February Conference Call 2/11/05

Present: Reuben, Rich, Amanda and John:
Absent: Steve, Arif

Report from Web sub comittee:

Amanda wants to do a survey on the site. She wants to capture info that might later be part of a more comprehensive document. Amanda will write up some logic about why its needed: She wants to get best practices from people. She'll post to the list to make sure people know that there is a survey in progress.
Rich likes the idea as well, and feels like it would feed into or work with Reg. Amanda agrees this is a nice tie in to our funding request for reg.
Reuben says survey's could provide the basis for a further discussion maybe. Amanda will compile.
Amanda, one of the things that we covered was the prospect of volunteers and set up a committee that would take up ownership on the website. Perhaps that could be turned over to a person and group that could work on it. Amanda would coordinate.
Rich says its best to try to form a volunteer committee so that they won't feel isolated. Volunteering is also a social phenomenon. This is a general comment about how to handle volunteers. This is also a way to recruit leadership in the future.
Amanda says we should compile a list of volunteer type activities.
Rich says we could create a "cafe kit". The software that you download. A description of how to set up your own cafe. A volunteer committee could help drive this. Amanda says that Steve would need to head this up.
Amanda asked Rich to contact Steve with his ideas for the cafe.
Rich suggested we have an online "fix the website" party to focus attention on getting issues worked out. This idea didn't seem to have traction at the moment.

Reuben asked if any of us come up with things on the site that need to be changed or fixed should we drop Amanda a note? Amanda says we should fix it ourselves and let the SC know.

Rich saw some modules for list of orgs to be entered and Rich would give it to Amanda to examine for possible inclusion on the site.

John how about a email list or forum spot for web volunteers interested in helping out. Amanda says that this might be a good start for using the forum. [She will work at getting this started when she has time.????]<--- can't remember if this was actually said.

Fund-raising sc

Rich would like us to revise our strategic plan and post it. Would it be possible to identify a roadmaps for future work. By defining objectives for projects, how large they will be etc. Any fund-raising efforts will be more successful and convincing to funders with this information in hand.

The current SC strategic plan will soon predate all the members of the SC

Reuben the last time we talked about this we got some ideas from the community on the wiki. We could stick with the idea that we came up with i.e. the source book. To direct our work in the coming months.

Rich said we need to evolve some goals about where we want to be over the next 36 months.
The source book is a project idea not a general strategic vision.It would be useful to ask ourselves "if we had money where would we put those resources?" Projects like:
Make NOSI the resource for the FREE/NPO world,
volunteer match etc.
Can we think of this in terms of milestone for NOSI?

The type of metrics we should think about using as milestones are:

X Number of cafes per year
web traffic
publications
number of npo's that have [transistioned to open source? ]<--not sure here

Once these have been figured out we could move forward with projects.

Rich: We should work on writing out what are shared understanding of what NOSI is and what NOSI does this could form the basis for a future face to face meeting.

Reuben appreciates the worth of an extensive planning process, it is probably hard to do such a thing given our current commitments etc, it may dissipate our energies.
Amanda would like to return to this issue in several months
John this might be good to return to when we have added new steering committee members
Rich, I am really taking about doing a survey of what we think we are up to. Rich would survey the SC and by next month we hoped to have a shared consensus document, it can serve as a road map for the future. Folks say this is a fine.

misc

Reuben announces: I will be stepping down from the SC at the end of March. Main reason is that he has been on the SC since the group started, and that is a long time. Its important for Organizations to get new blood. Also increasingly this seems to be a group of pratictioners who work at or with at NPO's. Reuben says he is not one of those. One of the reasons NOSI is able to have an implicit understanding of where we are going is because we are all a part of the same sort of the work. Reuben wants to get more technical practitioners on board. Reuben is not leaving because he isn't interested. He would like to be a committed volunteer of the sort we have been outlining during this meeting.

Based on Reubens announcement John will collect the names of the people put forward in December and mail them to the SC. If we have consensus on some names, John will contact them to see if they are interested in being a part of the SC. If we don't have strong feeling about anyone, John will begin contacting people from the December list as part of a process of getting a feeling for the interest level of folks to be substantially involved in NOSI's work. This will not be a direct invitation to the SC. John will bring that info back to the SC if necessary.

Reuben will talk to John about getting NOSI documents in Reuben's keeping moved over to SC members.

John asked Rich for copies of the primer

Amanda asked that we keep a NOSI seminar at Penguin Days and the like re: best practices/how to's for FLOSS community members volunteering with NPO's on the back burner for later discussion.