• Saturday April 15, 2012, 12:00-2:00pm**
    MIT #10 building random empty (music?) classroom

Discussed building websites for nonprofit organizations, schools, or small local businesses, inspired by Habitat For Humanity

  • requires more specialized skills, so harder to find volunteers, owners less able to contribute
  • owners won’t be able to maintain the website themselves without some kind of training
  • consider creating an online community for owners to share knowledge
    • crowd-sourcing eases the burden on skilled volunteers
    • probably only a few contributors and lots of ‘leeches’
    • allow non-tech-savvy owners to share knowledge related to other areas of the business, to gain ‘reputation points’
      • then site devolves into a general site for small businesses, plenty of which already exist
  • asking owners to do design work themselves will result in poorly designed websites
    • short consultation will a designer included in the charity
    • templated CMS solutions are, universally, terrible
  • video recommendation: watch Joel Spolsky’s original pitch of Stack Overflow
    • he isn’t re-inventing the wheel since Q&A sites already exist
    • he outlines what all the existing sites are doing wrong, and then describes how his site addresses those problems

Scheduled 1st ‘open’ meeting for Tuesday May 1st, 7pm-9pm

  • Agreed to invite a small number of people to join (not spamming an entire mailing list, for example)
  • 6:45 - 7:00, Share current events or interesting things we’ve discovered recently while waiting for everybody to arrive.
  • 7:00, Meeting starts. Do not stick to a strict schedule but do these things in this order:
    1. Take turns presenting ideas and getting feedback from the group.
    2. If the group is large, break up into smaller groups to discuss the ideas in more detail.
    3. Open brainstorming and discussion.
    4. If there are not enough ‘organic’ ideas, the organizers will come up with some example problems to address.

Other notes on our intended structure

  • Start out monthly, meet more frequently as the size of the group increases (to allow people to come when it is convenient for them)
  • Email minutes (like these) after each meeting and/or post on a wiki page
    • Bill volunteered to do this
  • Send reminder email (perhaps with a suggested agenda?) one week before each meeting
  • Look into affiliating ourselves with Kris Constable’s ‘ideas meeting’ organization: http://www.ideasmeetings.org/wiki/Template
    • Michael volunteered to do this
  • Find a suitable location with a more serious atmosphere and fewer distractions than a bar/restaurant, such as a room in Boston Public Library or MIT
    • Natalya volunteered to do this

For next time

  • Send the email addresses of people we invite to Bill so he can create a mailing list.
  • Until we get a mailing list set up, remember to click "Reply All"