OWS NY IWG Minutes 10/16/2011

Five of us met (alongside other subgroups of the IWG) to offer some guidelines for what will be accomplished. We were careful not to make decisions, but to ask the kinds of questions we felt needed to be addressed, but which had no ‘home’ within the #OWS NYC structure. Below this list are details about our next meeting and how to get involved.

What is the new supporter engagement process when it takes place online?

What technical means do we have to demonstrate our process?

How do we want to document our process?

How are we capturing traffic of people interested in our media?

How are we capturing traffic of people looking for us physically? (This question is related to search and location based services)

How can we improve the site rankings of our digital properties?

Why does it make sense to have one domain name do better than the other, in terms of reach/popularity/ranking?

What is the right priority of domain names for our purposes?

What are the domains we have control over?

What are the digital properties that we control/admire/collaborate with or influence?

How do we scale the decision making process? How do we make the decision making process work for other constituencies and larger numbers? (the hard of hearing, the not physically present, under- represented voices, etc.)

What (online) mechanisms exist for broader and deeper participation?

How do we retain attention over the long term?

What is our engagement and retention strategy?

How do we give people the engagement they want?

How can we do this non-coercively (not splash pages, not force- subscribes)

How do we do it horizontally and democratically?

How do we decide what (email+social media) messages go out and how?

Should we fundraise aggressively in the future? With which tools and partners?

What is our email strategy?

What email segments make sense?

What email segments are public for sign on/sign off?

How do we meet communication needs of different audiences?

Should we segment by checklist?

Should #OWS use online advertising? If so, to what end?

What is the compelling message? How can we map the historic significance of what we are doing? Can we help determine the stickiest language with A/B tests?

How can we use google search terms to create content for our digital properties? (See what people are searching for, and create content accordingly)

What should be on our about page?

What’s the tool to aggregate votes/opinions before stuff is built open source?

Other comments:

Digital Strategy is not in the role of telling or instructing others on what to do; we take on projects we ourselves will work on (in coordination with others, as relevant.) We have access to expertise that can be used to help other groups solve technical issues related to their work – we’d love to help with brainstorming.

Our next meeting will be tomorrow, Tuesday, at 7pm. This is scheduled two hours after the start time of the Internet Working Group. The location of this meeting will be at the info desk at Zuccotti Park at 5pm. Some of us will remain active with the IWG; we expect others to work with us directly and skip the IWG meetings. Our first meeting was heavy on the male demographic (as is the IWG in general). All are invited to participate. Please join our list serve http://groups.google.com/group/ows-digital-strategy and please do contact me if you have questions. A highly technical background isn’t necessary; we would like to see online campaigners, community organizers, web content managers, marketers, CIO’s/CTO’s and others join us. We also welcome representatives from other WG’s curious about our work, or who have been doing similar things.

During the week we expect the new website to roll out, and sometimes soon a CiviCRM will be in place to handle our email lists and mass emailing capacity. These are being handled by others in the IWG and the Open Source WG.

The agenda for our Tuesday meeting is to turn our list of questions above into a prioritized workplan. We welcome input and draft proposals for any of these topics.

We will post announcements of our work on the IWG listserv while keeping most of the discussion on our own listserve.

Please forgive any unapproved edits to these notes or lack of clarity.

I take responsibility for those.

Charles Lenchner