Minutes for May 6th 2008

Tues 6th May 2008, 9pm - 10:30pm in IFC.
5 members of collective attended

Agenda
1) Process for server failures
2) Recent Bans
3) Reddy's Front Page layout
4) Outreach
5) Quality Issues
6) AOB

1) Process for server failures
It was agreed that all the techies would exchange passwords.

2) It was noted that the recent vote to unban MC. was carried.
Action: Ter to remove ban.

3) Reddy's Front Page
A very rough mockup of this is available at page NewFrontPageDemo. There was some discussion around various designs. It would be desirable to have thumbnail photos and a drop down list of a subset of the main topics to allow further feature selection.
There was some discussion of a promoted newswire and this may be incorporated. Also to check again the UK and NY Indy sites
Action: In 3 weeks to vote on the current front page demo with a view to adopting it as the new front page.

4) Outreach
General discussion said we should focus on people involved in Unions, NGOs and political groups and maybe do this via a focus leaflet distribution to these groups.

James is considering doing a survey. Plan is to do one to sample our readers to determine what are the most important things we should address.

Action 1: Reddy to email the PDF of the text of the leaflet that we had been working on and for this to be placed on a static page on the site.
Action 2: Ter to email results of 2003 limited survey to collective for ideas.
Action 3: Collective to compile a list of potential survey questions

5) Quality Issues.
There was a general discussion about this and about various types of newswires, registered users, voting, promoted newswire and so forth to help remedy low quality. The general consensus was that everyone present would not currently recommend the site to their peers due to lack of quality.

This issue is to be discussed again after the survey is done.

The existing guidelines (No. 8) actually have quite a bit to say about article quality.

6) AOB
a) Ant proposed James & James are given Oscailt ability to edit static pages on site. Motion carried.
b) Ant proposed that Consitution be changed to allow a person to act as a list administrator and moderator at the same time. This is due to limited number of people available. Motion carried.