[Imc-oxford] Draft minutes of meeting 26th August

[Mr. Demeanour]

There were 6 present.

Agenda agreed:
- Feedback from Network Meeting
- Relaunch and Outreach

The delegates to the NM reported back in some detail. There were
suggestions concerning the benefits of perhaps using a trained
facilitator at the next NM.

An explanation was given of how the new aggregator for the UK front page
is supposed to work.

The discussion then moved on to deal with outreach and the re-enlivening
of Indy Oxford.

A number of ideas were put forward concerning the handling of features.
- Our current rules require that a feature should link to no less than 2
   newswire articles. For the purposes of "seeding", it was suggested
   that we might relax this rule temporarily.
- It was proposed that the Oxford front-page be amended to provide
   prominent links to information on how to propose a feature; at the
   moment this information isn't so easy to find. There was consensus
   that this would be a good idea; a mock-up will be made, and brought to
   the next meeting.
- It was agreed that a "Roundup" feature should be posted roughly
   monthly (nothing to do with Monsanto - a newswire roundup is the
   idea).
- A number of other minor changes to the site that have been agreed for
   some time are now in hand; a specific proposal regarding these changes
   will be posted to the Oxford mailing list when the work has been done.
- Regarding the RSS feed of the Events calendar:
   It was agreed that we should request that the feed should include the
   date in the title of an event.
- Regarding the RSS feed of the Oxford newswire:
   It was agreed that we should ask for article links to point to the
   Oxford site, not the UK site.

There was a brief discussion of the idea of taking Oxford through the
new-imc process. In general the view of the meeting was that this would
be a good idea; there could arise a synergy between the outreach
requirements of the new-imc process (which requires evidence of a
significant outreach effort) and our plans to build the collective
through outreach anyway. The feeling of the meeting was that the
process should not be begun until "new blood" has come on board, so that
the new recruits would feel less excluded from ownership of the
relaunched IMC.

There was a discussion of the new process proposal from Northern:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-process/2010-August/0809-cc.html
The meeting didn't have the text of that proposal to hand, but there was
consensus that Oxford should block any attempt to move to consensus-1 in
a consensus of collectives (bullets #8 and #9 in the linked mailing
list post), on the grounds that a block from a collective is very
different from a block raised by a "rogue" individual, since it
represents the fact that all the members of the blocking collective
agreed to block a proposal.

The next meeting will be on Thursday 9th September (TBC) at 7:00pm in OARC.

======ENDS=======

Any additions and changes to me please; I'll incorporate them and repost
in about a weeks' time.

-- 
Jack.