Andrew started things off by discussing our hosting outreach efforts. Rather than randomly emailing people, we’ve decided to start focusing our efforts on who we think are the most likely candidates for a upgrade to WordPress. Related to Managed Hosting, Albert finally got rsync to start backing up sites on WebFaction which means that I will no longer have to do backups by hand. It was just another line to the backup script we already have running.

We had a bit of discussion about the theme design services that we offer because we actually have our first client that hopes to relaunch by the beginning of next term. There are a couple of concerns we have with trying to do a theme design over winter break. Most importantly, we’ll need regular and prompt feedback on the iterations of the design to launch on time. This may prove difficult over the holidays. Our goal is going to be to have the first iteration of the design done in the next three weeks, and then have a “working” theme ready for launch (in five weeks). Refinements to the design will be made in the couple of weeks after launch. If this timeline works out over the holidays, then five to six weeks in general will be a good amount of time for doing a normal theme design.

Albert brought up the Knight News Challenge as a potential source of funding for some of the project ideas we have. I intend to start working on an informal application for the Edit Flow Project. We’ve already done a significant amount of development on it, and intend to continue working on it, but the funding could potentially be for the functionality idea we have to make the pitching process open if the news organization so desires.

We’ve started using Highrise for contract management amongst the hosting and business teams with mostly good results. The contact and company management functionality is really cool, it helps us keep all of that information in one place, and the deals functionality works alright for our needs. It’s mostly useful for keeping track of the potential deals we have on the table. The tasks functionality, unfortunately, isn’t of any use because we’re already using Basecamp for that, but it would be very slick if Highrise integrated with Basecamp. Also, if we reliably bcc all of our email conversations into Highrise, it will be really useful months from now when we run into the question of “when did we talk to that client last?”

Greg and I recorded an epic College Media Lab last night with Sean Blanda and Christopher Wink about News Inkubator. Look for it on Wednesday.

First up was hosting matters. We spent a good while talking about the issues we’re running into with upgrading plugins through the Wordpress Dashboard. While we’re not positive we can fix the issue we’ve opened a ticket with Liquid Web and will be continuing to work on resolving the issue. We also talked about modifying our approach in reaching out to perspective clients. We’ll be making some adjustments toward that end in the coming weeks and into next year.

Next on the slate was a quick discussion of doing a complete overhaul of the hosting page content. Will’s going to be setting up some methods of tracking site activity through Google Analytics and we’ll base an reorganization off of what comes out of that. We’ll probably work significantly on this over Winter break.

Lauren also talked about continuing our efforts at revitalizing the wiki. For the foreseeable future we’ll be picking 3 pages every week that need content added to them and we’ll be working on those throughout the week. The goal will be to follow through with the plan that Megan and Kevin drew up over the summer for reorganizing the content. Hopefully our work will make the wiki even more of a resource for those looking for information.

Looking forward to this week we’ll be having posts on the blog about the recent WordCamp NYC, the most recent edition of College Media Lab and more so stay tuned for those updates.

First at bat was a recap of ACP/CMA, what worked well, and what we want to do better next time. Andrew remarked that, for CoPress, the conference went as well as we could’ve hoped for. It would’ve been sweet if we had a booth, though. We learned from Logan while at the conference that the booths were only $650 and included four conference registrations. Originally, we thought that vendors were required to sponsor a part of the conference and that fee ran into the thousands of dollars (i.e. outside of our budget). The informal way we were there, though, was good for networking and being on panels was a plus. Andrew also remarked that at one of the panels he was at in the audience another audience member, unprompted, asked a question about us. Lauren thinks that, for next time, we should do more branding, have rack cards, etc. I’d personally like to be more “network-y” and talk with more people. In addition, I think it would be really cool to expand our coverage of the panels and make sure we have people covering each tech-related one. Last but not least, it would be really sweet to bring the entire team to the next conference we attend.

On the organizational side of things, I spent several hours on Sunday entering line items for invoices, receipts, etc. Our ledger should be completely up to date and, thanks to Albert’s efforts, we’ll be able to do up to date reporting on our revenues and expenses.

For the blog this week, Greg is putting together a post about how the Texas Tribune can be a model for student news organizations and Lauren will be writing one about transitioning your web staff from year to year. Lauren and I will also talk about the wiki, as we hope to start developing the content again.

High priority: Review of Thursday’s client session

Andrew hosted our first client session Thursday during which about a dozen clients joined him via livestream and chat to walk through the process of setting up a sandbox demo site for experimentation. Although there were no technical difficulties, Greg and I noted that the quality was degraded, making it hard to follow exactly what was going on.

Next time, we’re going to try to improve the streaming quality, have everyone introduce themselves, and outline the goals and format for the session from the start. We’re going to try to do the sessions every other week and switch off who leads the session. If you participated and have any feedback, let us know in the comments.

Medium priority: #NCMC09!

Alas the week of the National College Media Convention is here. Daniel, Andrew, Adam and myself will be in Austin, Texas Wednesday night to dominate the convention with our snazzy new CoPress t-shirts and business cards.

Andrew, Daniel and I are going to meet up Wednesday afternoon in Austin to figure out a game plan for the rest of the conference (sessions we’ll attend, panels we want to be on, etc.). Depending on how many clients are interested in joining us, we’ll hold either a client dinner/lunch or just a general tweetup.

Low priority: Editorial content

Next week Greg and Vanessa are planning on another College Media Lab, but we’re still waiting on guest confirmations. Tuesday I’ll be posting a CoPress promo video, and the rest of the week we’ll be liveblogging from NCMC. I’m also taking a video camera and tripod so we can do a few videos at the conference.

High priority: Hosting

Andrew will send out our new and improved e-mail newsletter Monday outlining our presence at the National College Media Convention (#NCMC09 aka ACP/CMA). Will plans to continue working on the plugin to allow for more customization features, including the ability for users to unsubscribe.

We’re planning our first client workshop at 4 p.m. PST Thursday during which time new clients will learn about how to set up a sandbox for testing. The hosting team will also answer any general questions clients might have about their sites.

Medium priority: Preparation for ACP/CMA

The rack cards are being ordered soon and polo shirts are on their way. Lauren, Daniel and Andrew get into Texas on Wednesday afternoon and Adam will be there Wednesday night. We’re getting together for a team dinner Friday night, when we’ll talk about equity and other important things.

Before heading to Texas, we still need to schedule a meetup (tweetup!) with all clients and potential clients. We’re also going to make a spreadsheet of some kind, as suggested by Greg, to split up team attendance at the NCMC. Bryan also suggested making fliers to promote the meetups for advisers. If we decide to do this, we should plan it soon so the posters can be designed and printed before heading to Texas.

Since we don’t have any prizes to give out for Twitter contests at the conference, we’re going to be the go-to place for coverage (college media is, afterall, our market). We’ll liveblog as many sessions as we can.

Editorial and community

A few site ideas include: restoring your site from a backup, Web technology sessions at ACP/CMA, the Columbia Spectator debacle and College Media Lab. If anyone on the team or in the community would like to contribute a post, let Adam know.

On the agenda today was a recap of Daniel’s conference in Seattle and a preview of the ACP/CMA conference in three weeks.

In Seattle, Daniel served on a panel with representatives from College Publisher and Woodwing. Although it was a small crowd and only about 5-10 college media advisers were in attendance, they seemed impressed that CoPress already has 28 clients.

Four members of the CoPress team will be at the ACP/CMA conference in Texas next week where a few of us will be on panels. We plan on contacting our clients who will be at the conference to hold an unconference session or tweet up in the evenings. We also plan to mingle between sessions as much as possible to get to know people and spread the CoPress word. Adam is putting the final touches on rack cards and t-shirt orders. The business cards came in last week.

For editorial content this week, there’s a second episode of College Media Lab, a possible showcase of cool features on new client sites and a link roundup. Another cool idea we had for a post or just in general for clients is to make really cool, branded mockups of what a site could look like if you really delve into customization. (On a sidenote, after the call, a few of us stuck around for a lengthy design brainstorm in which we decided we like the Spokesman Review’s topics navigation, The Star’s timeline view, and some design elements from Lawrence.com. But that’s just a teaser; you’ll hear more about it later.

That’s all folks. Until next week.

We also discussed the launch of our email newsletter. Andrew will be preparing a draft of the first one and we’ll be sending it out when Courier supports sending emails to existing WordPress users (which should be coming soon). It’s going to be a tool for pushing out emergency updates, as well as a regular summary of what’s going on with links to blog posts, a way to welcome new site launches to everyone else we host, and so on. It’s undecided as to whether anyone can sign up for this, or whether we’ll restrict it to just active clients.

Our conversation about updates to the website was postponed to Tuesday’s hosting call. There was feedback from a potential client that we need to act on including:

• Pricing information was confusing: do we build sites that conform to accessibility standards (need to make that clear)
• Way to look through potential themes (both WooThemes and opensource)
• Explain the design part of the process and what the client’s role is
• We should calculate their server plan, have them submit server stats (if they know it)
• News org. size calculator doesn’t work (is it even really necessary?)
• Point people to more information instead of directly toward signing up

On Saturday, I’ll be in Seattle for a conference on the future of journalism/death to newspapers. Specifically, I’ll be participating on a panel about content management systems for student newspapers. More specifically, a College Publisher/CoPress smackdown. To keep this as professional as possible, I’ll be working on a presentation throughout the week. Greg had a good suggestion that we should make our presentation as much as possible about our vision for student newspapers, and not necessarily what CoPress is. I agree. I think we should also generate a list of questions we think I’ll be asked so that we can prepare a list of potential answers ahead of time.

Adam is going to finishing up with the ACP/CMA materials tonight and tomorrow. We still need to draft rackcards, stickers, shirts, and possibly buttons.

High priority: Conferences, managed hosting and Connection Engine

We’re just five days away from the ONA 2009 Conference and about a month away from the ACP/CMA Conference. After some difficulty getting his hands on the right typeface, Adam is now putting the finishing touches on business cards to be printed tomorrow so we can give them out at these conferences. After evaluating the budget, we’ll be able to determine if we can buy rack cards, stickers, t-shirts and maybe pins too (yeah, we’re getting fancy).

In other news, plugins on the managed hosting servers are updating more efficiently after LiquidWeb did minor server configuration. For updates like this, we’re considering starting a newsletter to send out to clients about changes,  tips and tricks and to introduce new members to the network. We want to ditch Google groups, but are unsure about what alternate option would work best besides a mass e-mail.

The next big projects for the upcoming weeks are the Connection Engine, working on new team contracts and drafting a functioning budget. If any accounting/business students have tips for Daniel about drafting a budget, leave a comment or shoot him an e-mail.

Medium & Low priority: Promo vid and bank account

I’ll have a final video drafted by next Saturday to conclude our educational video series. This final video will serve as a promotional piece that can be sent out to potential clients as an introduction to what CoPress does and how we can help. I want everyone to contribute a sound bite or video clip so we can get everyone’s voices/faces into the video. On second thought, that might be a bad idea if the CoPress team changes over the next few months of changes.

We also have a new bank account set up in Oregon so that it can be easier managed by Daniel. For the time being, Adam and Daniel are the sole signers on the account.

Editorial: Any ideas?

The editorial calendar is a tad empty this week. We’ll have an episode of College Media Lab (formerly This Week in CoPress) to post Tuesday, a Wednesday post about WaPo’s controversial social media strategies, a preview of web/tech sessions for ACP/CMA and a link post on Friday. If anyone on the team (or outside the team) with solid post ideas, let us know.

That’s all, folks. For those of you going to ONA, see you soon!

Andrew started the conversation with a report on the new client outreach we started at the end of last week. We’ve sent direct emails to two newspapers thus far with only one indirect response. Taking this as a good-ish sign, we’re going to email five more potentials on Monday and see what the reaction is. Andrew has shared the letter outline with the team that we’re using to craft these emails. Hopefully if we refine this process over time, the outreach will bear some fruit.

Miles is finishing up a list of current clients that we think are good candidates for switching from version 1 hosting to Managed Hosting. We’ll want to start that process as soon as possible, ideally before he leaves the country on vacation. On Tuesday, Andrew and I will want to talk about this, the process for scoping out design and contract work, regular client workshops, the best way to contact all of our clients at once, and a better spreadsheet for managing launches and contact information.

Adam is going to have draft business cards done in the next few days for ACP/CMA. We talked a bit this afternoon about promotional materials and how they relate to our budget for the conference, and business cards, rack cards, and nice shirts for the team are high on the list of priorities. If we have the funds, we might also get stickers and CoPress T-shirts to hand out. We’ll need to make sure this is alright with the conference organizers before we sink money into it, however.

I finally finished drafting our strategic goals for 2009 last night (it took a week longer than I expected just because I became swamped with a few things). The point of this document is two-fold: provide a common vision for the team for fall 2009 as well as a set of criteria for us to judge the success of our efforts at the end of the year. I’m going to have the team leave comments on the document, then I’ll send it for comments from advisors, and then we’ll wrap all of that into a nice final document that will be published on this here blog thing.

This Week in CoPress is still going through its process of rebranding. Greg and Vanessa are going to work on finalizing the new name by Tuesday, and then we’ll produce appropriate bumps, logos, etc. for it. On the 27th, we’ll be recording an episode on Breaking News and Twitter, and two weeks after that will be one on the Duke Chronicle and maybe the Next Newsroom Project.

On the blog, we’re going to hopefully have a post on the relaunch of The Campanil, which now has a surprisingly fresh design from News Evolved, and a post from Max Cutler about Courant News and how it handled the traffic with the recent murder on campus. I think it would also be sweet to have a bit on how the CMS conceptually assisted the newsroom in their ability to cover the news, and what they might want from the CMS in the future.

High Priority

To start things off I covered the Managed Hosting outreach goals for the coming months. Over the next few weeks Daniel and myself will be sending out emails to 10 new schools a week in order to reach out to perspective clients and bring new members into the Forum and Wiki community.

Daniel also covered preparation for the fast approaching ACP/CMA conference in Austin, TX. He’ll be putting together a budget for the event soon and then we’ll start getting business cards, t-shirts, stickers, and maybe even some DVD handouts together. Lauren also suggested the idea of doing some informal tweet-ups during the day.

Medium Priority

Thanks to a lot of hard work by Miles the first stage of the Connection Engine will be up and running soon. Once it’s up on the server we’ll create some test accounts to start putting it through its paces. Lauren and myself will then work on skinning it to fit in the spirit of Version 3 of copress.org.

We also discussed a new workflow for editorial ideas on the blog. We’ll be posting ideas to CoPress Micro with the hashtag #copressblog. Daniel also mentioned a list of ideas for things that we aim to accomplish this fall and will be sending it out to team members later this week.

Editorial/Community

• Monday – no content planned
• Tuesday – Vanessa, commenting policies
• Tuesday – Mo, version 0.2 Edit Flow
• Wednesday – Lauren, edu video #5
• Thursday – Adam, site launch roundup
• Friday or Saturday – Daniel, We Clicked On

High priority: Reincorporation, design and evaluation

Daniel gave us the update on reincorporating CoPress as a for-profit organization. The paperwork was filed this week, so the next step will be obtaining an employer identification number from the IRS. And more good news: We don’t have to file a tax return until early next year.

Although we launched our site redesign a few weeks ago, there’s still work to be done. Notably, the hosting page needs to be tweaked to better reflect and explain what CoPress does. We’ll be shifting priority info “above the fold” of the page and including text about what you can expect during the transition, among other things.

In terms of evaluation, Daniel will put together a document about what goals we should be meeting and how we measure success, as determined by conversations he’s had one-on-one with members of the team this past week. One main goal, which we all agreed might be a bit too ambitious, is to get 75 managed hosting clients by the end of the year.

Medium priority: Editorial stuffs

This Week in CoPress — or whatever we end up changing its name to — is going through some changes. First off, it’s not going to be held weekly, and it’s no longer going to be as interview-based as in the past. We’re going for a more conversational feel oriented around topics instead of individual projects. If anyone has feedback on the format, new name or topic list, check out Vanessa’s post about it and leave a comment.

The educational video series (A Case for Innovation) will continue for the next few weeks. This week’s video is about 20 innovative ideas for the newsroom, the following week’s will be about capturing value on the web, and we’re still tossing around the idea of doing a proprietary vs. open-source video. So far, they’ve been generating positive buzz. Andrew also suggested burning them to a CD and handing them out at the ACP/ONA conferences.

Low priority: Conference networking

With October journalism conferences in Austin, Texas and San Francisco, CoPress will have a strong presence and thus a huge opportunity for networking. In the upcoming weeks, we need to figure out whether we’ll print business cards and make t-shirts.

Editorial/community

The upcoming editorial calendar:

• Monday: Nothing. It’s Labor Day!
• Tuesday: Kevin’s post
• Wednesday: Case for Innovation part IV (video and post)
• Thursday: Vanessa’s post on commenting (tentative)
• Friday: Link love

We’ve been using our new system of breaking down topics to be covered into 3 priority levels and endeavoring to keep the calls to 30 minutes. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s working well. We’re always sure to cover the important stuff, and get off the phone much faster than our old hour and 30 minute standard.

Site Design (fixing the 2am half-assing)

Today’s call started off with a full acknowledgment that our hosting page, while updated, is not nearly what we need it to be. Feedback provided:

• It’s not entirely clear that by signing up for hosting, the client should also be signing up for Priority Support. I don’t think we should manage hosting accounts if they don’t have priority support
• Signup form needs to be updated a bit so that we make sure we capture required information.
• In the school size calculator, Staff Size, can be mistaken for University staff, as in faculty, staff, etc. not newspaper staff.
• We should review why we limit database restores to 3? If the DB crashes or breaks after that we won’t do anything? It might become unlimited, as its a service that people are likely to never use, hopefully will never have to use, but should always be there for safety’s sake.
• Include a badge with “Prices starting at $50/month” that leads into the pricing page
• We should consider raising the basic setup cost to $200. $150 seems low
• Maybe make the graphic only over the left column, and move the links to the top of the right column.

Adam is going to take the lead on mapping out what we need to do, and Daniel will help with execution if needed. Any other feedback? Let us know in the comments.

Creative Commons, GPL, MIT, © (Legalese)

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. Our software licensing will be decided on a case-by-case basis, with a strong preference for open source software.

The real reason we wouldn’t release something we build as open source is because we don’t want to support it. Rest assured – we’re still real strong supporters of open source.

Financial (Light on numbers, heavy on Words)

There’s a fairly massive report coming about the research done for the Revenue Platform, pay attention to this blog and perhaps the main blog for updates.

Editorial (I can haz randomness)

Our planned editorial calendar for this week:

• Monday – This Week in CoPress
• Tuesday – roundup post of site launches
• Wednesday – Edu video #3
• Thursday – Best practices for commenting policies?
• Thursday – Adam has this
• Friday – We Clicked On

The forum discussion for this week will have something related to facebook apps.

One last thing worth mentioning: as Microsoft would say, we’re going to have a pre-alpha of the Connection Engine v0.1 ready to go this week. (Cheers to Miles!)

So why did we do it? It opens up a lot of expansion opportunities we wouldn’t have had with a nonprofit status. The move allows us to share equity with the people who have worked so hard to build CoPress up, and it opens the doors for investment opportunities. Though we lose the tax benefits and the warm fuzziness of being a nonprofit, we think CoPress has the potential of being a self-sustaining business in its own right.

Members in attendance:

• Daniel Bachhuber
• Joey Baker
• Ryan Sholin
• Suzanne Yada
• Jackie Hai
• Andrew Dunn
• Bryan Murley

For the text record, on Sunday our board will meet to vote on whether we have permission to move the project from non-profit to for-profit. We need a board vote on the record to make sure that everything is legal. Depending on whether that passes or not, Joey and I will then work on refiling on Monday with the State of Florida. We’ll continue with Florida over Oregon or another state because Susan Linch is kind enough to be an excellent resource. Once we get the filing done, we’ll wait as close as possible to September 15th to file for an extension on our tax return. The next month will also hold the project for us of figuring out how we split up equity amongst the people who going to be doing the work this fall. Neither Joey or I are qualified to comment on how this will be done (yet) and plan on talking to knowledgeable people within the next week to figure out the most equitable way to do this.

Thursday’s meeting with Carolynn was mostly focused on investment, when you seek it, what investors are looking for, etc. Most of the information isn’t applicable to us currently, and might not ever be applicable to us. The upside to external investment is that you get an infusion of cash with which to scale your business. The downsides are that you lose ownership/control of the company, the investors generally want at least a 20x return, and they might be looking to take your company public or sell it off to get that return. If we can scale such that the team starts getting paid based on their work without having to take external investment, I think we’d be better off.

My notes from the meeting (page 1, page 2, page 3) are moderately informative.

Before I get into the details, I’d like to welcome Vanessa Bezic, who is joining me as a co-host on This Week in CoPress, season two. Vanessa is a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, where she studied broadcast journalism. She learned about CoPress this spring from David Cohn, who is now on our board of directors.

Now, on to the call:

We first discussed the Web site redesign, which will launch on Monday. In addition to a post about the redesign on the main blog, look out for another announcement about hosting.

The next item involved an informative video Lauren Rabaino created about innovation. She’ll soon be working on another one as part of our new educational video series.

Related to the new hosting page, we discussed managing workflow, something that’s previously been discussed on this blog. Moving forward, we’ll be contacting new potential partners, primarily seeking out smaller college news organizations who may not have heard about us yet.

That point tied in with our discussion about a new push to expand our community, which Adam Hemphill will be leading. This entails contacting organizations to bring them into the discussion and see how we can help them and they can contribute to the larger community.

As I mentioned earlier, we’re getting ready to kick off This Week in CoPress, season two, which will be co-hosted by Vanessa and yours truly. The plan is to record the first time – we’ll do it live! – before the end of the month and then continue weekly on Sundays before the team call, if that time works out ok.

How does that sound? Would you be interested in listening and/or participating live at that day and time?

Some possible topics for the first episode include what people have been working on during the summer and what we can look forward to during the coming school year.

If you have any other ideas, please let us know!

In the more organizational realm, we’ll soon be back to office hours and – a new thing – specifying full days we can commit to working on CoPress, including responding to inquiries and such.

On the business side, Joey Baker reported that the area in highest demand is training for how to sell ads online. He’ll be looking into this further as an opportunity to provide an important service as well as be source of revenue for us.

Until next week, stay classy.

We started off the conversation by running through the website redesign we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. For history and posterity, this is where we’re at (although both the images and copy are not set in stone; we’re having an epic Basecamp conversation about the merits and demerits of our proposed slogan):

The original, original goal was to relaunch last Tuesday or thereabouts. After we completely blew through that, I moved the draft day to Thursday and then launch over Saturday. That didn’t happen either. Our goal now is to launch as soon as we put the finishing touches on a few last things.

Those things include:

• Daniel – Completed /about/ page. I’m working on a draft now that I’ll send around for comments and feedback as soon as I get it done.
• Daniel or someone else – Building a blog landing page to the design that Joey already prepared.
• Daniel and Joey – Finish up the final design for the home page.
• Miles – Finish up the new hosting page with pricing and other things
• Andrew – Create a MediaWiki skin to match the new website design
• Adam – Make the forum look good.

If we can get these things done by evening on Tuesday, then we’ll put the website into maintenance mode and make the switch. Otherwise, we’ll shoot for Thursday/ the weekend.

There are a number of hosting grunt tasks that need to be taken care of either Monday or Tuesday of this week. On Tuesday, we’ll hopefully connect to talk about a couple other ideas for the fall, including having client introduction surveys, regular workshops on WordPress, PHP, etc., and building a plugin to manage dead College Publisher URLs.

Lauren published earlier today (or yesterday?) the first version of an epic educational video making the case for innovation. We all heaped praise on her and are looking for the final version by the end of this week, as well as a draft version of video number two although I’m not entirely sure which one we’re going for. Adam is going to lead an outreach initiative for the month of August by compiling a list of 75 or 100 webmasters we should contact. This list will probably contact people we’ve been in touch with before and those we haven’t, and the goal really is to let them know of the community resources we offer so that we can get more people involved in the conversation. There’s going to be a line we have to be aware of so that we don’t come off as spammy. I think one approach we can take to address this is, although it’d be a lot of work, hand write every email. The form letters generally get deleted pretty quick unless you signed up for them.

On the editorial side of things, we’re going to be picking up our content production as soon as we launch our new website. This new editorial strategy hasn’t been planned yet, we didn’t talk about it on the call, and is something I hope Adam can take a crack at.

Lastly but not leastly, we had a short conversation about the continued project of moving from non-profit to for-profit. The biggest task this week will be to organize a special board meeting because, legally, we have to get the board to ratify the decision. Once we get the go-ahead, we can re-file with the State of Florida as either a C Corporation or S Corporation. We need to do this within the next week or so because we have to send a request for deferring on taxes by September 15th.

In all seriousness, though, we were really productive. This call marks the end of the profit vs. non-profit discussion as we start to buckle down on big projects that need to be completed by the end of summer.

On the just-short-of-an-hour call today, we had Daniel, Adam, Joey, Megan Taylor, Greg, Andrew and I.

Organization

Thursday was the first CoPress hackathon, or something similar. The day kicked off with an 8 a.m. conference call and everyone dedicated the next eight hours to working on CoPress projects. Feedback, overall, was positive. Although everyone generally likes the idea of working all day, time conflicts make it difficult for everyone to start at 8 a.m. (such as Joey, Greg, Andrew and I). We’re going to continue the CoPress work day every Thursday as a weekly team event.

Daniel’s also planning to do a Tuesday work day in addition, and anyone who can’t make it Thursday is free to join him. Something I just thought of that didn’t come up earlier is perhaps splitting it for those who can’t do mornings, e.g. 4-8 Tuesday, 4-8 Thursday. Holla in the comments if that’s plausible.

Operations

Version 3.0 of the CoPress site is coming along beautifully, even featuring a live stream that aggregates all CoPress activity across social networks. Things that still need to be done include fixing the subnav and changing the default WooTheme typography associated with the new theme.

Also, we got another update (although no final decision) on getting a standardized phone number for CoPress. The problem with using Google Voice is that once team members sync their phones with the CoPress number, they can’t use personal Google Voice accounts. Daniel’s temporary solution is to have the number direct to voicemail, which in return notifies all CoPress accounts. Adam said that defeats the point of a phone number. We’ll continue the discussion later, I presume.

Editorial

Megan Taylor has taken on the project of revamping the CoPress wiki. She put together a handy audit of current wiki content– what works, what doesn’t work and what needs improvement. The Wiki is going to be broken down into topic hubs: WordPress, Django, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Languages, Search/Analytics/SEO, Launching your site, Web applications, Doing Business Online, Building your Community. She’ll have the final write-up for the Wiki vision by Monday.

Financial

Joey has a new invoicing system that is completely digital. Although he’ll mainly be in charge for sending them, he can teach anyone on the team to do it just in case. Greg brought up security concerns with the documents being stored on the cloud, but there will be no personal information (credit cards, bank accounts, etc.). It’ll just be straight numbers about credit and debt, so no huge concerns there.

Community

Andrew will develop a landing page for the Design Camp content so that it can become a resource that doesn’t get lost on the blog. Andrew’s initial sketches for the landing page will be done Thursday.

I’m continuing work on the educational videos. Storyboards are in their third round of re-writes but should be done by the end of the week so I can start video production. The first video is launching with the new site on Aug. 12.

Also, this Monday we’re starting up a forum discussion for the first time in a while. The topic will focus on must-have WordPress plugins to add to our list for the Wiki.

Hosting

Miles wasn’t around this week, but Daniel relayed his thoughts to us. Overall, Miles says we’re in “a really good place.” He changed the conversion script to create WordPress XML files (instead of SQL databases), which makes updating a database much much easier. This means that our import process is significantly simpler than the CP-Import plugin. The next step for hosting is to start prepping for the next round of conversions. The rest of the schools are going to be launched over the next seven weeks.

We started off by continuing the for-profit vs. non-profit conversation we’ve had of late. I did a recap of the call Greg and I had with Greg’s mom, Susan Linch. She was really helpful and informed us of most of the logistical things we’ll have to cover if we do the switch. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like too big of a deal. The bigger/biggest concern is one of PR/branding backlash. From our call on Sunday afternoon with John York, it sounds like even that shouldn’t be our biggest concern. We should instead focus on the business model and business plan; if we can continue doing what we’ve been doing in the harmony of the community, then we’ll be fine. I remember that he also suggested we do a bit of brainstorming as to what we think the worst case scenarios are such that we’ll then be able to generate strategies to deal with them. My goals for this week are to write out a legitimate spec for the Connection Engine, or start on one at least, and start working on this business plan. We’ll want to have it done to a point where we can make a final decision by August first.

Adam didn’t have any redesign and rebrand concepts to show off at the meeting, but said he’d have some to share later this week. Our goals are to push this out by August 5th, although that would be coming up pretty quick.

That’s as far as I can get tonight. Sorry for the incomplete summary; I’ve been writing nearly the entire day it feels like. The audio is a good conversation.

The short answer on the potential transition is that the actual work would be very minimal. We’d just have to file a form with the State of Florida to reincorporate our business as a standard corporation. This would replace the non-profit filing we have right now. It’s really just a matter of paper work; Susan says that these types of transitions happen all the time and the state and the IRS don’t mind at all.

So, the actual legwork would be quite simple. It’s understanding the differences between a standard corporation and a non-profit that will make the decision more complex. The obvious thing about a non-profit is that you aren’t taxed by the state or the IRS. If you’re a for-profit, then your profits get taxed. In Florida, however, any yearly profit under $5,000 doesn’t get taxed (the IRS will still tax the organization). The less obvious thing about non-profits is that if you have money left over at the end of the year (i.e. your revenues exceeded your expenses, or you made a profit), then that money can either go towards your operating expenses of the next year or towards the salaries of employees/payments to external contractors. This could, in some regards I believe, work in the same fashion as shares in a corporation.

Shares, and ownership in a company, is a unique aspect to for-profit corporations. Structuring this way would mean that we should divvy up shares in exchange for labor with the understanding that you could get a dividend from the shares when/if CoPress is a more profitable company. Share owners could also sell their shares at a later date.

I’m split at this point now. Earlier, I was more inclined to make CoPress a for-profit corporation because, in my mind, giving out equity in the company was the easiest way to reimburse people for their effort. It would also mean that we could go after a limited amount of investment if we needed money put into the company. Non-profit might still work in our scenario, as I’d still like to be as transparent as possible and focus on our mission. The goal in either regard is to create a mechanism to reimburse anyone that might be spending a significant amount of time with the project in the near future. For instance, if I were to commit 50+ hours/week to CoPress, I’d love to get a payout for my efforts when we do have a more reliable stream of revenue (in addition to receiving a salary at some point).

Because our end of the year was legally June 30th, we’ll have to make our decision for the next year at least by August 1st. After that time, we’ll want to file our tax returns or file for an extension on taxes.

Organization

The main focus of the call was centered around futures of CoPress. The team is still posed with two options:

• Go for profit, find a dedicated core team, develop the revenue platform and work on creating a market for it. This will take a lot of time and a lot of dedication.
• Stay non-profit and discontinue expansion of hosting clients

Of course, there are many in-between options. One examples that came up was becoming a “transition” resource to train colleges moving to their own hosting (on a per-hour pay basis). Daniel indicated that the ideal situation might look like having about 2-4 people working on development and managing hosting operations.

Daniel set a deadline of making a decision by July 1 (Wednesday) so he’ll move forward this week by making phone calls to the team regarding going for-profit.

Editorial

Not much to say about editorial this week. The only blog post lined up is a recap on the wiki workshop, which will be written by Andrew Spittle.

Financial

The main points from financial are that there is about $3,000 in the bank account and Daniel has checks (so ask him if you need one). Also, Joey made a joke about decimal places and Django, but it went over my head.

Community

I’m working on the educational video specs. I’ve already posted the spec for A Case for Innovation and I’ll be done with the Going Web First spec this week. Please look at the specs on Basecamp and add any suggestions.

Hosting

Miles reported that people are still asking for hosting. His goals for the week are to catch up on e-mails and soft launch 4-5 sites.