Minute taker: Andrew V.

Attended: Andrew V, Shana, Matt, Big Softey, Billy

Website Meeting Minutes 11-26-11
Location: Peachtree and Pine, 4th floor
Work Session Time:  5pm-8pm (show up early and get help on projects you need help with or pick up a new task
Official Meeting Time: 8pm

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New Proposals:

UX Working Group
Shana – I want to propose to the Media Committee this Sunday that we create a UX Working Group as part of the Website Team.

UX (User Experience) is used by the nycga to gather and receive user feedback on their website, then propose needed changes to the website builders to make the site more user friendly.

This this would relieve the current core members of the Website Team to focus on the actual building of the site, provide an avenue for those not experienced in coding to make use of great ideas, and make some much needed improvements to our site.

I would like take volunteers right there at the meeting who are serious about getting this started. We can then merge the new UX Working Group with our Website Team. The group will need at least one BL to keep it organized and running smoothly, they should attend our meetings on Saturdays to discuss possibilities of implementing the needed changes, etc.

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Minutes:

Attendants: Andrew V, Shana, Matt, Big Softey, Billy

Before meeting:  Avery, Kirsa, and Shana discussed that the IT and Website Committees should discuss things together first instead of airing grievances on public forums such as Facebook or by other means.  Also it was mentioned by Shana that we are all here to help each other, and not to cause conflict. We’re all working for the same cause and we’re all on the same team here. Website Committee requested for us and IT Committee to stay in communication with each other, play nice, and provide constructive feedback.

The new wiki the Website Team is using for Change Logs and How To’s was discussed with IT. Avery and/or Kirsa will get back to the Website Team on what the IT team recommends.

Andrew V, Shana, Avery, and Jimmy are currently the only individuals to have sensitive passwords pertaining to website, such as cloudflare.

IT Committee will be moving a server to a data center and it will host the email, not Mayfirst, and IT Committee will manage.

IT was informed about the UX (User Experience) working group.

Billy offered to assist with testing for holes on website and server. Billy will discuss this with IT Committee about possibility of running security tests on their servers.  He has Website Committees approval to test for vunerabilities regarding website programming or plugins on the test site, but not change anything affecting infrastructure.

Andrew V’s friend, Joe, who lives in Minneapolis will be allowed to recieve a copy of server for testing purposes. He will act as a web consultant. This copy will be in ISO format. It will have all passwords removed. This was agreed with consensus of committee.

Big Softey suggested that the group use the date of Christmas Eve to roll out any major changes to the face of the website.  We agreed this is something that we need to discuss. We will also discuss this with UX group.

Andrew V to check out NYCga methods of integrating new members into the Team and ways of maintaining security while doing so.

Andrew V to discuss with Mayfirst via trouble ticket, issues with speed and latency.

Website Team needs people to step up, take initiative with new tasks, and follow through with their assigned tasks. It was discussed that Shana is overworked and needs more help from our team.  Shana will be unable to bottomline unless people start stepping up and taking on tasks. Jimmy, Shana, and Andrew agree to rotate on a per week basis as bottomliners to help Shana with her workload.
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Email List for Every Committee:
IT infrastructure will handle email address and lists for now on.

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Project Report Backs:  (what have you worked on, what have you finished)

Completed Projects:

• Mayfirst is our live server.
• Avery’s is our test server.
• Group Docs:  Shana – fully functioning
• Email/sms Notification Option:  Jimmy – Fully Functioning.
• RSS Activity Feed at the bottom of the Main Page:  Shana and Jimmy – Fixed
• Nav Bar: DONE. stretch it out across the entire bar so it’s neither on the right or the left, then move Home button to the right side. (ipad and iphone make this difficult do to their browsers)
• Activation: Jimmy DONE. make the process more streamlined.
• Wiki – shana done.  http://wiki.occupyatlanta.org

Projects that Still need work:

• How To pages, Admin and Regular:  Shana – been adding new items as they arise from questions sent to website@occupyatlanta.org  ScreenCasts with Sound would still be nice to have if anyone wants to help that would be awesome.
• BP floating NavBar:  Shana – was able to change the wording on BP nav bar to match wording on the main nav bar.  EX – Groups to Committees and Groups, Activity to Updates and Announcements.  HOWEVER, it also changes the terms everywhere on BP so that’s no good
• Mobile Version:  Billy – Roman ? Plugin needs serious format improvements.
• Browser Compatibility:  Billy – ? IE  needs to match Chrome (at least more so than the way it looks currently)

New Tasks:  (what needs to be worked on or what needs to be fixed that wasn’t mentioned in Report Backs)

• Group Choice for Events: add the option on the Dashboard form.
• Event button on Group Pages should point to only that Groups Events
• Work on making our current server response time faster.  Shana –  (ticket has already been submitted to MayFirst, and within 10minutes someone assigned it and a fix was made, waiting to see if the issue is resolved. Also made some other changes with cloudflare and it seems to be speeding up some.)