work now needs to be done to select the projects to feature in October. This list is flexible; for example, the team chose Sol de Septembre over Azpitia because it could not locate a consult document in English for Azpitia. So that project might change. And the team felt that featuring 4-5 projects would allow a more focused event.

A graduate student from Dominican University, Mark Poshepny, has been working with Mary Laura to write a report on selected HDP’s for the celebration.  He completed his internship at the end of the sojourn.  See Mark’s report separately.

We designed a poster, banners, and other decor for the event and for publicity ahead of it.

The team also sketched out a plan for the Archive event. It hopes to have spaces featuring each project, a hands-on activity in the Archives, and opportunities for community residents (who will be invited) and former staff to share stories.

Website team report

Work by the website team during the sojourn focused on the design of the new Archives website. Students from Dr. Danny Mittleman’s graduate content management course at DePaul University presented the results of their development work during the months of January and February. The students presented an analysis of the current site, 3 design templates and a style guide for us to consider. Following are links to the classes’ work.

Style Guide:  http://mittleman.org/hci421/docs/

Theme A:  https://nickd2.sgedu.site/theme-light/

Theme B: http://somerweich.com/HCI421_ThemeB/

Theme C: http://ericc.sgedu.site/

After review of the three themes we decided to work with Theme C and elements from the menu system and home page of Theme B.  Dr. Mittleman also suggested we look at  the History of the House of Representatives: http://history.house.gov/Oral-History/

We reviewed this site and recommend it as a vision of what we would like the archives site to be. The prototype site is located here:  https://icaglobalarchives.org/  We developed a sitemap for the new site based on the previous work of the Archives group.  Archives site map

We have 2114 digitized documents that can be immediately linked to 10 collections. This site is being developed in WordPress and a decision was made to transfer the current File-maker-pro accession database to MySQL which is the native database that works with WordPress. We anticipate that a working prototype would be available by August. A tech team was established composed of Wendell Rafior, Tim Wegner, Doug Druckenmiller, Steve Ediger and Danny Mittleman. One immediate issue is the decision of a cloud-based storage solution for the archive files and a hosting solution for the archives website and database.

The long term development of the website is at least a 2 year project and we will seek additional assistance from other classes at DePaul that would have an interest in working on the site as a service learning project.