First DHtech Meetup as an ADHO SIG

The SIG activities that were discussed include the new mentorship program, which will offer a long term, low frequency partnership between members working on various DH topics; and a community code review initiative, which aims to improve the code quality of DH projects.

Attendees introduced themselves and shared some of their ongoing work; people joined from Europe, Australia, and the US. Some common themes that emerged were problems of sustainability, the difficulty of finding and funding qualified software developers on the one hand, and training students in DH on the other hand.

On the more policy oriented side, attendees discussed the need to clarifying the goals of DHTech in relation to other software- and DH- focused initiatives and organizations, including the RSE movement and the Software Sustainability Initiative. The attendees suggested some of the topics unique to the DHtech community, including a strong focus on data source criticism due to data heterogeneity and therefore workflows of data curation, the ethical implications of working with specific sources, and the close interaction of DH RSEs with non-coding experts in their code development.

Upcoming opportunities

The next DHTech meetup will take place in mid November and revolve around projects, both in their initial phase as well as matured, that have to work with fuzzy or uncertain dates.

If you are interested in the mentoring program, either as mentee or mentor, feel free to fill the short mentorship interest poll.

The next meeting of the community code review initiative will take place on 20th of October. Please join the DHTech Slack for more information.