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Some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently that might make for a session or a side-hacking:

1) Amazon Web Services for Poets. Father-of-blogging-among-other-things Dave Winer has started a tutorial called EC2 for Poets, showing non-techies how to run their own virtual server on AWS. CHNM has started to use these cloud services, from storage to high-performance computing needs (like MapReduce), but I suspect all of us should know more about AWS and its possible uses (and drawbacks).

2) Digital Humanities Registry. It’s 2011 and it’s still hard to find the blogs/twitter usernames/etc of our community. There are some scattered Twitter lists and Day of DH lists and combined feeds, but some merging of OPML files would be helpful; we’ve thought about doing this at prior THATCamps but never followed through.

3) What Can We Learn from Journalism? I’m increasingly of the mind that journalists (at least forward-thinking journalists) are about 3-5 years ahead of the humanities in dealing with changes brought about by digital media and technology (mainly because necessity is the mother of invention—their business is tanking), from information-gathering techniques to new business models to new genres to data mining.

4) New to Me. C’mon, show me a website, service, or tool I’ve never seen before but should know about. Different than dork shorts in that it can’t be a site/service/tool that’s yours. Surprise me with something that is oddly applicable to the humanities, to be emulated or used.

5) New Peer Review Models. If double-blind peer review is broken, what are some possible replacements?

6) THATCamp Sustainability. As I like to say, THATCamp is a movement, like the Olympics. It could use a less corrupted model than the Olympics, but still a sustainable one. A model that doesn’t rely on selling TV rights. For instance, would it be OK to move to a pay-ahead-of-time (but still modestly) system so that each camp is properly funded?