A toolkit for kickstarting a community

One of the three underlying themes of this years iPRES is “Starting to preserve”. Various groups amongst the organisers have for many months been discussing and planning how this might manifest itself at the conference... and beyond. Early in in the discussions it became apparent that there was a strong desire to leave a lasting legacy in the region, a digital preservation community of practice to keep fanning the flame of digital presentation interest that (hopefully) would be ignited through localised activities at the conference.

Discussions around how this might be achieved have exposed hitherto unexpected (or at least unsurfaced) problems that would need to be overcome. Problems such as who exactly would the target audience be; how could they be reached; how we could make the case for digital preservation to them when they may not even realise that they had a problem; how could we get them to attend the proposed sessions at the conference; how could they afford to attend; and, perhaps most importantly, what steps would need to be taken to ensure a community of practice didn’t wither and die post conference.

Luckily, the collective iPRES brain has been able to come up with some answers to some of these questions. We would like to pass on these learnings to the community. This lightning talk outlines the problems we have encountered and the (potential) solutions we will be employing to achieve the stated aim of leaving an iPRES legacy behind us.