It’s this week, so I think we’re probably too late this year. We should make sure it’s on our radar next year though.
Tag Archive for 'conferences'
Another Sunday night, another team conference call. We skipped the week prior because some of the team was still traveling back from ACP/CMA. Joining me on the call were Greg, Miles, Sam, Andrew, and Lauren.
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.
We’ve been consistently able to keep our weekly team calls short. Attendance was a little low at this week’s call because we pushed it back an hour (to 5 p.m. PST) to accommodate for Daniel and Andrew who were at BarCamp. On the call we had Daniel, Andrew, Greg, Will, Albert and Lauren.
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.
Daniel, Adam, Greg, Will, Sam, Andrew, Albert, Vanessa, Bryan and myself were all on today’s call. It’s been a while since we’ve had such great attendance. Here’s what went down:
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.
Our conference call, which was attended by Daniel, Greg, Albert, Will, Adam and myself, was one of those lazy Sunday calls. Although productive, it was a little unenthusiastic (listen to call and you’ll know what I mean).
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.
In just over twenty minutes, we covered a lot of ground at this week’s conference call, which was attended by Daniel, Adam, Greg, Andrew, Vanessa and myself.
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. Continue reading ‘Sept. 27: Another record-setting call’
Note: This started as an e-mail thread but I’m opening it up to the blog for further discussion of an implementation strategy.
The ACP/CMA conferences are a perfect opportunity to use Twitter for community engagement, since attendees will likely have their laptops and everyone will be following #ona and #acp hashtags.
Twitter contests
At the beginning of CoPress’ panels, we should encourage the audience to follow us and announce that anything said during the panel — both from panelists and attendees — could be the answer to one of our trivia questions, which we’ll tweet afterwards. Since I’m not leading any of the panels, and because I’ll be at both conferences, I can be the person who picks the trivia question after the panels. This will probably only work if we have a decent prize like a CoPress t-shirt or a coffee mug.
Continue reading ‘Planning community engagement for ACP/CMA’
Interesting would probably be the word I would use to describe this week’s team call.
Organization & Operations
Daniel has created a document outlining our strategic goals in each area, which builds on the first version we created. It’s fairly preliminary at the moment, but we will soon hash out goals for the next six months. Look out for more details.
We also discussed Ryan Sholin’s question on Inside CoPress about what is a student and what is college media. We concluded our definition for student would be an undergraduate, at least part-time, who is in good academic standing.
Also in this arena, we’ll be finishing up some Web site changes, starting a document for drafting our bylaws and sending thank you cards to donors.
Continue reading ‘March 29 2009: Starting to Detail Strategic Goals’
Emily Kostic, brand new CoPress team member!
Our apologies for getting this post up a bit late. We did hold our regularly scheduled conference call on Sunday (even if only 5 people were there), but the post is just going up now.
Of course, the big news was that our new team member, Emily, was on board for her first conference call. Woot!
Organization & Operations
Daniel has been on a much-deserved vacation the last few days so Adam took both topics. Which was largely a discussion of how to fix up our Web site. We know the content kinda sucks, and we’re going to work to make it better. Hopefully our re-adoption of Basecamp will allow us to work on this efficiently.
Editorial
We’ve got a lot of posts in the pipeline, including some guest posts for this week. So look out for ‘em on the blog. (Oh, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite college journalist for the UWire 100).
Financial
Our accounts haven’t changed very much. With so many new clients, we’ve had a few late invoices, but nothing we’re really concerned about — it does take some time for educational institutions to cut a check.
This, however, has lead to people wondering what our current financial status is. Which means we need to investigate online options for sharing our current financial state.
Long-term, Joey’s been working on developing a plan for an ad network. We’re brainstorming all kinds of crazy ideas to create a system that will be unlike any that’s currently in business. (Naturally, we’re liking a lot of the stuff coming out of RevenueTwoPointZero.)
Community
We’ve started to talk about a CoPress-sponsored BarCamp sometime in late May. This is still very tentative, and it does seem like a lot of us will be attending NewsInnovation Philly.
Hosting
We’re not going to be closing our beta period (for the time being). Woot! We can handle more clients for some time to come. Miles couldn’t be on the call, so we didn’t get much more that that.
Don’t forget, we’re all about radical transparency, so if you like, you can listen to the entire conference call below.
Are there any conferences near the end of May or beginning of June?
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