Attendees: Sam Arnold, Patrick “Problem” Boyd, Adam Rice, Bryan “Breezy” Frolick, Bill Blome, Laura, Clovis, Gyesika
Facilitator: Bill Stackinator: None
Agenda: standing agenda, TH after burn, and should the LLC pay to get more social media posts, more traffic/promotion.
LLC update: (Adam)
● Will meet with our civil attorney as we do each time this year. Go over the waivers, survival guide, etc. Get comments in before next week for survival updates. Haven’t made changes in years, only a few things required by the landowner.
● Had Town Hall – was well attended and people had a good time. Have a few open lead positions – echelon, guardian, and a handful of other positions that are less critical.
Regional update: (Clovis)
● No update. Same as last week all is good. Some regional events are working on a code of conduct, but the survival guide fills a similar role.
● Bill: It covers everything you should know. and outlines how to act.
● Sam: We tell everyone to go read the survival guide when they first come out
● Adam: Other events have the code of conduct, and the only things we aren’t doing in our survival guide are listing everything that can get you into trouble and what can happen to you if you do those things.
● Bill: Between the waivers, the disclaimers on the back of the ticket, and the other forms we cover everything that should be covered.
● Adam: The other codes usually are more explicit about consent issues.
● Bill: We will kick you out even if you signed a piece of paper.
● Adam: Having a code of conduct can reassure other community members that we do have a system in place to deal with bad behavior.
● Problem: Other events have set up a conduct committee to monitor the grievance process. We like to keep things closer to the vest for the protection of everyone involved. We don’t make a rule unless we have to make a rule.
● Bill: That’s not what we do here, we don’t like extra bureaucracy. The idea of radical self-reliance and that the community can come together and monitor the behavior of the members is our way. Work on it at a camp level, or a theme camp level. Like doing it this way.
● Adam: We do have a “trump” card in these situations, or an ace in the hole, where we repeat on the ticket and on the signs you see all over the event “You can be denied admittance for any reason or no reason.”
AF update: Adam – Monthly AF meeting is a week from tomorrow.
Remaining questions and discussion:
● Bill: Can we dovetail the AF updates into a discussion on town hall?
● Clovis: Yes. All of the AFs wanted their leads to speak at the last minute. Didn’t mind it. AFs/leads should be able to tell us what they want to communicate at the Town Hall Event to help schedule it ahead of time in the future. But even though it was last minute we still got done fairly quick, and were able to get everyone in.
● Bill: Felt it was fairly concise.
● Clovis: We ran just over an hour, and then a couple of hours of socialization.
● Adam: I thought it went really well. Not sure how successful it was for volunteer recruitment. Not sure everyone heard the messages they needed to hear.
● Bill: Prior years we might have had more volunteer recruitment – actively engaged the people who came to TH.
● Clovis: Shaven apes handed out stickers. City planning recruits internally.
● Problem: Genesis is a more volunteer area.
● Clovis: Not sure how successful it is to recruit for May event in Feb.
● Problem: Most department don’t need help this early. DAFT is one.
Should we pay FB to get our message out?
● Problem: Last year our ave post in 2018 had 2337 people see it. So far this year in 2019, its 944. This year only 810 saw the ticket post. 3187 saw it last year.
● Bill: Does anyone have experience with FB ads and using them? (Group said no). I do, and what I can say is that for what we need, we wouldn’t need to spend a lot of money and it would be effective. Seems like we shouldn’t throw down money before we try a system to help get the word out organically. Can we identify 12 people or 20 people that would commit to sharing messages to the Flipizens page organically?
● Adam: CC members maybe?
● Bill: We could test it now until Flipside and see if it makes a difference.
● Problem: Would like to get people more involved and make our own “algorithm” and maybe only use FB for the ticket posts. We should boost posts so that they hit more people that like our pages. Let’s try and work around FB than with them at this point.
● Adam: Philosophically opposed to FB, only a member to communicate with the community. Don’t want to give them money. Believe that when you pay for ads you get all kinds of info about the people.
● Bill: You have to pay extra for it.
● Adam: That seems like a slippery slope. There is an additional level of creepiness that you can get when you pay FB money.
● Problem: We already get info from FB on the people who interact with our posts.
● Adam: Another thing that crosses my mind, is that people are drifting away from FB – people don’t look at it anymore. Some people are moving to Instagram.
● Clovis: Lots of people are on instagram.
● Adam: Maybe we can republish content from FB, twitter and to instagram. Maybe we can use the envelope pics on instagram.
● Bill: That almost opens a bigger discussion – the nature of social media tools is that they will all ebb and change over time.
● Problem: Communication tools in general are the same way. Email is kinda dead unless you are doing business. Lots of businesses now use Slack.
● Clovis: The list style.
● Adam: Trying to keep up is like Whack a Mole. In AAR – had discussions about building our own APP to get info out to the community. Also could give everyone an “@flipside” email address to get information out. The social media aspect is only one part of the problem.
● Sam: It might be a good idea to use the envelope art, and other art, to help distinguish different messages. On the Website right now, all the messages all have the big Flipside graphic on it for all of them.
● Problem: For a while the site would pick a graphic to go with a post, and sometimes it wasn’t appropriate. Sometimes offensive images were uploaded and then shared out to the community by accident.
● Clovis: Do we have a social media lead? No?
● Adam: It’s under content, and our lead does WordPress for her day job. She’s really good at it.
● Problem: Was hoping that the shock value of the discussion being about social media and paying FB money would entice people to come to the meeting. I see every post our FB site does, and I can see how many people we are currently reaching versus how many we could reach with paying for ads.
● Gyesika: Is this how I get Nomads?
● Adam: A guy did a prank once to make the ads so specific so that only one person would ever see them.
● Bill: Once you start filtering by zip code, you can get super specific in how you want to target the ads. It could be something like males, in this zip code, who like cats, and so on. Most people usually don’t do that when they do ads because you want a large audience.
● Problem: $10 for ads will not get us much.
● Bill: I will vol to send an email to the CC list this week trying to motivate some coordinated sharing of the key posts.
● Problem: There have been 10 or so emails to the ticket lead saying they didn’t see the emails about the ticket window.
● Sam: I saw multiple posts about the tickets.
● Clovis: There are always people who don’t pay attention. We could do a phone tree and still have some people we miss.
● Problem: We only have 510 people following us on FB.
● Adam: Let’s wrap this topic up and move onto other topics.
CC Business
● Clovis: Found us a photographer for photos if we want to do that.
● Bill: That sounds like a good idea – (Gyes and Sam are in favor.) Do you want to send an email to the list?
● Clovis: I’ll send an email to the group.
● Adam: Can I make a suggestion? When you see someone who needs a pic, just take a pic with a smartphone.
● Gyes: Something I did for Freezer burn, was to upload photos to a website to make “wanted” posters of everyone.
● Adam: The difficult part about photos is getting them all done because everyone isn’t always together at the same time. We can accept lower quality photos so that we can get everyone’s photo by using phones.
● Gyes: What topics are for next time?
● Adam: Review how safety departments work, and reduce medical transports through self-care. Oh I see what the problem is – I was looking at March.
● Problem: Education update and reporting interpersonal incidents are on agenda for next time.
● Sam: I see the same thing.
● Clovis: Someone needs to get ahold of (didn’t get name) – send it to Misti and she will make him show up. I will try all of the methods of getting ahold of someone.
● Bill: I’ll facilitate next week, and let’s sign up Prost for stackinator. I enjoy signing him up for stuff.
● Adam: March 18 meeting – review how safety departs support the community and reduce medical transports through self-care.
● Clovis: Need to get some of the AFs and leads involved.
● Adam: Izzy owns safety departments and I own self-care.
● Clovis: We should post these topics on FB, and then pay to promote it and then add in the social media topic.
● Bill: It is important to have non-CC folks show up to discuss the interpersonal policy.
Move to close meeting by Bill. Adam second, Gyes third, meeting done.