WG/InterOccupy Communications/Minutes/01062012

InterOccupy Communications Meeting Notes - Fri Jan 06 2012

Present: Farhad, Bobby, Sarah, Stephanie, Noah, Marlene, Martin, Elizabeth

Farhad was the facilitator (sort of) and notetaker.

I. Housekeeping

A. New Email Addresses

We're going to switch over to interoccupy@occupyboston.org as our main email address. The old gmail address will forward to the new address, and all email in the old account will be copied to the new account.

We still need volunteers to check interoccupyarchive@occupyboston.org, process the incoming information, and post it on the OBIO wiki.

B. Groups.OccupyBoston.org Password

Sarah believes that she may have it in her email somewhere and will look for it.

C. Inreach/COMHUB

Farhad, Sarah, and Bobby will be the Inreach Working Group's three points of contact in OBIO.

D. InterOccupy.org Conference Calls

Members of OBIO are encouraged to join the InterOccupy.org announcement list to help insure that OBIO is able to adequately inform the Occupy Boston community of InterOccupy.org conference calls.

E. Calendar

Sarah will set up a Google calendar for OBIO to list relevant events, and -- if needed -- will ask for help on the mailing list to get said calendar displayed on the OBIO wiki.

F. Meeting Place

E5 was very crowded for this meeting, and it made starting the meeting challenging. Bobby will contact the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center about the possibility of meeting there when necessary. Noah suggested the possibility of meeting in Chau Chow City. As of this writing, our regular meetings will still take place at E5.

II. OWS Road Trip

After some discussion, the following action items were created:

A. Sarah will help with party planning.

B. Farhad will write Ian at the Democracy Center about the possibility of holding a party there and CC Stephanie.

C. Both InterOccupy and the Road Trip "bottomliners" will make sure that there's an announcement at every GA soliciting support and volunteers for housing, skillshare organizing, party planning, and tour guides.

There was also some discussion of OBIO spending as much time as possible with our visitors, as well as the idea of creating welcome packets for them (e.g. with a copy of the Boston Occupier, a map of Boston, a Tiny Tent, etc).

III. Mass Occupy

After some discussion, all present reached consensus that it would be best for members of Occupy Boston to attend Mass Occupy as individuals intent on observing.

IV. #J17

Sarah described DC's plans for #J17 and all present reached consensus that she'll make an announcement of their plans to the Occupy Boston GA.

V. Contact List

Farhad shared the new Contact List format with everybody. (Editor's note: I didn't take notes on this, but what follows is an email that I wrote after the fact.)

As of this writing, we are still using a Google Doc, as that was the consensus at the last working group meeting where it was discussed. Here's the format:

(I) There are tabs for OBIO, Occupy Boston, Local, National, and International contact lists.

The OBIO list is our internal contact list for OBIO members.

The Occupy Boston list is going to be more-or-less obsolete once the Inreach Working Group -- of which I am a member -- has the COMHUB project up and running. I.e. if we're looking for specific OB folks or working groups, then the best thing would probably be for OBIO to work with COMHUB to track them down. So! Personally, I wouldn't worry about building this list up.

(II) There are currently columns for Occupation, Primary Working Group, Name, whether or not the contact is "Public", the member of OBIO who made the contact, Phone, Email, Twitter, Facebook, and Notes. The International list also has a column for Country.

(III) The "Public?" column is intended to be used as follows:

A. If the contact in question is comfortable with having their info entered into a semi-public document, then please place a "Y" in the "Public?" column and fill out the rest of their info. Anybody looking for that contact's info will now be able to find it easily.

B. If the contact in question is NOT comfortable with having their info entered into a semi-public document, then please place a "N" in the "Public?" column and then leave everything but their Primary Working Group, Name and their OBIO Contact blank. Anybody looking for that contact's info will still be able to get it through the designated OBIO Contact, but the contact will be afforded a degree of privacy in the meantime.

C. If you have old contacts, and you're not sure if they'd be comfortable or not, then please place a "TBD" in the "Public?" column and then proceed as if they're not comfortable until you're able to confirm otherwise.

I've marked all my TBDs in light red so that I remember that they still need to be confirmed, and I would suggest that others do the same.

Everything else should (I hope) be pretty straightforward. We may want to add columns for things like Secondary Working Group or Projects as we see fit, so please feel free to do so. In the meantime, please add those kinds of details to the "Notes" column.

All members of OBIO are encouraged to add their contacts to the Contact List.

VI. Brainstorming on the meaning of "relevant information"

This item was tabled due to a lack of time.