2017 Annual Governance Meeting

Code for Pittsburgh - Annual Governance Meeting - Minutes
January 7, 1017
Attendance
8 in attendance:
- Connor Sites-Bowen, presiding
- Dale Sheldon-Hess
- Coral Sheldon-Hess
- Eleanor Tutt
- Toby Greenwalt
- Christian Gass
- Matthew Lavin
- Hollen Barmer
2016 Recap
Connor has written a year-in-review blog post, summed up here:
- Held events every month except January (cold) and November (c4a conference).
- Best-attended event was Bicycle Crash Data Workshop/Hack Night
- Most-specific topic
- Most partnering community organizations
- Least-attended event was April’s non-themed Hack Night
- Special Events:
- Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
- 10 new articles
- 46 edited articles
- Design + Open Data presentation to AIGI
- Data Drinks (happy hour)
- Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
- Police Blotter project was a huge win and is now complete
- Membership and Communication Channels:
- Meetup membership has almost doubled, from 225 to 502
- Twitter follows are now >1,000
- Recently added a Slack channel
- Changed name from Open Pittsburgh to Code For Pittsburgh
- CfA Summit:
- National organization is no longer officially supporting local brigades
- Will advise local brigades at they each try their own thing
- So what do we do now?
- Also, the national scene is popping off - there are a ton of amazing folks to learn from, who are trying their own experiments in their own contexts. Connecting to that network of cities is vital.
Vision for the Future
Background:
- 4 or 5 years ago, CfA was providing money to local brigades
- CfA is no longer giving out money - moving away from building network to other goals
- Local brigades can continue to use branding if they use the CfA Code of Conduct
- Brigades can pursue whatever organizational structure will work for them, such as
- Consulting firms (LLCs)
- Nonprofits (401c3s)
- Loose, budget-free affiliations of individuals
So what do WE do now?
- Proposal: We continue to exist
- Passed by acclimation
- Discussion about budget, goals (below)
Budget:
- Currently we have no formal budget
- Carnegie Public Library has provided space for free
- Connor has paid for some tech (domain names, Meetup, etc.) out of pocket
- We could do things that cost money, but then we’d need money
- Supporting projects with hosting/domains, etc.
- Different food options (sponsorships by restaurants also possible)
- Advertising, attending events that have fees
- Possible income sources include grants, such as One Source grant for civic tech and data
So what sort of things do we want to do?
- Do more of our most-successful events
- Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
- Partner with community groups; BikePgh went great; how about WalkPgh, others?
- Tools to Speak to Power
- Second session already has 34 signups
- Can we build a website that teaches the same ideas?
- That should be a project for this year
Connor Gets Ambitious:
- This could be a good and big thing; it could be enough to support a full-time staff
- Connor puts in ~10hr/wk, and could do 40
- Connor has spoken with some foundation folks informally; if we build it, there is likely money available
- Question: Connor, what would you do?
- Plan events more than 1 month ahead
- Plan more than 1 event per month; perhaps weekly instead of monthly
- Panels, discussions, speakers (perhaps out-of-town)
- Currently we often duplicate events that succeeded for other brigades; we could instead be the ones creating new, unique events
- Publish more than tweets
- Do the “homework” of implementing a first pass at the ideas that come up in meetings
- Keep up with all the other tech orgs in town, “calendar awareness”
- Writing grant applications
- Documentation
- There has been some success locally with “shared staffing” models; several orgs hire the same professional together, each gets them part-time
- Having someone who can be the ground-game face of the org during business hours would be good
- Doing consistent weekly events does take a lot of work
- Is half-time, at least for a while, a possibility?
- Tasks described cover many roles; could you hire someone else to do part of it while continuing your current job?
But Going Back to the Previous Questions, What Do We Want to Do?
- Would like to do something “very Pittsburgh”
- Like the Fish Fry or Pierogi maps
- Take public stances
- Without being “political”, that is, without supporting or opposing particular politicians or parties
- Teach the skills from Tools to Speak to Power presentation, apply them and document the results
- Identify an issue of disparity in the community, use skills and tools to help the under-served
- What about water quality in Pittsburgh?
- Lots of individual lead tests being done, but no one is really collating them
- Someone on Reddit had the same idea, but not everyone is on Reddit
- Does the person on Reddit know we exist?
- Adopt-a-Thing (usually hydrants) is a fairly complete off-the-shelf project, a quick win * Adding to that, city reports weather emergencies; could make it auto-contact adopters after weather emergencies
- What about water quality in Pittsburgh?
- If I miss a C4P meeting, how do I keep track of priorities and projects?
- Add some continuity to projects, too. “This quarter, we’re focusing on …”
Organizational Roles for 2017
Required Positions:
- Captain — Connor
- Storyteller (Communications) — Hollen
- Community Organizer (Recruiting) — Toby
- Delivery Lead (Point of Contact for Projects) — Christian and Mark again; delegate more by-project
Optional Positions
Duties will be carried out by someone in a required position unless someone volunteers:
- Training Organizer (Onboardiing) — Toby
- Government Liaison
- Developer Evangelist (Like delivery lead, but nice)
- Event Organizer — Connor
- Data Evangelist (Data Lorax)
- Policy Evangelist
- Website Manager - Christian & Hollen
- Maptime - Christian Gass (w/ support from Melinda A, Eleanor Tutt, and others interested) - The Maptime org emphasizes a distributed, volunteer and step up approach. Maptime is a flag to rally around.
We discussed adding a Documentation Lead. Just as the Delivery Lead works at a high level on project delivery and also makes sure each individual project has a per-project Delivery Lead, a Documentation Lead would make sure each project has a per-project Documentation Lead and would work to make our documentation more consistent, with the goal that anything we release is repeatable. Having that as a role would also formalize our commitment to doing better documentation and being more transparent.
If the organization formalizes as a non-profit, should, or will, the Executive Director be separate from Captain?
- Yes
- After discussion, people feel Connor might be best as Executive Director, but should be Captain until we make this change
- For an example of how this role-split works in practice, we discussed LITA (Library Information Technology Association) Executive Director Jenny Levine and her relationship to the board; the board sets the vision, priorities; Jenny helps wrangle volunteers and staff to make it all happen, does a great deal of between-meeting homework
Returning to Visions for the Future
More things we could do:
- Making existing data sets available to be easily used in common art tools
- Mapping all sorts of businesses to the policies or issues they have supported
- Consider how this data can be used for ill
- Building on that, how about a Data Ethics meetup?
- What programs will you not write? Make a list now.
- See neveragain.tech
-
We should focus on fewer projects, better documented ** We will require a Documentation Lead for projects (along with a Delivery Lead and a project plan)
- Clean up our GitHub
- Make it clear where items such as meeting minutes should go (in the blog)
- A GitHub wiki is just a specially-formatted repository
- The start of a project is messy; it’s okay to start with a private repo
Code of Conduct Review
- The CoC is in GitHub, but it needs to be on the website
- Needs to have contact information for group that handles potential CoC violations
- There is a Slack contact, but that username is for the CfA Slack and needs to be removed
- So, CoC Group
- Members: Connor, Coral, Eleanor, Hollen, Matt - open to more volunters!
- Group should all be reachable via a single email (safespace@…)
- Each event should start with a mention/summary of CoC and how to identify the duty officers present for that event. Printed copies of the CoC should be made available at each physical event
- Need some way to identify those responsible for handling potential violations a the event; a special lanyard? A button?
Next Hack Night
Thursday - Civic Hack Night - Data + Activism Redux!
February Hack Night
Fish Fry Map Data Entry-a-Thon and Pierogi Potluck
- As close to Ash Wednesday as possible