Icarus Council Meeting 6/5/08  2:00pm EST

Present: Mimi, Nick, Molly, Michael

Working Group Updates 

Phone and voicemail- Need credit card to keep it going, Mimi communicating with Ashley and working on bank account issue

Payroll- Paychecks for May are out. Payments now submitted on 1st of month as long as everyone has paperwork into Mimi (even if FJC already has it.)

Core Responsibilities Document Consensus

Looks good, not an entire job description or team priority list, just a jumping off point for coordinator shared responsibilities. Support positions have different decision making responsibilities, not on calls for example. Coordinators are forming council right now, may be different once others are brought onto council. So these are not council responsibilities.

Financial support for Ken's film, Sending Neil and Eddie to Oxford

Can't make a decision on this until we have a budget.

Education and Outreach Job Description & hiring plans

Didn't have a chance to split the job description. Unsure of how to split education and outreach responsibilities. Need help, maybe check in with Molly. Michael and Sascha both wrote documents about outreach, Campus Icarus becoming more clear, once tasks are defined they can be split. Job description basic draft will be out by Monday morning.

Database and web stuff

Conversations have been happening over email. Nick thinks a lot of stuff could be done in Drupal rather than salsa. Focus group with ny icarus locals and Nick and Mimi with consultant from DIA Wednesday. What are our needs? Who is it for and who can use it? Can we sustainably manage? Will we need one person to consistently work on it and be saddled with all the responsibility? Could use Salsa (DIA) as a model to do our own through Drupal and save money. Organic groups feature not on salsa: each group can have their own site with calendar. Another pro for Drupal: Supporters can sign up on the site without having to migrate the data to salsa. Integration is important, and additionally saving money would be rad. Local groups would love to be able to integrate their listservs, yahoogroups, etc.

Also: Jackrabbit has offered to help on short term projects. Nick should communicate with him and see what he might be able to do. Mimi will send Nick Salsa login info for free trial. Need to evaluate potential database solution based on: most pressing needs/ ideal needs that we could grow into/ etc.

Communications- topics we need to look at in ongoing way include: how files should be named, flagging emails that need responses, communication between web forum and council, who posts "blogs" on the main site

Coordinators responsibility to post blogs? Might cause damage if we're all posting willy-nilly. Maybe point person in each working group could post. That's giving a lot of access to a lot of folks. Is that a bad thing? How does the flow of information work and how do we work out how everything overlaps? Need to be thinking about and developing procedures. Also part of the database conversation. Next weeks agenda to include a discussion about technology needs for database / web group to think about.

Agenda items for next meeting:

Budget check-in ($$ for film and Oxford trip)

Communication needs, website and database as tools for organizing

Team priorities

Descriptive organizing terms and language (do we use council, coordinator, etc. ?)