Meeting Minutes October 18, 2007

We had visitors from the Town of Harvard with us today along with a documentary film maker from Canada.

Keith, Jackie and Tim are from Harvard. Keith and Jackie are volunteer community media makers and Tim is an elected selectman. They do not have a physical space to house a community access center, but they were able to obtain equipment and some money through their franchise agreement. They would like to take their community media efforts to the next level and are looking for help defining what that next level is and how to get there.

Cathy Edwards worked for a community television station in Canada and is working on a documentary about community media around the world and how it helps build and strengthen community. She spoke about her travels around the world and how community media was being used in some developing countries. We saw a segment that was shot in Fiji. Because of political unrest and racial issues between the Indian and Native populations, community media has become an important tool in educating each group about the other. Its being used to build community. The call in shows are popular, where locals can call in and express an opinion on a topic. Cathy filmed some of our class and interviewed members afterwards.

Cathy aslo spoke about the Challenge for Change program in Canada, how it started and how useful it was for conflict resolution.

Aaron is soliciting help with organizing the Wiki. If you have any documents out there please make sure there is sufficient introduction to them. We are looking to make the Wiki more user friendly so any ideas about organizing it should be discussed in class next week. Jay is suggesting that we organize the links on the left into a more general yet focused table of contents. The table of contents can link to an index for that subject. The p0int is that every document out there doesn't have to link from the table of contents.

We discussed the Technology Grids again. We need to firm up the attributes we want to compare and analyze. The idea is that we can use the grids as part of primer to help non-profits understand the potential use of these technologies.