Nimble Tents

Life in the anthropocene seems to be marked by an endless series of crises. Whenever we put together a temporary team to work on a project in order to react to a given crisis–whether environmental, social or otherwise–we call it a nimble tent. The professionals in the tent work fast and once the job is done, they dismantle it and go back to their regularly scheduled programming. These tents are usually composed of people working outside their home institution because of the need to have the right people for the job at hand.

Static site development has a role to play in many of the scenarios calling for a nimble tent. These projects do depend on the ability of teams to produce a project efficiently together and constantly communicate online. Because of this, static site development has to be combined with messaging applications and cloud-based solutions for data-entry, code sharing or document creation like Google Spreadsheet or GitHub.

Although nimble tents have to form around the needs of a specific context, that does not mean we can’t predict some archetypal team compositions. We usually can have some notions of what teams look like based on successful past efforts, and even those that did not quite succeed in their goals. One form of tent, for example, the “Rapid Research Response,” involves one or two technologists, one or two data curators, one or two researchers adept at finding data and sources online, one or two good writers and editors, a good promoter, a good project manager, and if necessary a media monitor to keep the team abreast of major developments on the ground and warn them of any security threats. We could imagine archetypal forms of teams for other types of work as well. Depending on the type, we can also decide whether static site development can play a role or not.

Here are some reasons to consider static site development:

The project could circulate without internet, and even grid electricity provided the user machines have access to battery power and hard storage
You want the project to persist without maintenance once the team disbands (by definition)
You want to ward off security threats from hackers and trolls. Because of the absence of a database, you close off many of the vulnerabilities of your data

Here’s what the “technologists” will need:

Working computers with a text editor, web browser, and terminal
The ability to install free and open source software

Here’s what all the team will need:

Working computers with a web browser
A messaging app
A predictable connection to the internet

contributor: Alex Gil (Yale University)
last update: 2021-08-04