Maintaining a Kick A** Tech Team and Organization
So you’ve hired a talented team, developed a shared vision, and implemented a bunch of user-centered tools and services. Now, how do you keep it going? Following up on Sibyl Schaefer’s 2015 talk “Designing and Leading a Kick A** Tech Team,” we’ll discuss how our small team of archivists provides ongoing technical leadership and expertise to our organization, an independent archive. Informed by sustained engagement with users, we strategically deploy low-cost, loosely coupled and easily maintainable (and abandon-able) tools that solve specific user needs and build political capital. Using staff turnover as an opportunity, we look for ways to build confidence and competence with technology across the organization, resulting in shared operational commitments and collaborative project management. Through informal horizontal skill-sharing, we value the existing expertise and labor of staff, break silos of tech knowledge, foster ethical computational thinking, and have fun experimenting, learning and teaching together.
