Outreach Committee Meeting: 7/8/13 Hilary, Mallory, Alfredo, Aaron

Hilary: I sent an updated content committee proposal to the list. I just sent it so it might be too soon to discuss. Mallory: proposal looks good, proposal will be difficult only because of mobilizing volunteers to supply content. blogging doesn't happen anymore on the site. blogging on mfpl never took off in the past blogs are different than solicited articles

There are 2 kinds of content - articles that are featured and might be in the lowdown. The other would be soft content that would exist in a list of general posts.

Hilary: this is a point I raised in the proposal - are we concerned about opening the forum to anyone posting anything?

Mallory: we can post an editorial policy and note that we may or may not publish what was written.we don't want to hurt people's feelings We can prioritize things like: non misogynistic/non racist articles, etc. APC has a great policy we could lift We should be clear about purpose.

One key issue: Timeline for Lowdown / Timeliness writing articles and publishing them as they come in will be better. if there's a flow of articles we can send out the lowdown on a regular basis.

Hilary:

that is really the point of this content committee - right now we don't have enough of a flow of content.

we also need to change the way content is presented online as well so that we can better use the web in addition to the email blast

Moving on - let's discuss other topic areas that were identified at the LC meeting back in March but have not yet been discussed in this committee:

• Recruitment: getting new members to MFPL

This would include: organizations, people of color, strategic partnerships, different kinds of groups

• Internal membership development: getting our own members to think of us as more than an ISP, engaging members

Mallory Comments on recruitment - we can't really know where we're lacking because we don't know what we've got right now. We have a sense - lot of occupy, groups in Mexico, etc.; but we need to categorize geographically and by sector and until we do that we won't be able to define targets.

This could be connected to internal membership development - but this might also be connected with the upcoming membership meeting.

Alfredo: this is part of the working group I'm on - still in discussion stage. Focus will probably be entirely on semantic discussion. We're discussing having a meeting that starts in August and ends in October. The face to face meeting will be in October. Focused on three tables/mesas - infrastructure and resource / outreach communications / structure and membership. These are rough categories. all members can be in any or all of the mesas -and discuss issues prior to the meeting. and then the face to face meeting will have the mesas meet for 3-4 hours and produce a report with work proposals and goals.

I want to tag this with membership development. At the next LC meeting I'm going to give a report on the original development of the organization - how it was originally viewed and how it operates now. And then we can hopefully have a membership outreach meeting where LC members take on the task of communicating with 7-10 members to let them know about the membership meeting and to get their involvement. This will be engaged with membership development. But there is disunity in how the LC views - strategic and political differences - there's a huge variety of levels of conscienceness about who we are - many think we are a progressive internet provider. These are good members but we want to push them to be more. We want to let them know more about who we are. Their view of us might not change until we think differently about the internet. Members consciouceness about what the organization is, is related to having more and more new members who do understand. That's why we need a more aggressive recruitment policy.

Mallory: Which organizing working group is working on the Membership Meeting.

Alfredo: it's the membership agenda committee - with Joseph, Alfredo and Juan Gerardo. The proposal hasn't been fully discussed yet, but it's based on the chats they've had.

Mallory: This task that has been given to our committee, really belongs to yours. The membership meeting is really the mechanism for internal outreach. What we want to recruit inwards is to get them more involved in participating - at the membership meeting. All the efforts to get members to participate in the meeting is internal development. So our work here should be to support you in the membership meeting.

Hilary: that makes a lot of sense.

Alfredo: Our role is to structure the membership meeting and organize it. But not determine it's overall character. Intent is not part of our committee role. We have to see when the LC approves the plan and then we can start to work on it.

Mallory: Do you want to share this proposal with our committee? A lot of what you are describing is how to do membership inreach.

Alfredo: It's not a secret - what i mentioned is the proposal. This will change MFPL.

Hilary: this should be a whole LC task. Perhaps this committee can think of a way to structure this kind of outreach - but not to carry out all the tasks.

Alfredo: Most of this will probably be US based/Mexico has their own specific list of people to contact. LC should do this work. LC.

Hilary: we can provide a script for outreach, and use this outreach point to gather other kinds of information - contact details, issue areas, region - which we can add to our database

Alfredo: There will be pushback. People might want to only send emails.

Hilary: we should let people pick groups that they know, and also make them contact groups they don't. and they can play with the script - but it's really a few calls.

What's the next step?

Alfredo: Working on getting this through to the next LC - would like to get a couple of paragraphs from OPC to discuss outreach.

Hilary: What exactly do you want from this committee.

Alfredo: Need a paragraph about outreach to the membership.

Mallory: Could we see your proposal and then comment on it with the paragraph?

Alfredo - Will send proposal.

Mallory: Clarifying question. About recruitment - Stephen had talked about civicrm.

Hilary: it was part of the lowdown discussion

Mallory: civicrm is useful for building a database of members. How we're going about what our membership looks like now - gathering information like state, and issue area.

Hilary: yes the current control panel/red system has an area to enter in postal addresses and we can add tags, but we can also create a category for issue area with a pull down menu. I think if we set up these issue areas in advance, then we can use this outreach push by the LC to fill in a lot of contact information into the list.

Ok - so we're out of time. We'll continue the discussion about content committee, and recruitment/membership meeting online.

Next meeting will be August 12th - Stephen has already offered to facilitate.