You Never Forget Your First

Minutes from inagural meeting - Oct 5/05

Bill Dunphy, Tom Hogue, Patricia Young, Marissa Nelson
absent: Lesley Simpson, James Harvey, Rebecca Jager

1) Road Map
The gang agreed to a fairly simple plan: Spend a few meetings generating and honing a list of quick hit ideas, cool things we can do with the web site in the near future. Then we take a step back and grapple  with some of the bigger or more basic issues — how we get content on the web, who decides and designs, how to take advantage of it's power to create communities etc etc.
ACTION ITEMS - None

2) Tom's Initiatives
Tom Hogue offered details of a few web/tech pitches and projects already coming down the pipe:

a) Video Streaming off TheSpec.com

i) Go Cooking - (recorded Oct. 7, available by Oct11) using our local freelancer and local college students as techs
II) Go Backstage - (recorded Oct 15, available Oct 22 using WebCenter for Excellence and local college students as techs)

b) Book Club - for $500 US we can purchase (and 'brand' as our own, i.e. The Spec's) an e-mail book club that provides registered members with a daily dose of book talk, including advance excerpts of new releases. Members tailor letter to their tastes. Proposal calls for Lesley Simpson to build a web presence for the project, adding a weekly book column with a sidebar of reader's comments and discussions
c) Citizen Journalism - The notion that the media should not just listen to, but give a platform to, "citizen journalists" is finding great favour in some corners of the net. Fad or fab? Tom's conducted some preliminary research, reasoning that our listings and letters to the editor are already a form of citizen journalism and he wanted to find out what's involved in "mediating" the content - useful information if we want to propose some bolder experiments. He'll share the results at a future meeting.

ACTION ITEMS - Tom to share research on citizen journalism later

3) Top Three News Web Sites
If we are going to improve our web presence, it would help to have some idea about what we're shooting for. So far we have:

http://www.boingboing.net
http://www.metafilter.com
http://www.kurzweilai.net

ACTION ITEMS: Committee members are asked to provide Bill with their top three news web sites BEFORE the next committee meeting.

4) Top Three Quick Hits
The meat of the meeting.  Using the latest in high-tech tools (a flip chart) the gang produced the following draft list:

• Stand-alone  site for the Poverty Project including:

All Stories
Voices/faces of poverty
Blogs (readers/staff)
Readers' Contributions - photos/stories
Interactive graphic maps/charts
Agency/Volunteer swap meet
Practical resources/How-to's
etc.

• Spec Columnists Podcasts
• Somali Project stand-alone site including

All Stories
Voices/faces of community
Slide show of trip with Cathy Coward narration
How the story was built - in words/pictures/audio Wade/Cathy

• WSYWYG Venue Ticket search - searcheable on-line seating guide to Hamilton theaters, stadiums, arenas with 'views from the seat'
• Photo sharing - a la Flickr.com - for high school sports and more
• Photo submission form for The Spectator and Spec.com
• Web polling - linked to print stories and issues, with commenting
• News Updates - LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL , as well as CP or whatever. Maybe just as a ticker on our home page
• Searchable Restaurant and Movie listings
• Readers Group - opt in mail list to be tapped for story ideas, interviews and temperature taking.
• A special home for crime stories on our site
• A tag system (a la del.icio.us )for stories or some way of sorting them.
• Scheduled Web chats with staff
• Mail-to links embedded in bylines
• Sidebar resouce links routinely added to stories
• The week/day in photos  - a slide show feature

In addition the committee suggested an eagerness to search out a better layout than our current headline list and a front page that looks like the entrance to a news portal instead of the back page of some small town tv listings magazine. Other suggestions included selling columnists off the front page of the web site and finding better ways to promote what our web is doing.
ACTION ITEMS: We still need quick hit ideas from Rebecca, Lesley, and James. And ANY NEW IDEAS ARE WELCOME FROM ANYONE.

-30-

Next meeting will be held at 2pm on Monday, Oct 17 - Meeting will be devoted to prioritizing quick hits and seeing what work needs to be done to get them "pitch ready".