Thanks in part to issues with Skype and some deviations from the agenda, this week’s conference call clocked in at a formidable 1 hour, 36 minutes. While Daniel, me, Joey, Greg, Miles, Emily, Bryan and Andrew Spittle attended to create a great turnout, the meeting’s length prompted Daniel to half-share some plans for radically restructuring the weekly get-together (replete with whiteboard and video… ?). Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I’ll be seeking a better platform for holding conference calls; if you have a suggestion, please leave it in the comments or get in touch via email.
Hosting
Due to the presence of Andrew Spittle and with knowledge of his recent project, much of the hosting discussion revolved around using his prowess to develop a WordPress news theme for open-source distribution to the college media community. We decided to move forward with the idea, and I will be starting a wiki page dedicated to its incubation. Meanwhile, we’ll be launching two sites this week and are aiming to have at least a workable affiliate page launched. Miles continues to court potential clients, and we’ll be trying to develop a badge of some sort for the footer of affiliate publications’ footers.
Financial
While Bank of America continues to demonstrate their incompetency in various ways, Joey has been working on securing payment from a few clients. Moreover, he and Daniel have for some time been brainstorming what we want from an ad network revenue platform—not just as a host organization, but as a consumer, as a business owner and through other perspectives. We hope to establish a solid understanding of what is out there and what can be leveraged to build a better system. Do you have ideas? Be sure to shoot them our way directly or by contributing to conversations on our various platforms.
Organizational
Strategery! Daniel finally revealed his strategic timeline in all of its glory. Basically, it’s a reworking of the organization-wide goals we set toward the end of last year as part of our Knight News Challenge application. We will review the document and its sections as a team every few months to provide an overview of where we’ve been, where we’re going and how effective our efforts have been. Other than that, we briefly went over policies for information security after I inadvertently caused a bit of a kerfluffle last week. Whoops.
Editorial
Tomorrow marks the debut of This Week in CoPress Live, though Emily ran into a bit of a snag when scheduling the event on BlogTalkRadio. (For some reason, she couldn’t select any time between 7:00 and 11:00 p.m.) Nonetheless, we’ll be going live at 6:00 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time) tomorrow with Greg as a co-host and some editors-in-chief-to-be. Content for the rest of the upcoming week was also reviewed, with Thursday being a sticky spot that was eventually filled by Joey and his offer of a blog post regarding DO (Daily Orange) Palooza. Keep an eye out for our posts this week by subscribing!
Community
This, I think, is where things started to go awry. After quickly talking about analytics research for our community efforts, much ado was made about surveys, institutional review boards, timelines and more. We fell back into our habit of scaring away people that are not intimately familiar with the inner workings of CoPress, but eventually we agreed that now is not the time to perform a survey of college media. Getting to that point pretty much took it out of us, so a few items were shelved for later discussion as we decided to get on with the evening.
Operations
With where we were at regarding length, the operations section became mostly a rehashing of what I will be focusing on this week. We decided to implement comprehensive time tracking for core team members to better assess the (considerable) resources that we commit to this project, but otherwise I will continue chipping away at everything I’ve been working on the recent past. (Documentation, anyone?) As noted about 600 words ago, too, I’ll be seeking an alternative to Skype.
*Dusts off hands.* And that was that, or as they say in the (foreign) movies:
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