For the first time in weeks, CoPress managed a Sunday conference call that actually went a few minutes shorter than expected as we briefly reviewed a few projects that are on the table. Daniel, Adam, Joey, Greg, and Miles were in attendance.
Organization
In organization, Daniel revealed that he’ll be leaving us for a few days to get a few moments of sanity. In the meantime, he’s working on creating a strategic goals document that should lay out the big picture at CoPress. We also want to try to polish off some of the rough edges on our website, with significant facelifts for the team blog (which we’re moving to inside.copress.org) and the main about page. We have the recurring problem of balancing the desire to display copious amounts of information with effective design—and we’ve yet to find the perfect balance.
The main conclusion of our operations discussion was that Project Pier just isn’t cutting it for us as an organization. Tasks are getting lost, checkboxes are going unchecked, and there is no job-tracking to speak-of. So we’re moving back to BaseCamp—and looking forward to a lot more alert-emails in our inbox (and Daniel) to keep us on top of things.
Editorial
Our editorial discussion was primarily planning, laying out the week’s content and dreaming up articles for later weeks. Daniel also encouarged all members to listen to This Week in Tech, which he thinks could serve as inspiration for a new kind of roundtable podcast, moving away from the one-on-one interview format. Greg’s been sitting on this week’s podcast for days now (which must be a first for the organization), which is with Steve Buttry on the restructuring of the Gazette.
Financial
Financially, CoPress hasn’t changed much in the past week. Joey should (officially) be our treasurer in a few days, and Bank of America is being frustrating to work with, as normal. We briefly discussed possible ways to raise more money and make the organization (and full-time employees) more sustainable, and particularly focused on what Daniel labelled a “marketplace of support.” Essentially, this marketplace would be a website designed to bring together sites using open-source CRMs–high school papers, CoPress clients, regional papers–and talented individuals who can provide tech support. As middleman, CoPress would take a cut of the hourly rate paid to the tech-support. Ideally, this marketplace would integrate with our social network to make it easy for sites and programmers to find each other.
Community
We then turned to discussing Greg’s community-building efforts. Jared is working to expand the wiki, while Greg’s done a masterful job of using the Twitter account — so much so that one follower suggested we create a collaborative survey based on our tweeted questions. Daniel and Greg also examined the concept of running website critique sessions, with shared screencasts to bring in a wider audience. Greg suggested bringing in Will Sullivan (who is involved in the judging for the ACP) to help lead the discussion. The final details of the critique will be worked out of Tuesday’s community-call.
Hosting
The hosting discussion was particularly brief. There was a general consensus that more information needs to be tracked, including data on our member schools like page-views, monthly income, and comments/month, and the time it takes to setup and support these schools. In the meantime, CoPress has three schools to launch this semester, and we’re moving ahead on them aggressively. Two should be ready to go within a week.
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