Minutes for the Marspedia Governing Council Meeting - November 17, 2017

Attendees

Susan, James B., James G., Bruce, Nicole, Carie, Mike S., Mike D.

Not Attending: Lucinda, Rose

Agenda

Nominations & Election of Secretary for the Council.
Reports from the Editorial & Technical Subcommittees (James)
Marspedia Logo (Susan)
Publicity phases (Bruce)
Discuss editing review schedule for new articles being posted (Nicole)
Subcommittee meetings should have a bit more notice and more options for times (Nicole)

Secretary

After some discussion, we decided to postpone the election of a Secretary until a future meeting. We will make an effort to recruit a Secretary.

Reports from Editorial & Technical Subcommittees

James Burk provided a report on the activities of both subcommittees.

The Editorial team has been having weekly teleconferences where we've been working on a Topic List and list of Needed Articles. We will continue to use the list of topics (which we consider a good list for now) to build out the needed articles (which needs some work).

We completed the new home page today. It has a "how you can help module" which is a call to action for volunteers. We also link to the new Teachers Start Here page, which needs some more work.

The technical team is working on a List of action items including a review of all tag templates, categories, and a new procedure for importing articles from Wikipedia.

Marspedia Logo

We are working with a designer on a new logo, and have done one round. We discussed some ideas of how we can proceed for a second round. Bruce and Susan will email some of their concepts and ideas for further discussion & thought by the group. James will consolidate all the logo ideas and provide to the designer for a second round.

Publicity Phases

James Burk mentioned that we'll be sending out a call for volunteers soon to the Mars Society newsletter list, which has several thousand people.

Bruce talked about how we should have different publicity for different categories of volunteers, that first we should recruit editors/contributors and 2nd we should have a general call to grow the audience of the wiki.

Bruce referenced his Contributor_Categories list for categorizing future volunteers. James Burk and Bruce agreed that the best way to track future volunteers in these categories would be to use private spreadsheets.

Editing Review Schedule

We discussed the previous idea of having an editorial calendar with days that people can sign up to review & edit articles that are submitted that day. However, since articles will likely come in spurts in this time period, we thought that having a notification system would be a better idea. The technical team will look into having email alerts when new articles are submitted and also a way to have an editorial workflow when new articles are submitted.

Scheduling Tools

We discussed the difficulty of finding times that everybody is available and agreed that we should continue to look at other tools that are out there to schedule meetings among a group.

James Burk said the Editorial subcommittee will likely continue to stagger meeting times to accomodate various volunteers attending, who have differing schedules.

Action Items

Susan and Bruce to send their logo ideas & topics.
James to gather logo ideas from the group.
Technical Subcommittee: look into email notifications for new articles, and an editorial workflow/moderation for new articles.
Susan & James: look into meeting scheduling tools.