Re: Wrap Up
Subject: Re: Wrap Up
From: Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com>
Date: 1/10/11, 19:19
To: Scott Mintz <scott.w.mintz@gmail.com>
CC: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>, Sundeep Gottipati <gsundeep@gmail.com>, Campbell Vertesi <campbell@vertesi.com>, "dynamicuno@gmail.com" <dynamicuno@gmail.com>, Emma Allan <emilieduchatelet8@gmail.com>, jkundra@gmail.com, Seb Gillen <sebgillen@gmail.com>

I am sorry that I have been uninvolved recently due to family concerns.

But I want to endorse your efforts to get a website up.  In fact, for the moment I think getting a website up is more important than even the network software, for the following reasons:

Although we have 100+ people on our participant spreadsheet, I suspect some or perhaps many of them have lost interest because we have no place online for them to roost or to participate beyond the IRC channel (which was a giant step forward, thanks due to Campbell and others).  For instance, a website would be useful to marshal interest in the Wikileaks rally.  Scott tells me in chat that what I am talking about is, in business jargon, creating stickiness for new participants.

Passing around Google docs is getting cumbersome and the information that we want to share widely should just be posted.

With the next wave of interest, probably to be triggered by Barrett's rally-related writing, we need to have some more automated participant information management than the current spreadsheets. I formerly maintained the general participant spreadsheet, the mailing list and the Science/Journalism spreadsheet before Emma took over those tasks, so I will encourage her to weigh in here.  Sundeep, is there some off-the-shelf open-source membership records software that could be dropped into the website--so the new participants could enter and update their own information into a database?  Currently, such information is manually pasted or re-keyed from e-mails into Google spreadsheets.

Clark


On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Scott Mintz <scott.w.mintz@gmail.com> wrote:

So I started writing the below but didn't have time to finish as I'm currently at the airport awaiting a flight to ohio to visit my grandma, and no, this does not make me a saint.

To conclude what I was writing before, I was attempting to kill two birds with one stone. Specifically, I assumed and subsequently verified that Campbell would prefer to dedicate his available time to the software schematic. Additionally, I was optimistic that Nathalie and her team would be up to the task of designing the site. I say this since their expertise may prove invaluable in presenting an overwhelming amount of information in a clear and concise manner that is easily digestible by the general public.

Since I don't have Gregg as a contact, and I'm writing this from my phone, would someone please forward this to him?

To clarify, i'll be unable to attend Sunday's meeting but would appreciate a copy of transcript, if possible.

Now for some personal items:

Campbell-I'll send you a check out of the proceeds of my $1000 per hour consulting fee.
Emma-Why I read your email at 3am local time I have no idea but it certainly was interesting. Do you really do back exercises?
Tim-I wish I had your weekend job even though it would mean a liver transplant sooner than expected.
Clark-How's it going?

Scott

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Scott Mintz" <scott.w.mintz@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 7, 2011 2:36 PM
Subject: Wrap Up
To: "Scott Mintz" <scott.w.mintz@gmail.com>

This past two days I've sent out several emails but did a piss poor job of keeping everyone on the same page.

With Barrett's permission I reached out to Nathalie, the owner of www.bizwall.net. My hope here was that she would be able to provide designing services. At this moment in time I'm unable to provide a screenshot of the mock site she set up, but it looks very similar to the projectpm.singingsites.com site minus content.

While I'm confident everyone on this email chain has the attention span of a komodo dragon on the prowl, I, on the other hand, suffer from undiagnosed ADD