Archive:2008-02-25

This is a Core Team meeting.

Attendance/introductions
Who's taking minutes?

Goals for the semester
Where do we want SFC to be by the summer?

Brainstorm 5 internal projects that should get done in the near future
Also brainstorm at least a couple "next actions" for each project.

Anyone wanna be chair or vice-chair?
Someone could practice chairing the next meeting if they want and nobody objects.

Slimming the Bureaucracy
Why is there so much bureaucracy?
 * Quick answer is we tried operating SFC without any serious structure for a long time, and ultimately it burned everyone out and things fell apart. The Bylaws now clearly state who has the ability to make decisions on the global level and how they may do so. After a long period of time in which nobody had responsibility or accountability, and repeated failures of e.g. the consensus decision-making model (whenever we failed to reach consensus, nothing got done), I think that a little structure and bureaucracy is necessary.  Trust me, I'm a Quaker with anarchist sympathies, I like consensus and flat/nonexistent structures as much as anyone, but I think it's frequently hard to do things that way when doing activism across several time zones with people you've never met.--Nelson 01:02, 26 February 2008 (JST)

Wiki overhaul/maintenance
i'd like to discuss the idea of creating a team to manage the website content, specifically the wiki. with the new wiki skin, we have the ability to extend our web presence considerably, but we need people to keep the info on here up to date. This might be more appropriate for the volunteers team than for the core team, but i'd still like to at least touch upon this. -Parker
 * I think we want to wait until we have a lot more volunteers before we start splitting them up into teams again... in the near future, I think we'll just have a single "volunteers" team to cover all volunteer work (aside from perhaps the web team). Adding more teams I think amounts to adding more bureaucracy, which our Columbia friend was criticizing in the comment above ;-) --Nelson 01:02, 26 February 2008 (JST)

Minutes
log

Attendance

 * Karen Rustad, Nelson Pavlosky, Hendrik Grahl, Parker Phinney, Alex Kozak, Richard Kaufman from UPRM
 * Karen is "chairing", Nelson is taking minutes.

Goals

 * Gavin's post - http://www.gavinbaker.com/2007/12/26/my-002-on-the-future-of-students-for-free-culture/
 * 1) Incorporate
 * 2) Get funding and hire a Coordinator
 * 3) Pursue 501(c)3 status
 * 4) increase communication between chapters
 * 5) Increase volunteerism and participation in governance (of SFC)
 * 6) Develop strategies to assist the growth and sustainable development of chapters
 * 7) develop strategies to increase our profile and influence off-campus


 * support the Board in working on incorporation + 501(c)3 + hiring the coordinator
 * sorbix/Alex volunteers to help
 * Activist packet / "how to start a chapter" kit
 * Past attempts include Start a chapter and MyChapter
 * Encourage more self-reporting from chapters, e.g. through the chapter blogs...
 * perhaps some sort of blog-a-thon?
 * (Or maybe a round-robin where chapters take turns interviewing each other?) --Nelson 06:49, 2 March 2008 (JST)
 * encourage people to overcome their hangups over posting stuff to their chapter blog, post about ideas, things before they happen and post-mortems of how they went after they happen. Remember, your chapter blog is both a way to reach the outside world *and* other SFC chapters.
 * Set up software so that chapter blog posts are automatically published to their chapter "announce" mailing list
 * Perhaps a podcast? Each chapter can do its own episode, upload it, and if it's approved broadcast it. (Probably should wait and see if we can succeed at blogging first before attempting a podcast.)
 * A free culture reporter/newspaper, a person or group of people who investigate and report on chapters' activities and other internal happenings, rather than relying entirely on the chapters to self-report.
 * Collect materials that chapters have created for their own use
 * (with the original source files so that they are easy to modify) --Nelson 06:49, 2 March 2008 (JST)
 * Make a Students for Free Culture pamphlet
 * Cleaning up the SFC wiki
 * How can we deal with information fragmentation between the global and chapter wikis? (Frequently lousy pages on the SFC wiki beat relevant, up-to-date pages on chapter wikis in Google searches b/c of SFC's better pagerank.)
 * Good job on the new wiki skin, Parker! (Can we get it on the chapter wikis too?)
 * Who wants to be Core Team chair or vice-chair(secretary)? Think about it for next meeting!
 * We need project management software.
 * Parker is volunteering to help Nelson & Christina with that.
 * We're playing around with Basecamp now, but we need to investigate FOSS options ASAP.