• 1 Agenda
• 1.1 Review of actions from last meeting.
• 1.2 Issues arising
• 1.2.1 (Not) Using YouTube (and promoting activist tech)
• 1.2.2 Email list
• 1.2.3 Crabcasts (How to use Crabgrass)
• 1.2.4 Website
• 1.2.5 Resources
• 1.3 New items
• 1.3.1 Crabgrass skillshare: the return
• 2 Minutes
• 2.1 New email list
• 2.1.1 Content
• 2.1.2 Practical steps
• 2.2 Website
• 2.3 Crabcasts
• 2.4 Materials
• 2.5 Youtube/Activist tech
• 2.6 Next meeting

Agenda¶

The order of items doesn’t have to follow the structure of this document. We can decide the order of items at the meeting.

It might be useful to think about groups items at the meeting into ‘techie’ and ‘non-techie’ – I think that some non-techie people might not want to be at the meeting for stuff they’re not interested in. Just an idea – thoughts?

Review of actions from last meeting.¶

Don’t know about you, but I sometimes (frequently) take on more than I can do, leading to my actions being late or totally lunched out. I therefore suggest we give each other a bit of leeway and talk about our action points thus:

• I’ve done it. Yay! Look at me, I’m great.
• Not got round to it. Will do it by X.
• Not got round to it – can somebody help?
• Not got round to it, and probably won’t, so …
  • Can somebody else do it? Or,
  • Let’s agree that it won’t be done.

Action points from the last meeting:

What	When	Who	Progress / Notes
Create Drupal template for web site	Week after 10 March	Carl	Realised that we can’t really do this unless we spend a bit of time thinking about what it’s for
Note on web site to explain why we use YouTube	ASAP	Graham	Not done. See below
Mail website group to change name to thamesvalley	ASAP	Carl	Done
Mail Reading to see if someone wants to acces thamesvalley@	ASAP	Graham	Done. Waiting for reply. They’re v. busy.
Set-up encryption for tvca@	ASAP	Graham	Encryption set up. Need to talk about the old key (can’t be revoked at the moment). New public key is at bit.ly/tvca-pgp
Resources section on web site	?	Not assigned	Let’s revisit this
Mailing list changes – 2 lists: high & low volume	After next TVCA meeting	Graham / Carl	In progress. See below
Advertising the Crabgrass site on web site	?	Graham	Done. Here
Set up Crabgrass moderation (to prevent permanent deleting of stuff)	ASAP	Carl	Done
Set up a Blip.tv channel for Crabcasts	ASAP	Charlie	Done. See below
Draft Crabgrass guidelines	ASAP	Carl	Done. Here
Researching a shared online space for graphics etc.	?	Carl	Some research done, see minutes of last meeting
Sign up for Identi.ca account	ASAP	Carl	Done
Discuss having a video day to shoot and compile a new TVCA video	?	Carl	Done

Issues arising¶

(Not) Using YouTube (and promoting activist tech)¶

Suggest absolute max. 10 mins discussion.

Graham had an action to say why we use YouTube (i.e. use corporate bandwidth). I (Graham) think we should revisit this policy. I think the impact on YouTube is minimal, and it’s quite a hard thing to explain. I also suspect our brethren in orgs such as VisionON TV would be very happy to donate some bandwidth to our noble cause. If you think about it, our current policy extended to email would mean we recommended gmail and hotmail instead of riseup.

Instead of supporting tech collectives (VisionON, riseup, etc.) but not using their bandwidth, perhaps we should support them by using and promoting them – and making a donation?

A second part of this discussion could be: should TVCA be actively promoting activist tech. For example, should we have a section on the web site where we promote services such as riseup.net, aktivix.org, resist.ca, noblogs, etc. for email accounts, lists, blogs, collaborative working, etc? Ooops, missed out ox4.org

Email list¶

Email list applied for. Awaiting approval from riseup.

On the new (announcements) list, need to decide if it’s TVCA generally or Oxford only.

Graham has a suggestion that the announce list be used to send one email per week. Only urgent action call outs (where people are being asked to do an action that hasn’t been previously announced) should be sent in addition to the newsletter. (So it would be 1 email per week unless there’s an urgent thing.) A vague idea for the newsletter format (think it would be a good idea to have a standard format) is …

• Action updates (actions that have happened in the last week)
• TVCA actions about to happen in the next week
• Next meeting – logistics & draft agenda
• Minutes from the last meeting
• Crabgrass round ups
• Other actions coming up
• Stuff that doesn’t fit in the above

To make the newsletter short, where possible only headlines should be use and a link for further information supplied

Crabcasts (How to use Crabgrass)¶

We’ve got a blip.tv account (what’s the address / password?). Let’s decide:

• What topics we are going to make Crabcasts about (suggestion from the previous meeting was that we start with the basics).
• Who’s going to do it, and when.
• How to make sure people know where to find the Crabcasts.

Website¶

20-30 minutes

Graham has started a discussion on what we want to use the website for; perhaps we could use this as a starting point for a proposal on what we want on the site, how we organise it etc.

Resources¶

2 minutes

We agreed last week that a “resources” section on the website was good idea, but didn’t talk about how to take that forwards. Before the redesign (which could take a little while), it would be good if someone could take this on.

New items¶

Crabgrass skillshare: the return¶

10 minutes

There are quite a few people in TVCA who started coming to meetings since the last Crabgrass skill-share, and there are also lots of people who have accounts but use them infrequently. It might be an idea to hold another Rockin’ Crabgrass Skill Share to:

• explain it to new people;
• show people who already have accounts how active it currently is, and answer any questions/problems that have arisen;
• give a refresher on how we use CG (meeting minutes etc.); and
• go through some advanced features (e.g. versions, {Green,Red}cloth formatting, email notifications)

It would be good to get an idea of when we could/should do this, and how we could facilitate the session.

Minutes¶

4 people at the meeting

= “jazz hands”; general agreement about something

New email list¶

• New “announce” list has been requested, but it’s still pending — this can take over a month.
• There is an old mailing list that we could re-name.
  • We should give riseup a chance to respond first

Content¶

• A single weekly “newsletter” e-mail; this would incorporate the “Friday email” (Crabgrass round-up), meeting announcements for that week and the minutes from the last meeting.
  • There could be exceptions for urgent action call-outs
  • How would we make sure that the minutes/agenda etc. were done in time for the email?
  • We could just link to the meeting page (e.g. https://.../oxford-meeting-yyyy-mm-dd), and say “minutes will be available on this page”. This also means that minutes, agendas, should be marked as public on Crabgrass (so people don’t need to have an account to view them)
• Does it need to be weekly?
  • There are advantages to weekly e-mails; the regular schedule sets a routine

Practical steps¶

• We could send this e-mail out to the regular list, change the guidelines as planned and tell people who want lower traffic to delete everything else.
  • There is a problem, though: people who want less email want less in general; deleting most of the emails from the list is still “processing” them.
• Maybe we could instead run an interim “manual mailing list”; announce the changes in list guidelines, and in the same email say to email tvca@riseup.net to get only the newsletters; we can add these people to a list and CC them in to the newsletters.
  • GRAHAM to take on setting up this manual mailing list in some way

Website¶

• Should we try and work out the “information architecture”, just to have something to go on?
  • This risks turning in to a longer discussion, e.g. on user-generated content
• When can we have a longer conversation about the website, and how?
  • Problems with surveys and asking people in general: people don’t know what they want a website to do unless they have a strong idea of what websites can do.
  • Also, we need to get an idea of the energy people want to put into the website; we should certainly ask how much user-generated content people want on the site, but we should explain how much effort each one is for everyone, not just us.
• Can we propose e.g. three ideas to a TVCA meeting? Say, one leaving the site where it is, one changing it a bit and one completely re-thinking it. Then people could choose between them.
  • Good idea, but maybe we can differentiate these proposals based on how much effort they will be: have a very-involved sexy dynamic proposal and a low-maintenance automatic-ish proposal.
• Could we just poll for what people want? High-input or low?
  • Yes, but then we face the same problem of people not knowing what’s possible; some aspects of the proposals are mutually-exclusive.
• We should definitely present this problem in a meeting, and talk about that session beforehand to make sure it’s as useful as possible (i.e. planning facilitation of that session). When can we talk about this?
  • At the next meeting

Crabcasts¶

• These should be short & focussed – byte sized chunks of a few minutes each.
• Could use the next Crabgrass skill-share to ask people which casts they most want.
• CHARLIE agreed to make the first cast on how to set up a Crabcount

Materials¶

2 versions of a generic TVCA leaflet exist; it would be good to design some more though. Maybe we could all have a go by next meeting? CONSENSUS

Youtube/Activist tech¶

• No Free alternatives to Youtube (archive.org logs IPs, blip.tv also corporate).
• Lots of gmail and hotmail addresses on the list; should we be promoting riseup, noblogs etc. more?
• Indymedia might be adding Flash videos, but in short we need more research.
• GRAHAM happy to write up activist tech policy on the website, does want input from others.

Next meeting¶

• Should we have a meeting over Crabgrass chat next week?
  • NEXT MEETING 6pm on Crabgrass Chat.