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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.

Nosi Fund raising sub committee Minutes
minutes 2/4/05:

Present: Reuben, John, Rich

Reuben: [made some announcements which he will pass on to other SC members]

Reuben: where are we going with fund raising. Has anything been done?

Rich: recapped where we were with the IBM project, and said he handed it off to John.

John:
I have much less time to work on NOSI stuff than I originally intended do to job considerations. More like 8-10 hours of week. Therefore I have focused on stuff I could do easily i.e help build conversation on the list, work on the website.

Besides gathering names of some potential funders, and starting to work on a boiler plate for NOSI Fund raising docs, I haven't done any Fund raising work.
Now that I have Reg from IBM's contact info, I will contact him to get a feeling for where the project stands before working on the document prepared by Rich and myself.

Rich: Pointed out that there wasn't a consensus on projects to be undertaken and how that might affect our plans for funding. Rich said we probably should define a plan, try to raise some money, and not plan to raise more $$ than that

Reuben: feels like he would like to see us to do the groundwork to be able to act on a fund raising plan. We haven't had a larger plan [not clear what plan Reuben mean here?] for years now and thats what slowing us down.

Lists of potential funders. Talking to other groups about who they are getting funded by. The sub committee can work on this.

Rich: Wants SC members to respond to a survey about general direction. We could then try to identify areas that could be driven by list members and solicit help. Lists members could work on these “teams” with lots of independence, and would check in with the SC to make sure that the direction was in line with NOSI's goals.

Q: What structure would allow all list members to participate. It would probably would need to be a different sort of organizational structure. Rich mentioned the idea of having the coord work to develop several "task forces" that the sc identified would make sense to involve people on a voluntary basis.

Q: Whats the relationship between funders, list members, sc members, and other orgs?

John will follow up with a phone call to Reg, ideas for ways to use volunteers will be brought up with full SC

Website Committee Call 2/8/05
present: Amanda, Steve, John

Big Stuff
We really need a better looking site, no one has jumped up to take that on, though.
(todo: John will try new tactics to pressure the NOSI list community to come through and offer help developing a theme for the site.)
(todo: Amanda will reach out to the CivicSpaceLabs community to see if she can inspire anyone to help develop a theme for the site.)

The site as a whole and the calendar separately are syndicated and available as RSS feeds.

[SC CALL] We need to involve the NOSI community in creating content for the site -- soliciting specific articles from individuals was proposed as one idea. We settled on encouraging people to blog and promoting good journal entries and/or story submissions to the front page on some kind of regular basis. This would entail moving the primer to a box so it would stay on the front page, and adding a box for recent articles to the site, so that submissions that aren't promoted are still accessible and people know that there is reading material there.

We don't want to host general interest blogs, we want to invite members of the NOSI Community to write about things that are related to NOSI. What Open Source Software are you using, challenges you've experienced, barriers and frustrations, great stories: we need to firm up some language that describes what we are looking for.
(done: the blog module is enabled)
(todo: Amanda will add some thoughtful guiding questions to the blog entry form)
(todo: when the time comes, Amanda will look over the list of people who have signed up so far and send individual invitations out to each of them inviting them to submit content)

[SC CALL] We will discuss creation of a website volunteer community on the next NOSI SC call. Things that the website volunteers could do include:
* gathering, classifying and adding weblinks to the site
* gathering, classifying and adding events to the site
* overall site design
* the NOSI site is on its own shell account, so we can give people we trust access to it without giving them access to anything else at LINC.

[SC CALL] Amanda wants to run a survey about how members of the NOSI community are using Open Source office servers. Would this be an appropriate use of the site?

Little Stuff

The calendar shoots off the page.
(todo: Amanda will look at this; it is probably something that needs to be resolved in the theme, so if we get a better theme it should fix itself.)

(todo: Amanda will test migrating to CivicSpace again)

OTHER NOTES

* content: started a weblinks module and stuff isn't public right now. It would be cool if people started using it. It isn't formatted well but perhaps people could do some work on it.

* John mentioned that the Calender module doesn't really work that well

* Steve says page is text heavy. Make a box for article of month, block for primer.

* Amanda knows we could have an aggregator if we want but we don't think that makes sense right now.

SC Minutes for January 2005:

1/7/05
11:00 AM EST
Present: Reuben, Rich, Amanda, Steve, John
Absent:Arif

Agenda:
1.Assign a note taker: (john)

2.possible new board members:

Amanda asked Rich if he still intended to step off the SC as per his announcement in the spring/summer 2004. Rich said he still intended to step down in the future. Reuben added that he is also looking to step down in the future.
John liked what he heard about Mark Bucciarelli
from hubcap consulting as a possible SC member.
Rich has spoken with Michelle Feldman (from NYC, documents PHPAdmin), Tom Panzarella (fund for city of ny and dotorganics)
Other names: Anders Schneiderman of the SEIU
(Service Employees Intl Union). And John Lorance. Rich suggested a mozilla foundation person or a FSF person.
Rich wants to have John call potentials with a sort of general list of things we need help on to gauge interest and commitment. What the list of questions would be hasn't been talked about. Reuben suggests getting some activities together that volunteers could help out on, would allow potential board members to make themselves apparent through the quality of their volunteer commitment.

3. Help with Spring NTC
Steve will be presenting at the Spring NTC. He needs to line up some speakers. He asked for some help locating people. He also asked Amanda if her co-workers “script” re: integrating OS into NPO's was available. Amanda said probably so. Amanda said that could be shared and possibly linked from the NOSI website. She will check into this.
4. Penguin Day

John talked with Katrin Verclas, she is hoping Steve will rep NOSI in Chicago, and that Amanda will rep in NYC.
Katrin has offered to fly/get John to SF for Penguin Day in February..
Katrin asked what NOSI wants to accomplish with these appearances? Katrin thinks we might use it as a way to define our needs and recruit volunteers from the OS community to help accomplish them.
:
Reuben: we can use these events to do focus grouping. Ex: What do people need from a NOSI as a community building entity? It was useful at the last penguin day, hearing from people what they need and what we should be working on. It would be helpful in directing us.(ex: it helped us draft our proposal to IBM) The community asset map was a good project, although it isn't clear exactly what became of it.
Amanda: We could have NOSI's name on some of the information for the Penguin Day events. In return we can serve as a conduit to get the word about the days out, help Aspiration to recruit locals who may be on our list, get it on the website etc.
Rich: we could be co-sponsor co-convening. Amanda: if we are going to co sponsor we have to be able to come to Aspiration with something specific.
Rich: Perhaps we could do a follow up to the community asset map. An “Action Map” whose goal would be volunteer recruitment effort.

5) update from John

John has worked about 10 hours a week to NOSI because of other work commitments.
An official NOSI phone number has been set up which is 12025585489
John have been working on a list of upcoming events in 2005. This should be available for collaborative editing on the NOSI site soon. Once I have the kinks worked out I will let people know and invite them to add to it. If we can get people to commit to going, we can enable the calender module and post it as “official” Nosi appearances. Criteria for volunteers doing an event as a NOSI rep should be a report and ideally a picture from the event so that we get some community building pr out of our sending primers etc.
John: would like to have information from our previous success stories and then I would like to check in with them for follow up and possible some feature stories with pics. Amanda will send along the db of agencies that registered on the website for John to do follow up on. Rich (or Reuben) thinks we can get pictures from some of the agencies that we featured in the TCO study.
John would like other SC members to respond to emails.

6. other business
Q: has anyone done any work on the on line donation front? A: Amanda attempted to contact our fiscal sponsor via email, with no response. Reuben will make a call and see if we can get them to help us set up a network for good account. Rich has offered the help of the OC to setup a sub account under their auspices if our agent can't help us.
Q:Whats the status of the NOSI request to IBM. A: This has stalled for the moment, but Rich is going to hand this off to John and has in fact contacted Reg Foster to let him know that this is the case.

The web subcommittee is going to schedule a conference call for a Friday before the next months SC call to talk about look, functionality and how volunteers can help out. John will help set this up.
The Cafe could use volunteer help. Steve will put out a call on the list to start grooming volunteers for this work.

Rich announced that the Grassroots Use of Technology
Conference is ccming up in Boston with dates to be announced on list in the near future.

Amanda asked people to use the Nosi-steering list. John and Rich thought that it had some privacy issues re: fund raising and the like that should be thought about. Amanda withdrew the request for the time being.

Rich suggested that when sending emails to other SC members we append [NOSI] so that clients can properly handle the mail.