Supporting the Occupy Movement post-summit

Meeting Notes: Occupy Devsummit

Derek, Bill, Kathryn, Cooper, Ted Facilitator: Sarah

Talking about ideas for Occupy movement. How to stay involved and brainstorm where to go next. There was a session the first day for one-pagers concerning security on the internet. OccupyTechnology.org

There's a web team for OccupySF, and it's a chaotic environment, and high stress level.

Idea of doing one-pagers within your area of expertise, writing something up. How can we support the larger occupy movement?

Ted brings up the point of the Occupy tactic in terms of encampment is losing momentum, so there possibly needs to be a shift in tactics. There are also barriers to entry in terms of how to plug in, and how to get involved. Groups need to talk to one another.

Media team has been organized on the mailing list, which was on Google and now on Hackbloc. High volume of emails, so we moved to redmine. Problems have been user education. Are there better systems for this?

What do people want to learn about? Website is a good way to put up certain types of information: scheduling info, groups to plug in to, etc. PR and external media are other issues.

One email for external, one email for internal media. Segment information in separate lists or sources.

We want to see more transparency, and it may be not ideal to use the ticketing system and private groups for this. Google groups are public by default but may need to moderate.

Occupy@ email address is going somewhere, and someone is receiving it. How do we make sure that it's not an anti-democratic channel?

There's duplication of efforts in every city. Perhaps we need a federated management of tasks.

There's similar problems throughout… how much communication is going on between cities? We need some kind of federated services. There's processes and services that are being actively developed. Some kind of occupy tech consortium that is collaborative may be good, and may evolve. There should be at least conversations going on, between cities using technologies that are perhaps already exist.

How much communication is going on between SF media and Oakland media? Very little. That's really easy.

What would be helpful are "spokes-councils" between cities and building communication between folks.

We should make an internet directory for all occupies. Or better yet, party like it's 1999 and start an occupy web ring!

The work is overwhelming and threes not a lot of techies actively involved in the Occupy movement tech subcommittees, even though theres a lot of techies around that want to get involved. We can perhaps draw on those resources and farm out tasks to them.

What kind of software do we want to develop? Perhaps an aggregation tool for calendars, twitter, Facebook, etc.

People are dealing with the issues of the lack of leadership but also dealing out tasks. How to we figure out how to get the bay area occupy movement together? Well we should get everyone together for a meet up and hopefully the best practices will evolve from there.

Affinity groups are perhaps a good organizing structure for cities that aren't going to camp. Some direct action is perhaps needed in those situation.

Occupy Tech Bay Area formed, emails gathered.