ALAC Executive Committee Meeting
30th November 2007
Summary Meeting Notes
Present: C Langdon-Orr (Chair), R Guerra, V Scartezini, H Diakite (Rapporteur), N Ashton-Hart (staff)
The meeting was opened at 13:09 by the Chair, who opened with a question to the group to note what areas each member of the ExCom was most interested in working on.
V Scartezini raised her email regarding organising the work of At-Large and that there was a great deal of work to do in following issues and responding to them. There was also a need for each RALO to have conference calls so that we can have a good understanding from each region of their priorities. A role for ALAC members to act as a ‘speakers bureau’ to disseminate information, to share information in regions, and to identify what regional priorities are. The use of Wikis to draft and gain agreement on statements and positions is important. Just sending around emails is not enough of an accountability mechanism to ensure views and opinions are being respected.
R Guerra echoed much of V Scartezini’s comments. Defining and documenting what people are doing is important in order to demonstrate to the outside community that action is being taken and work being done. There’s a concern for the amount of time committed and the need to verify that commitments were met. There is a lot of work going on but that isn’t visible necessarily on email lists.
V Scartezini suggested organising wiki pages by topic to make it easier to follow action being taken. More organisation of work is needed; some of the techniques the board made use of in it’s committee work practices would be useful in At-Large.
R Guerra raised the question of who is to organise the wiki – the staff, or the ALAC?
V Scartezini said the staff can organise things upon direction of the ALAC. Each topic area or activity area should be the responsibility of someone on ALAC though for accountability.
The Staff noted that some policy areas were already being very actively maintained by those responsible for them – the IDN pages maintained by Hong Xue are a good example of what V Scartezini is suggesting.
C Langdon-Orr noted that the training on the SocialText environment the previous day was superb and it was clear this was a very powerful too. H Diakite noted that all Members should be trained on this environment. The Staff noted that training would be happily provided whenever convenient.
R Guerra noted the importance of not allowing tools to take the place of activity and outreach. This was reinforced by V Scartezini, noting that we could not allow ourselves to become too inward-facing.
C Langdon-Orr noted that the bookmarked Skype chat would make it easy for the ExCom to meet regularly and to send notes to one another at any time and further that the ExCom members should try and attend RALO meetings once or twice a year from regions other than their own.
H Diakite noted that limited access to the Internet or limited bandwidth was important to keep in mind and our tools should facilitate this. The Staff noted that there low-bandwidth/mobile Internet browsing features in SocialText and the ST administrator was providing further details of these features that would be forwarded on in due course. R Guerra cautioned that it is important to focus on engaging people, not having tech solve the problems. It’s the simple things that help. Let’s not underestimate the challenges of low-bandwidth. Let’s test new tools first, and see if they work, before proposing them as a possible solution.
C Langdon-Orr suggested that for the next couple of months, perhaps we could continue to try and have a short conversation in the fortnight before each monthly ALAC meeting.
The meeting was adjourned by the Chair at 13:55 UTC.
