[Boston-editorial] minutes from 5/15/05 web-editorial meeting

[Matthew Williams]

minutes from the May 15, 2005 web-editorial meeting

NEXT MEETING: Sunday, May 29, 4:00 at the Dome Cafe, MIT. Matt 
facilitating.

Present: Matt, Pete, Joe, Sharpie

1. Attendance: We realized we did a bad job of reminding people the 
meeting was happening, not sending out a general announcement. We will 
try to be more organized in the future--our apologies to anyone who 
wanted to come, but didn't because they didn't get an announcement.

2. New editors: We agreed to make Sofia, Jon P. and Sharpie editors.

3. Tech: We were one of the sites attacked, but we incurred no obvious 
damage. There may, however, be problems that haven't surfaced yet. For 
this reason, the tech team is accelerating our transition to Drupal, 
which is more secure.

We're going to wait on the usability testing until the new site is up 
and we can have people test that. The test will be ready to go soon.

The tech team's first priority will be getting the new site up and 
running with all our current features (as in a features column, 
newswire, calendar, etc., not as in feature stories) working. After 
that, we can decide what other things we want to add.

4. Visioning: The current visioning process has stalled out. We agreed 
that the Boston IMC as a whole should have a visioning retreat, 
although there was some disagreement whether it should be one day and 
local or a weekend somewhere in the woods.

5. Survey: Pete has access to the Survey Monkey website and will set up 
a survey for us there. We are in the process of designing a set of 
questions that will help us see who uses our site, how and why. If you 
want to suggest questions, please e-mail Pete pstidman at yahoo.com. We'll 
put a link to the survey from our site, along with a warning people 
that it will take them off site, which should be enough to alert that 
security conscious that the survey site will log their IP addresses 
(unlike our site).

6. Writing workshop: This happened last Friday. One person showed up 
besides Pete, but it nonetheless went well. Pete is hoping to build up 
a core of at least 3 or 4 people, though more would be cool too. The 
writing workshops will be on-going and be both a forum for people to 
critique each others' work and a place to go over various writers' 
tools.

7. Mission statement: We drafted a mission statement, but we realized 
we need the consensus of the entire collective--not just the 
web-editorial group--on it. Pete will post a draft to the appropriate 
lists and we'll hopefully talk about it at the next general meeting. We 
also agreed that a mission statement should only be 2 or 3 sentences, 
not a couple paragraphs like our current one.

8. Editorial policy: We tabled discussing this till we had more people.