[Tech] 06/23/2007 GRP Tech Meeting notes

[Jamie O'Keefe]

Including the communications director since some of the issues effect
communications.

06/23/2007 GRP Tech Meeting notes

Attending: Dan Melnechuk, John Saylor, Jamie O'Keefe
	
Status of the server update
	dan will do reinstall this weekend so the system boots and people can
start setting stuff up
	dan will also install a ticket system - rt / track / bugzilla.  it
will require a login
	stuff to move over:
		websites / email / emaillists
	decided we will go with apache 2.0
		each site has its own include file which should improve maintenance
		each site will have its own log file with simple naming convention,
domain name maybe

Status of the database cleanup
	jamie is cleaning up addresses
	dan will send voter (haven't received yet) and contributor lists and
jamie will append them
	jamie will then send the final list to get cleaned and identify dups
	jamie will remove dups by hand
	jamie will then send the list to a service to get phone numbers
	jamie will setup civicrm
	jamie will merge the final list into civicrm

	jamie will look at using the google maps api to geo code the supporter records

Status of instructions on upgrading zope to plone
	jamie will talk with eli

blog
	john sent the info he gathered on blogs in plone
	open question, does plone 2.0 have a blog?
	it would be good to have support for digg/del.icio.us/technorati/etc,
but we might need to update the plone code ourselves to add these
features

What should we replace webalizer with?
	we decided we do not want to share any data with a third party site
like google analytics
	we will try ed's analyzer suggestion and analyze our old logs as well
to get a better history

Setting up spaces on various social network/media sites
	social networks would be useful for connecting with our supporters
and identifying new ones
	most have some way of marking a user as a friend of another user

	here are a few we can use:

		myspace:
			probably the most popular, but pages look awful
			it is unclear how easy it is to maintain them
			presonal pages are public
		facebook:
			up and coming site that is probably next most popular after myspace
			college orientation, but with more people joining
			ui is nice and clean with everything in its place
			has groups feature, and users can enter notes, pictures, etc
			at least on a user level, easy to ask to link with other users
rather than inviting people to join facebook
			personal pages are private
		orkut:
			much more popular outside of us
			has groups feature
			ui is barebones
			limited ability to link with friends w/o inviting them
			personal pages are private
		flickr:
			very popular good photo sharing service
			has groups feature so users in group can post pictures to the group
			used by the irish green party among others
		youtube:
			very popular video sharing site
			used by many candidates/green parties as a means of distributing videos
			more exploration is necessary
		jaiku:
			new site for aggregating blogs, flickr/youtube posts, RSS feeds and other
			posts are designed to be short, 150 characters
			entries can be sent to mobile phones
			has groups feature, but is still in beta
			probably the best site seen for distributing quick alerts
		twitter:
			new site for distributing quick alerts
			posts are designed to be short, 150 characters
			entries can be sent to mobile phones
			no groups feature
	
	action items:			
		myspace - ask if someone wants to setup
		facebook - jamie created group
		orkut - jamie asked rich z to be admin of the grp group he created
		flickr - jamie will setup and put up grp pictures he has
		youtube - ask if someone wants to setup
		jaiku - jamie created group, still exploring
		twitter - probably should setup, but jaiku seems better

	once get approval from communications director, will put links on site

	dan suggested that we make use of call desk software that makes calls
local between two phones a local call via voip

Next meeting:
	July 28th, 2pm, 25 Moore St., Somerville
	will be on skype, contact id is jpokeefe