WG/OBIT/Minutes/120726

= OBIT Meeting 26 July 2012 =

Jeremy, Kendra, Brandon, Steve (notes)

S17 Website
S17 people are looking for a quick website. Brandon started working on one. This is a limited-duration campaign, so the UI is not super pretty. The S17 people want an RSVP form, a blog, and a wepay button.

Site is http://s17.occupyboston.org.

If anyone wants to help, create a login and jump in.

v2dev
Instead of better groupware, let's start simple: blogs and forums.

Stuff that we need in order to go live:


 * Needs captcha
 * cleanup of block configuration.
 * Better home page.
 * a new logo (that doesn't say "Group beta ver. 2.0").

We'll use http://voices.occupyboston.org as the hostname.

Brandon will create a new hosting order for voices.occupyboston.org. We'll leave existing v2dev as the development website for voices.occupyboston.org.

Please test v2dev forums and blogs, and try to break something.

Going away Party & Handoff
We'll shoot for a weekend, towards the end of August. Aug 24th or 25th. Location to be figured out.

Jeremy will look at Artist Asylum (Somerville)?

Debate on Electoral vs Non-electoral Politics
After general will, there's still a general unwillingness (among Boston Occupiers) to get involved in electoral politics.

What about a debate on community access television (Brookline)? Bring in a few people from each side (voting is worthwhile vs voting is not worthwhile), and get a moderator.

Could we do a debate with live studio audience?

Decided on a 4--6 person debate + moderator. Discussing whether or not voting is worthwhile.

Kendra will send out a request for participants in Boston. Steve will see if anyone in occupy Arlington is interested.

Possibly seek sponsorship from political science departments at universities.

Possibly work in conjunction with league of women voters.

First challenges: finding a place, picking a date, getting people.

Thinking about late August/early September.

Kendra will contact Jess, to start working on some of the logistics.

training
We'd like to do additional training sessions, and we discussed a few potential topics. We decided to put out a survey, and see what topics people are interested in.

Trainings 1x/month during OBIT meetings.

We'll need to find space to hold the trainings.

hack days
The last few hack days went well, but we haven't had one in a while. We'll continue to use Sunday meetings as hack days.

Sunday Meeting
3pm at Starbucks in Arlington center. Then head over to OA summer gathering afterwards. Steve to email location. Potentially a hack day, if we have internet access.

General Will
Jeremy is interested in getting a direct democracy group together (General Will, etc). Waiting to get meeting space issues straighted out.