The meeting started on time at 6:30 meeting, and was attended by about 14 current or prospective OpenOakland members. We did a round table on take aways, high points, and "cringe moments" from CityCamp.
Meeting Overview:
14 people attended yesterday's OpenOakland meeting at city hall and we had a debrief on CityCamp and discussed take aways and next steps.
The general impression was very positive. Nicole reported that inside city hall people who attended, and even those who did not attend but heard about it, were encouraged by tone and it's possibilities.
There was general consensus that now that CityCamp has concluded, OpenOakland needs to figure out a way to support existing projects and have a clear strategy on how we take on new projects. We have limited resources and understanding how we use our skills.
We also had a few new people come to the meeting. They were interested in helping out and we gave a run down of each of our projects.
I also brought up the issue of needing more developers. I think we need to make sure that while we develop a culture of openness to community members that we are also welcoming to folks who just want to develop and support apps.
Project Summary
We discussed the state of current projects and these were the general thoughts:
Adopt-a-Drain - will need to support email notifications. I said I would do some work on this but Rob and his friend (eak! who's name I forgot!) were interested in helping out with that. It has the potential to show a true collaboration between the city and brigade. The city wants to use this for their existing Adopt-A-Spot program.
OaklandWiki - Marina will continue to be a model champion of a project! And she's working on getting more people contributing and involved.
Open Government Pledge - This project was a success, but we need to make sure we are paying attention to the new council members and check if they are supporting open government policies. If not, we will need to have a way to raise the issue.
CKAN - This project needs some work. We need to figure out a way to update the application. Matt, me and Robert are the lead on that, but we still need people who are interested in advocating and promoting the project by reaching out to organizations that hold data (like Urban Strategies) and encouraging more people to post and use the data.
The other apps: Crime Map, Vacant Property Finder etc are projects in our timeline but haven't made much progress yet.
Proposed Meetings:
We also discussed having different kinds of meet ups every week to encourage different types of people. For example, the first week of the month have "Planning Meeting", second week "Social/Beer Time", third week "Present a project/Bring in a Speaker", and fourth week "Hack Night"
There was general agreement that this will encourage different types of participants.
Feel free to fill in any details I've missed. This email will be posted on the OaklandWiki, feel free to update.
