Occupy Central Vermont

Occupy Central VT Communications Working Group Minutes
Monday 11/7/11 6:30PM

Yehshua is going to setup a listerv and domain for occupycentralvt.org, which was a domain bought by Jeremey.
Group-wide email list: Yehshua has email list and should be able to form a group-wide email list. Many different lists can be created through this domain as well as personal email addresses.

Colin: Can everyone post to the General Assembly list?
Yehshua: This general listserv should be used as an official listserv?
Colin: Used by whom?
Yehshua: Moderated by the Communications Working Group
The website could be up tomorrow or in a couple of days.

Heather: WordPress is nice because it is clear who is administrating and commenting. How would that be with the new website? People want to get a general email for where to get more information.

Yehshua: Occupy Wall Street New York General Assembly is using WordPress and buddypress. Trying to keep what we have but enable more elaborate forms of communication and spaces, files, uploads, etc. Using this to be able to empower people with tools. Setup an account with Lienote similar to Linex. We will keep WordPress with our new domain. The domain is owned by one person in particular. How can we retain ownership over domain but consider who owns it and how many people. WordPress also has a plugin for calendar, integrates with google calendar.

Colin has experience and will coordinate with WordPress migration. Yehshua will use iread mail. The website will appear similar to what is currently available with WordPress plus additional perks and applications.

Will the WordPress site still exist once the domain is created? There could be a link, a redirect, or let it be. Will look into more information.

Objectives and priorities for Communications Working Group:

• Communications WG seems to be fulfilling technical aspect, outreach, and communications. After Saturday’s GA Communications WG had been tasked with sending an email about where and when is the new GA. Various URL related to group also for email: occupyCVT Twitter, Facebook event, occupycentralvt.wordpress.com, occupycentralVT.org.
• send out an email to full list – content: noting time/place of next GA, URLs & ways to contact us (Facebook, Twitter, wordpress, occupycentralvt.org). do we offer a second confirmation recipients want to be on this list, though it was pointed out this was rather explicitly provided to us for this purpose
• internal communications infrastructure for the GA – wordpress migration + buddypress, email system setup & listserv stuffs
• outreach – longer term goals – using radio, print, etc to education peeps about our presence

Tasks:

• Yehshua working on email list and wordpress site, tomorrow should be a good day for this coming together more fully
• John will draft up email – where/when next GA, URLs, etc – include flier
• Colin will upload flier & Romni will ensure there is a link out to the group
• We’ll get an email out to the full group by Thursday

Meeting Minutes, Communications Working Group
Central VT General Assembly 10/29/2011
Notes taken by Yehshua

* 3 new members have joined us, their email addresses have been made note of – Will/Romni will ensure the email list is updated

* discussed offline communications, as we started off with an email from Glen, read by Will (Glen could not make the GA, but wanted to update us on his progress in working towards a bulletin board for offline communications for the CVt GA. Making this type of offline communication a two-way line (eg, persons may submit notes/envelopes to be collected and brought to the GA) was raised as a possibility and (lightly) discussed

* we identified 3 primary responsibilities of the Communications Working Group that we are focusing on in some way at this time:

1. Infrastructure to facilitate communications within working groups, the GA as a whole, from individuals, and in all the myriad of possible forms
2. Outreach to local communities, increase participation in the GA using simple, yet effective methods/communications immediately
3. Facilitating/Inspiring Group Education – across this movement we are seeing plenty of new (and effective) methods for group governance/management/ facilitation by/for the people.. discussing, identifying, leveraging, and teaching methods which appeal to us would be of great benefit to the group

* we shift focus to discussing Immediate Needs and identifying actions that are needed (are goal for today is drawing up a basic who/what/how/when task list to report back to the GA)

Immediate Needs Discussed:

1. Improving Group Communications (for working groups, the GA, etc) – we need to figure out how to do this in ways that meet our needs as individual participants, working groups, the CVtGA as a whole, and for individuals/groups outside the GA.
2. The Occupy CVt Website, currently a wordpress blog, will this work for our needs? Various issues lightly discussed, flagged as not as high a priority immediate need. This discussion was in response to our noting a number of points made towards the difficulty in identifying the correct site, obtaining information, etc. Sidelined for now.
3. Visual Communications – using fliers, physical postings, etc as basic (immediate) outreach. Outreach takes many forms, and communicates different messages, what is an immediate message for outreach? Putting aside many of the topics that have been discussed here as a GA at large, we identified simply communicating the when/where/etc details of our weekly GA as an immediate message to get out. It was noted we should link up with the Basic Needs Group, so they know we are doing this and so that we can get the correct location (once they find a warm place for us). We will work this out as part of our meet up later in the week – interested individuals will make up some initial fliers beforehand.
4. GA/Group Process Education – this was identified as a need, as confusion/lack of education is showing in terms of misunderstandings, group confusion, people leaving, etc.. but we did not get further than noting the need.
5. The Communications Group needs to meet prior to the next GA, there’s too much to do to wait. We will figure out a way

* for some of the points above, we noted questions we wanted to bring to the GA as part of our report back to the people:

1. should we be entrusted with getting fliers compiled and posted RE our when/where of the GA? – lots of twinklies, good stuff
2. should we try to work out something like the use of Google Groups to simplify/facilitate Working Group communications? – this spun out into a much larger discussion than time permitted, primarily due to the question/proposal coming too soon, prior to enough education to help with understanding/comfort with the proposal. we amended our question: should we go away and figure out more details for everyone, compile a better, more descriptive set of questions/proposal, and make this an agenda item for the GA once ready? – twinklies for a yes. From this, we decided to make a google group for our own group’s immediate needs (also to show as an example). After the GA, one individual in the GA noted that we should checkout RiseUp.org as an alternative to Google Groups.
3. did not ask this question, as we were not prepared. topic was on the occupy cvt wordpress blog not being sufficient for an official site, and distinguishing between occupations and the General Assembly.