And there are great questions about growth and organizing that might be interesting to dig into. As more and more THATCamps are organized, issues of structure and authority may arise. Are we building a network or a community or both? What are the ramifications?

As someone helping to organize a regional THATCamp in Northern California this fall, I’m very interesting in exploring these ideas and hearing more from other organizers about things that have worked or not worked, and why.

I’d also love to share some fun tools I’ve used to look at the GLTHATCamp Twitter network before and after the event. See this short write-up I put together: blog.jumpslide.com/2010/05/twitter-network-visualization-to.html

Personally, I like Boone’s suggestion too, for Many Camps/One Registration, but then maybe he’s just trying to get us to start using BuddyPress. 😉
(Which actually wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.)

@Lincoln—I think you’re right that this could open up discussions about how academic communities are organized and fostered online. I think this is something major academic organizations like the AHA and the OAH are struggling with right now.

The things I’m most concerned with for THATCamp-in-a-Box are the simple, logistical things:

* Managing applications/proposals
* Getting attendees registered, and getting their information
* Getting the schedule of sessions up in a much more digestible/readable/sharable manner.
* Getting a nice, presentable site for the event up and running.

So, for me, if the organizer already has methods in place for doing the above, awesome. If they don’t, and want a package that does these things out of the box, that’s what THATCamp-in-a-Box should offer.

One idea I’ve been tossing around in my head (and spurred on even more by a tweet from @williamjturkel) is to not actually have attendees use our blog to post session ideas or talk about them, if they don’t want to, but instead do that in their own blog space and aggregate those posts here. That way, users contributions to the camp are more closely tied to the personal publishing space for individual attendees, but aggregated on the camp site. THATCamp-in-a-Box could have a mechanism for doing this, where a camper could enter their blog URL, and enter a feed in a second field for whatever category or tag they’ll use to post about THATCamp from their own site. The, the camp WordPress site just pulls in those posts, and even routes them to the camper’s individual profile page. I wanted to set something up like this for this year’s camp but didn’t find time to do it (That Omeka thing keeps getting in the way.)

Related, I’d say that, even if we didn’t centralize THATCamp sites, we could (and probably should) aggregate/archive the feeds directly from regional camp sites. We could even get the Tumblr feeds. 🙂 But I’m not sure this is a job for THATCamp-in-a-Box.

I personally like the idea of having hosted THATCamp sites, where campers have one registration, and they can apply to, and participate in, any camps with that one profile, as Boone suggests. They could even help organize regional camps more easily. WordCamp does somethign like this.

I mean, sure, here I am for two years, and I want to earn my salary, so I was thinking that I might need to set up some process or something for preserving the THATCamp sites, which, as y’all have pointed out, are all over the place and could easily decay. But the problem is that once I set up some kind of process, it then becomes somehow magically required, which means that it’s an added burden, which means that it becomes that much harder to start a THATCamp.

Still, I’m all in favor of *optional* centralized hosting, particularly on some kind of BuddyPress system (especially with integrated MediaWiki, since I’m feeling the lack of a THATCamp wiki), because I do think that’ll make it easier for people, and I think that’s the most important thing. I like how symmetrical all the WordPress THATCamp sites currently are — they’re all so pretty! — but on the other hand I don’t want to make building a WordPress site with our software a *requirement.* THATCamp Chicago is so far being run on Tumblr ( thatcampchicago.tumblr.com/ ), and that’ll work just fine.

One cool thing about central hosting for regional THATCamps is that it’d allow frequent attendees to develop something of a THATCamp portfolio, where all their blog posts and comments from various events would be collected together in their profile. That’s on top of the independent value of the archive that Lincoln mentions above.

Sounds like an interesting idea for a session, and potentially useful even for people who aren’t interested in hosting THATCamps per se.

I’m especially interested in the idea for a WordPress/BuddyPress/Mediawiki service. Besides the added value of simplicity, that kind of a service would ensure that archives of past THATCamps were preserved as the coordinators of regional THATCamps change over time.