Reports

• Jamie: infrastructure

• Mallory: International work, Policy wok.

Palestine The majority of my international work in 2011 took place on-the-ground in Palestine. I worked with a member organization Stop the Wall to build up their media, technology, and communications strategy to include youth, increase in international solidarity work, and social media. Through this relationship, MF/PL gained three key memberships from Palestine: Stop the Wall, General Federation of Trade Unions in Palestine (PGFTU) which is the largest union in the West Bank and Gaza, and the BDS National Committee (BNC) which is a membership organization comprised of hundreds of grassroots and civil society organizations around the world that support the Palestinian call for boycott, sanctions, and divestment against apartheid Israel.

Future work may include developing a media youth program with Stop the Wall and other collaborating organizations, involvement in the first, global social forum on Palestine to be held in 2012 in Brazil, and MF/PL's sponsorship and involvement in three major fact-finding delegations to Palestine and Israel in 2012 (unions, Indigenous groups, and churches). My travel and work stipend while in Palestine was provided by Stop the Wall.

World Social Forum At the beginning of 2011, me and other MF/PL staff and volunteers helped organize and attend the WSF in Dakar, Senegal. In preparation for the next WSF in 2013, I was asked to work with the WSF communications secretary to develop a working plan for the communications of the 2013 forum, to be held either in Tunis or Cairo. Preparation for this document also included an inter-commission meeting of the International Council in Diyarbakir, Turkey in September 2011, which followed a regular IC meeting in May 2011 in Paris, which I also attended on behalf of MF/PL. My attendance at both of these meetings was funded by the Communications Commission of the WSF IC.

Future work may include participation in the Maghreb/Mashrek forum process towards building early a communications and technology team for the 2013 forum and bringing delegates from MF/PL and the USSF to participate in the Forum on Forums, to be held in Galicia Spain in September 2012.

Climate Change Movement In March 2011, I led a small team consisting of Nat Meysenberg and Melissa Malone to Montreal to help live-stream the Alternatives International summit on Cochabamba +1, which aimed to report on the developments of the climate change movement in the time since the historic people's summit on climate change in Cochabamba Bolivia. While MF/PL was unable to gain funding for participation in the Durban COP 17 meeting this year, Ross and I helped our member organization Grassroots Global Justice with refreshing the website that Jamie and I had built the year before for COP 16 in Cancun.

Future work in this sector is highly dependent upon funding for travel, but we have very strong ties to the People's Summit that is planned to coincide with Rio +20 to be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil this spring, including some preparatory meetings that are happening in New York City in December 2011 and March 2012.

International Policy The annual Internet Governance Forum was held in Nairobi, Kenya in October 2011. I attended this meeting for one day and was able to meet face-to-face many of our collaborating organizers from the Association for Progressive Communications and Access Now. Access Now is also a group which MF/PL has been working more with on Internet policy issues, such as the letter that I helped them draft to the eG8 participants back in May 2011 in hopes that more civil society organizations would be invited to participate. Additionally, an Italian group asked for MF/PL's signature on a similar letter to be submitted to the eG20 in November 2011. While many other important international policy documents have been endorsed by MF/PL, the other which included collaborative feedback worth mentioning was a letter to congress against SOPA, which was subsequently signed by nearly 60 organizations. MF/PL funded the change fees for extending a layover I had already scheduled through Kenya.

Future work may include working with the APC and Access, and other peer organizations, to help draft and edit policy, research, and campaign documents, as well as utilizing an announcement list for MF/PL members to endorse policy documents as well. It is perhaps more long-term work to use policy and research as a way to conduct "inreach" with MF/PL members. Taking steps forward with policy work may also include membership with CSISAC, a sub-committee of the OECD on Internet society, ICANN, or ECOSOC, in order to gain membership with the UN as an NGO. Also, this future work would need to include participation in annual conferences such as the APC membership meeting and the next IGF.

National Policy There is a great deal of overlap between national and international policy work simply by the nature of Internet governance. However, there are two important developments so far this year related to national policy work: MF/PL's membership in MAG-Net and MF/PL's participation in the National Rural Assembly in June 2011. MAG-Net is a coalition of media and technology organizations in the United States that campaign around national policy issues. Hilary was our main point-person for this application, which was accepted in September 2011. The National Rural Assembly is an interesting mix of progressive policy groups who recognize the traditional disadvantage of rural places, which includes access to the Internet. My participation in the National Rural Assembly was funded by the National Rural Assembly organizing committee.

While few lasting relationships have so far materialized from the rural policy work, future work in this geographic sector is fundamental to our national outreach strategy and our work with Indigenous groups.

• Enrique: Laneta

• Hilary: finance

I joined May First in April 2011 as an administrative coordinator/member associate. My early tasks have focused on implementing new accounting procedures and protocols, conducting all the financial bookkeeping/record keeping to more accurately track May First's finances, and helping to create and implement a new membership payment policy.

The new accounting system has been put in place. We are using GnuCash, an open source operating platform. While the system has a few of functional limitations, it has been a useful program for tracking basic revenue and expenses. I have been able to reconcile Gnucash with our main bank account at Citibank and our online merchant Paypal. I believe our records now represent a comprehensive and accurate picture of May First's finances for the year 2011 and will serve as a basis for building and maintaining more accurate budgets and projections moving into the future.

The system is limited in running reports, such as aging receivables and other member payment tracking information. There is a need for more hands-on data entry to make the software truly functional in that respect. This is currently in process. But I am running GnuCash alongside the previous database program, so all the relevant information is available.

The new membership payment policy has been the other major undertaking. We set a new deadline for member dues payments at 90 days. Jamie has created an alert system to track the deadlines and he created a payment plan option so that groups can spread out the payments. We are also offering dues reductions or scholarships for groups unable to pay. The new policy went into effect August 22nd. We are just now starting to reach the first deadlines. I have been doing a lot of targeted outreach to groups with delinquent payment records to settle their past due amounts. We've been able to identify a number of defunct members. Others have been responding to the notices with payments; some with criticism. I think as a first run we are going to discover a variety of problems, bugs, issues and opportunities to refine the process - but there is a lot of potential to alter our language, the alerts, etc. The main goal is to better connect with members, open new lines of communication which will help us better serve the membership, and ensure greater accountability of members to the shared infrastructure.

• Ross: support and occupy

Since the staff position of May First/People Link Support Butler has only existed for a few months, the parameters of the position continue to be developed and assessed. Such assessment is, in fact, one of the primary things I've worked on in this position. In the first month (October, 2011), we (primarily Jamie, dkg, and I) took stock of the current support volunteer strategy and re-modeled the ticketing workflow to allow a more targeted approach to managing a support team. Whereas prior to this, the support queue functioned as a first come, first serve, everyone's responsibility type system (a system that more or less translated into Jamie answering 95% of all tickets), the workflow we developed and continue to think through, works in a somewhat more targeted manner in which I handle the incoming support cue and designate a support volunteer to handle the given request.

Thus far, the new workflow seems to have improved our support infrastructure in a couple of ways. 0. Now every ticket has a responsible (or an irresponsible) party handling the request, which has significantly transformed the (Jamie handles everything model). 1. The new workflow also allows for new ticket states, so that we can be more precise with how we and members communicate about support needs. A significant part of my early work as a staff member was dedicated to figuring out this workflow.

My day to day labor deals with the particularities of the new workflow itself. As the MFPLSB, I manage the ticketing system and make determinations about who should be assigned a given issue, and/or answering the ticket myself. Thus far this seems to be working fairly well as a practice, and from my perspective, has actually increased volunteer support participation.

Another part of the work I do as MFPLSB has been to handle some of the more intense problems we've faced with denial of service attacks and server outages. While this remains a skill I have not mastered, in the last couple of months I have had occasion to learn and tackle some very harrowing outage issues. At this point, I view part of my contributions to MF/PL as another support member capable of handling most crisis situations fairly competently as I have had at least two full nights of "training" (by fire) on dealing with outages.

A final component of the work I do involves the occupy movement. As an active participant on the tech team of Occupy Boston and slightly involved in Occupydev and Occupytechnology as well as Occupy the Farm, I have done quite a bit of outreach for MF/PL. In addition to helping numerous Occupation locations with their web infrastructure, I worked to get Occupy Boston GA to officially distance itself from using Google Groups and gmail, shifting instead to the MF/PL and the free tools we deploy. This has also spawned quite a few new memberships outside of the Occupy Dedicated Server infrastructure, i.e. dues paying members.

This outreach/activism has also created the condition of possibility for understanding some of our own techno-structural problems with user interface and helped me grapple with some parts of our infrastructure that needs overhaul.

• Alfredo: USSF, POC techies of training, Occupy