Draft Agenda for collective meeting, Sunday 25th April 2010

Who's job is it to write the agenda? Yours! Just press 'edit' and add stuff you want to talk about

Meeting of Northern Indymedia at (Change of Location) The Fenton 12.00 noon on Sunday 25th April 2010

We have been warned that the police have alleged, in private correspondence to the student’s union, that the EDL may try to disrupt the meeting. If you feel worried about this then please email us on imc-northern-contact@lists.indymedia.org – this is a private email address which only goes to three trusted Northern members.

Formalities

  • Appoint minute-taker and facilitator
  • Welcome new people, introductions, what do YOU want to get out of this meeting?
  • Finalise agenda in view of above
  • Agree break time and end time

Standing Items

  • Any corrections to last minutes
  • Matters arising from previous minutes
  • Correspondence received
  • Coverage and features coming up soon

Hot Topics

  • Report back from Hacktionlab
  • Report back from UK Indymedia Network Meeting
  • Mediation issues from UK meeting
  • add more here…

Any Other Business

  • Editorial Guidelines (additions, violence e.t.c.)
  • Video skillshares at Oblong
  • Should we be working on the things we collectively agreed we’d do before starting on new things?
  • Can we have bureaucratic meetings less often, and meet to work together as a collective more often?
  • As a start on this, can we schedule a day together to iron out some niggles with the website, including:
    1. Help text!
    2. Other texts (mission, editorial)
    3. Minor oddities in publish forms (“description”=>"body" etc.)
    4. Broken “more→” link in other_media column
    5. Spurious “<>” in article summaries
    6. Support for non-latin character sets
    7. New banner
  • Volunteers to take over as our liaison on imc-uk-contact and imc-uk-legal mailing lists
  • Volunteers to act as liaison on global lists
  • How to reduce the number of email to the main list

Next Meeting

  • Time & Date
  • Place
  • Facilitator
  • Promoter
 

Hey

I’d like to propose we add something to standing items : coverage/features coming up.

Also – if there’s new people there – (and depending on what they say in the “what do you want to get from this meeting” section) – we might consider bringing the “Reports back from…” fwd a bit.

Basically I’m trying to think of ways to put some gripping stuff near the front.

Also if the turn-out is good we might want to split into groups so the procedural stuff gets processed by those with a stomach for it and the newbies get some hand-holding over writing and publishing articles.

{I think I may be having an undiagnosed manic phase. bear with me}

Ptg

 
 

hey. i’m just waiting for people to say when they’re free to share a screen session before getting on with the coding bits. I could get them done in 10mins if people prefer but i thought it might be a good skillsharing thing? Also, regarding the weird tags in descriptions, there,s a good’n’geeky reason for this that i.ll explain at the meeting (not breaking html tags and leaving us vulnerable to xss attacks). It,s not an ideal solution but a temporary thing until we find a better one :-) that’s something we need to sort at the hyperactive summit

shouldi just get on and do the other bits or are people free this week for me to show them how?

 
 

I know we talked about doing a shared-screen session but I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to have a work-day on the site so that a group of us could be in the same room learning together (like we used to do at the common place), whilst people who were less technically inclined could thrash out the help file, guidelines, file feature requests on escapegoat, make graphics for a new banner and so on. It feels like we meet up to talk about process more than we meet up to work together, and I’d like us to change that. Working together is fun – I hope that when the new-imc business is concluded we’ll have much more time and energy for it.

 
 

Do we need to rally the laptop farm for this? I know JD can’t make it so if we’re going to work on different bits of the website someone else might need to get a bag full of laptops from wherever they are, along with whatever’s needed to make the wireless work.

Or were you thinking of a paper execise (in which case I guess we’ll need some printouts?

Sorry to sound a bit thick.

Ptg

 
 

protag: I was suggesting that the agenda includes planning a workday, not that we make this sunday into a workday.

 
 

Doh!

 
   

I didn’t get a chance to mention this in the meeting, but for the post-mortem: I tried to park my greenwashy-planetfucker in the university grounds and was turned away from two different entrances.

At the first I spoke over an intercom to a security person who asked me why I wanted to come in. I told him I was coming to a meeting at the Peanut gallery. He told me that it had been cancelled. Feigning surprise, I asked who had told him that? He responded that it was a member of the Student’s Union Executive and that if I wanted to come onto campus I would have to go to the entrance by the Parkinson Building.

I drove to that entrance to find the barrier, which is normally open at weekends was closed. I noticed one police van with blacked-out windows directly over the road from the security hut. Once again I said that I was here for a meeting in the Peanut gallery. I was told that free parking was not available, so I left.