Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 11/13/2008 – 10:09am
Notes provided by Steve Hanson and Maurreen Skowran
Present
Maurreen Skowran
Michelle Ferrier
Peggy Holman
Stephen Silha
Steve Hanson
Web site
Maurreen — How can we get people moved from the Google group to the site?
Steve — That may be a little abrupt at this point. Could we get some people posting on the new site?
Peggy — Can we use the Poynter conference as a transition point, because tje group will get new energy then? Can we bring this up on the Google group as a transitional period?
Steve — Probably should give some thought to the possibility of building a two-way mailing list implementation on the site. This may be interesting since it doesn’t look to me like all of that behaves well in Drupal 6 yet — but I’ve been a little out of the loop on that.
Need to have some discussion about the workflow of the site (such as what goes on the front page, who has what privileges), and what would the issues be for the upcoming conference.
I’ll send out a message to the Google group about this, and set up a conference call in ReadyTalk so that we can actually look at the site in the process. I’ll need to pull together some training info, etc. The call will be Thursday, Nov. 20.
We’ll move to discussing the web site for the near future as issues for the Stewards meeting calls.
Can we start moving more of the functionality from the various wiki’s, BaseCamp, and other places into the single web site?
Also — Peggy is going to copy over recent posts from the WordPress site at journalismthatmatters.org. All the posts there were by her. Steve had copied much of that from there to here. He will change the attribution from Bill Densmore to her.
The Google group has about 30 (Steve – actually it’s 113 subscribers) subscribers, with eight to 10 of them active. The new site has 12 accounts, two other people who started to sign up but didn’t finish, but only two people have written anything there.
Stewards
Are we fulfilling our purpose?
Probably doing so — should probably continue to have the Stewards meetings by phone till we’re more set up with the new web site.
We’ve been having some problems with the fact that the calls each
week often skip over the issues from the previous calls, and just
concentrate on new items.
Who are the people in the Stewards group? Don’t seem sure.
Probably should build a Stewards Organic Groups group on the site. How can we organize that?
We probably need to work on re-invigorating the Stewards group. We should extend an invitation to ask people to participate, and make explicit what skills are needed and what the mission is. This could probably use more structure. Can we make this less haphazard by having some points persons on particular issues so that we don’t just keep letting things drop? We should review what the original declared purpose of the group actually was. There should probably be some invitation to the current members of the stewards group, asking if they’re interested in continuing, and if not, replace them with some new blood. Who will do this? Michelle will do this but we need to first figure out who is in the group. Michelle will try to send it to the Basecamp site e-mail list, which is as close as we have to a Stewards mailing list.
Some people might want to participate but not be able to make the calls. Because probably no single time will be good for everyone, we might start changing the call times, to widen the opportunity.
There were some to-do lists on the Basecamp site — someone who is involved in them should probably update the status — think about how we can move some of that functionality into the new site.
Next call will probably be 11 December.
Poynter conference –
How will the web site be used in conjunction with this?
What about the funding issues? Still not resolved.
Announcement is going out very soon. Roles and responsibilities in the new news ecology, March 1-4 at Poynter. Trying to do outreach to non-journalism people who are community-involved. How do we try to reach those people?
Should talk about that during the next call.