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THATCamp New England is a loosely run organization, but it does have some business to transact. I’d like to hold a session on Saturday to take care of some business. Ideally the following kinds of people would come:

• previous organizers of THATCamp New England
• anyone who is interested in organizing a future THATCamp New England
• and anyone who just wants to be in the loop

The main business to transact is to find the institution (or institutions) who want to hold THATCamp New England next fall or spring. There is no need for a firm commitment at this point, but if you’re interested, then you’ll want to get in line tomorrow.

The other business is to thinking about sustaining THATCamp NE from year to year. There are two things to keep in mind. First, the Mellon grant to CHNM that funds the central organization of THATCamp (i.e., Amanda French’s amazing efforts as chief THATCampista, and thatcamp.org) will be finished soon, and the central organization of what will follow is still being organized. This shouldn’t affect THATCamp NE too much, since we haven’t received Mellon money for a couple years, but we do need to make plans for continuity on our part and on how we can contribute back to the international organization. Second, our multiyear grant from NERCOMP which has provided the lion’s share of our funding for the past three years will run out after next year, and we need to make plans to continue sustainable funding. It would be great if people with connections at their institutions could help make plans for raising funds (we don’t require much).

I hope we can wrap up this business very quickly (let’s say no more than half an hour) and move on to other sessions.

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Last year at THATCamp New England I gave a workshop on using plain text for scholarship, especially using Markdown and Pandoc. Tom Scheinfeldt and Abby Mullen apparently struck some kind of deal whereby I am obligated to talk about Markdown, so here is a session proposal. I propose that we talk about how how to write scholarly work in Markdown and Pandoc. If we want, we can also talk about more esoteric plain text tools like git and knitr and LaTeX. If you’re interested in doing this session, then you might want to take a look at the compilation of links here.

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I'd like to propose a show-and-tell session for people who are making maps or want to get started with them. Anyone who wants to participate can spend a few minutes showing a map they made—and preferably, actually rendering the map in front of everyone else. Hopefully we'll have a diversity of mapping methods which will give us a quick overview of the possibilities. Then for the remainder of the session, we'll talk about what was interesting in the maps we saw, and how to make them. Perhaps we'll break up into smaller groups so that mapping masters can give impromptu tutorials to beginners. By bringing together all the mapmakers into one place, I hope people will also be able to find someone who has already solved some of the problems they're facing.

If the scheduling crowd preferred, we could make this session more general, and turn it into a data analysis showcase.