Ideas working group notes 1/18/2012

Ideas WG Meeting Notes - 1/18/2012

  ANNOUNCEMENT: Our Next meeting will Feb 1st.  There is no meeting on Wed. Jan 25th.

(The note taker arrived ~ 30 minutes into the meeting. At this point, the group was having an informal individual stack. Below are several comments and discussion points that came from individual stack.)

• As a group, we should try to balance planning for an ongoing community meeting agenda, and continuing to gather discussion points.

• Pablo set up a web site for entering, classifying, and tagging concerns: http://montera34.org/occupybostonideas. It's pretty neat, and each of us should take a look at it.

• We'll need to propose some form of structure in order to get people interested in community meetings.

• Town halls and outreach are important. We should take Jeff's list of contacts, and start making contact with these organizations.

• We agreed to start meeting every other week. This will give individuals time to organize and work on their own outreach efforts.

• We had a volunteer to clean up/reorganize the Ideas working group wiki page. This should happen Friday night.

• We'd like to publish some of our materials on the ideas working group section of wiki.occupyboston.org. These resources would include our outreach letter, categorized list of concerns, and perhaps Jeff's list of community orgs/community leaders.

• A new working group met tonight; they're called "grow the movement". This group came out of Sunday night's action assembly. Grow the movement's mission is similar to ours. We may collaborate with them. On the other hand, having several groups doing outreach might be a good thing. Grow the movement is meeting right now, and they're talking about the practice of resource mapping.

• Kudos on the outreach letter. Perhaps it could give a more explicit reason for why community orgs should get involved with the ideas working group/Occupy Boston. But it's good enough to send as-is.

• Ideas would like to pursue some common goals with the outreach WG. We really need to think about having a spokes council. Several Occupy Boston working groups are all doing similar things.

• Several groups are trying to bring voices into the occupy movement. What makes the Ideas group distinct? Collect and reflect seems to be our core strategy.

• We could try to make some connections at the Citizens United events taking place this weekend.

• Our next meeting will take place on 2/1/2012, which is two weeks from today. We discussed a proposal from a few weeks ago -- changing the name of the Ideas working group. Try to think of names for the next meeting.

• Several people were planning to work on outreach projects, flyering, or a combination of the two. Two individuals felt inexperienced in doing outreach, but wanted to work with others as +1's.