This is something we (the humanities community) really need. Back when UPenn list died, what I gathered was that the grad student who had been managing it graduated and left it in disarray. So when someone got around to cleaning it up, the whole mailing-out functionality (which was its main use) was too difficult to get running again. He also implied that there were some institutional hurdles.

Yeah institutional hurdles can be a problem. I say we build it sans institution. Once it is good perhaps connect it up to something like HASTAC who can provide the bandwith and host it.

Going rogue! Nice.

Platform? Lyris, Mailman, other? I do think we want it to be disseminated via both e-mail & RSS & be archived openly on the web.

Lets keep the discussion located on individual pages. (Click the link above to go to platform as Zach already suggested Drupal . . .) Keep this page for general discussion and creating other pages . . .

Another option, once it's running is MediaCommons, but HASTAC is probably better.

Media Commons, HASTAC both good choices. If we got it up and it looked good and worked, probably not an issue to get an institution to adopt it. This actually strikes me as a simple project. The largest hurdle is getting people to see it/use it that aren't tech types, but for that I can try to get us an article in "The Chronicle" once it is ready.

@amandafrench I agree that if the effort is put into creating such a resource, there should be a variety of ways to acess data including RSS, email, etc

@dave Given the distinct need of this, I think that we'll collectively be able to hit "critical mass" -- articles in "The Chronicle" and other publications will help.

It's also worth mentioning that I work on the Crossroads Project (http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/), and this may be something that we could provide hosting/support for once it gets off the ground.

Agreed with David Lester about critical mass. With our blogs and Twitter feeds alone, it won't take long to get noticed.

Notice is one thing. Participation is another (she said darkly). It is really, really tough to break people of their workflow habits, especially when they more or less function. U Penn English CFP is broken, yes, so a new version of that will probably attract users, even if they have to re-register, learn a new site to go to & its new name & new functioning, etc. (Especially if we suck in the CFP archives.) But the History people are probably pretty happy with their H-NET; why should they use a new service?

Seems like there is a lot of interest in this sort of project, I was kind of half joking today when I put this up, just wanted to see how many others would be willing to help. But seems like a lot of interest so here is what I purpose. Lets let this discussion percolate a while (just a few days, don't want to loose momentum). Invite others to join, get a few more voice. Then late this week I will look to synthesizing the various viewpoints and see what kind of project (if any) we should go ahead with. How does this sound? (I have to be away Mon-Wed., and on the grid relatively sparsely so I couldn't do anything before the end of the week anyway.)

That sounds fine to me, Dave. I've been wondering whether we should seek a grant to support this work, though there is the possibility that that may be more trouble than its worth.

Sounds good. I think we might consider lobbying the MLA to do this, as well, though then of course it'd only be for the U Penn CFP list. (Hope they're not already building something.) NEH might fund a cross-discplinary CFP tool project.

I've taken the liberty of registering the Gmail address abettercfp@gmail.com, as well as the Twitter account @aBetterCFP. I'd be glad to share the password to both.

It's great to hear that UPENN is on it! My vote goes to offering to help, if that can be done diplomatically. Drupal is a solid approach, we have some experts at hand, and now this extensive discussion about features to pass on.

I agree. It's great to hear that UPenn is already making progress on this, and since they have institutional support and the network of people submitting, we should support what they're already doing.

To that end, I may have something useful to pass along. Last weekend, I started a test site in Drupal to see how the kind of framework we've been discussing might work. I'll post about it on the Design page discussion.

I also agree that we might want to see how the UPenn site turns out. I don't know if we can or want to compete with something with institutional support. If nothing has happened by this summer, we can certainly pick up where we left off. Perhaps at @THATCamp?

And we should certainly pass along our suggestions to UPenn.