Attendees:
NAC: Jill Bjers, Dawn McDougall, Chris Alfano, Jason Hibbets, Emma Burnett, Ramy Kim, Nina Kin, Laura Biediger
CFA: Meredith Horowski, Christopher Whitaker, Veronica Young, Tom Dooner,
Pre-Meeting Updates
Upcoming Calendar
- Upcoming Workshops: None on CfA Brigade calendar
- 2019 Calendar:
- ODD - March 2nd
- Summit - May 29-31 (Oakland)
- NDOCH - September 21st
- Brigade Congress - October 18-20th (Cleveland)
- Brigade onboarding / offboarding
- Onboarding - None
- Offboarding - None
- Wins/Props (please include links and/or storytelling)
- Open NC Collaborative had our yearly in-person Summit. It was very successful. The blog post link will be added once published.
- Open California Collaborative (I think that’s the name we’re going with) had its first in-person meeting in LA.
- Special Project Updates
- BAT Framework had a meeting on Monday that was really good.
- Cross-Brigade Design Group meeting had its first online call.
NAC Updates
- Chris
- Civic cloud is moving!
- Dawn
- Still have onboarding doc for NAC on the radar and will pick up after the holidays
- Will start poking more directly for NE brigades on MOUs
- Thought Philly signed…
- Emma
- Working on Brigade census survey & providing feedback on that. This is going to Brigades. This will hopefully enable CfA to better benchmark who is in the Network & demographic backgrounds. Is there anything you’d like to make sure gets included in this?
- Summit advisory committee: Beginning to work on crafting the summit agenda & programming. Please pass along feedback and ideas you have, specifically about how to best integrate the network with summit.
- Initial ideas:
- Get info on who from what cities are at the conference (meet up with professionals from Brigade cities)
- Initial ideas:
- Janet
- Jason
- Held a well-attended Brigade Action Team workshop on 12/17 with new volunteers signed-up to help update the framework to simplify and set us up for success cross-brigade collaboration
- Jill
- Brigade Hex Stickers: Nashville, Philly, Burlington, Austin and Maine have approved their sticker designs.
- Laura
- South Region call, 11.29.18, (notes)
- 6 brigades, 8 members
- Intro from Code for Atlanta
- Discussion tended toward first project recommendations
- January call to be scheduled
- Open NC Collaborative, 12.15.18
- South Region call, 11.29.18, (notes)
- Nina
- Open California Collaborative in person meeting
- Oakland & LA represented (also Zachary Antoyan from Fresno who wants to start a new brigade!)
- Mostly talked about strategy, the principles that Patrick Atwater has been working on putting together, what we wanted to focus on for 2019.
- Open California Collaborative in person meeting
- Ramy
CFA Updates
- Brigade Team Focus
- Systems & Structure
- MOUs, Census, NAC Elections
- Brigade health inventory
- Strategy
- 2019 Mapping
- Community Fellowship
- Budgeting / Fundraising
- Organizing
- Site visits
- Partnership work
- Systems & Structure
- Meredith
- Site visits: SF, Austin, Honolulu – been great to attend Brigade meetups and see members of the Network in action
- Listening convos: 25+ – so many (good) meetings!
- Gave my first official CfA presentation!
- ICYMI: 2018 impact report
- Christopher
- Veronica
- Notes below
- Tom
- User research round on the Brigade Website – can you help by sharing the sign-up form?
- Upcoming projects: Helping Brigade leaders measure retention, reporting back Brigade Census to Brigade leaders.
- Hashim
- We’ll be announcing details for the 2019 fellowship in January, and begin accepting applications in February. This opportunity is for all Brigade members. How might we ensure that we reach everyone? As in 2018, projects must be user-centered at their core, and designed around improving outcomes for vulnerable populations. Successful projects will include diverse teams, existing partnership(s) with local government, and strong Brigade support. Stay tuned for more information in the new year.
Agenda
Health Check-in
-
Everyone good?
- Jason had a great time at our Red Hat company meeting today
-
What was successful this month?
- Open NC Collaborative Annual Meeting was on the 15th. It was awesome.
- South region call led by Laura
- BAT Workshop led by Jason
- Discovery session on emergency response lead by Kevin Curry (Jason could see more of these happening–powered by the network)
- Nina, Tom, Ramy and Patrick Atwater got together to talk about California brigades working together (+ Zachary Antoyan from Fresno who wants to start a new brigade!).
-
Do you need anything to increase your “health?”
NAC Roles Presented - Jill
- Dig into the document and leave comments.
- Staff will do a read back about what they heard and we collectively use the document to create a job description for NAC.
- Then we will share broadly with network.
- Jill and Jason will help with creating the job description document.
Committee Document - Laura
- Discourse post with Lightning Talk slides
- Nick Kaufman’s Discourse post
- Discourse Skill-sharing: Design
- Next Design group call: January 14, 8pm EST
- 1st Membership group call: January TBD
“Heads-Up” items (MH)
- Things we’ve created / started to create
- NAC Travel Form to allow staff to know what NAC members are available for travel
- Brigade Health Checklist (VY) - first draft created. To be used to focus resources for staff and NAC.
- Content Volunteers for website updates
-
2019 Workshop Topics
- This is a work in progress but is a start.
- On the horizon
- 2019 Fellowship
- January 15 the timeline will be announced
- Looking for about 8 fellowship teams
- Workshop on CfA 2019 strategy plan
- April in-person time: Likely April 5/6th
- Quarterly check-in calls with Brigade leaders
- 2019 Fellowship
- In progress
- Network strategic planning
- Report back from listening conversations
- Leveraging list of training / resource needs
- Burnout materials
- Key Network team priorities in 2019 (5 min)
- Through 8 community fellowships, we will increase local government’s capacity to meet the needs of vulnerable people
- We will grow our Brigade network to cover 60% of the US by making it easier for the willing to engage regardless of geography or technical skills
- We will support Brigades with events and training, and by implementing a “New & Developing” Brigade experience
- We will prioritize 2-4 redeployable projects for Brigades, aimed at serving vulnerable people
- We will strengthen Brigade practices and their relationships with local governments
- Complete Brigade census to establish baseline of brigade member race/ethnicity; age; gender and delivery driven government skills, and establish goals to ensure the Brigades reflect the communities that they serve.
NAC Election Framework
- NAC Candidate Recommendations
- Process for recommendations
- Identified by outside committee (Jill/Jason/Chris)
- Rec’s can also be made to Brigade-info
- Brigade Team checks eligibility
- Forward to committee for outreach
- NAC Election Framework Reminder
- NAC Election publicity plan
- 1:1 recruitment starting in Jan
- Blog post around elections / census
- Blog post with the candidate questionnaire (modified from last years)
- Candidate webinar / blog post to recap
- Brigade goals for election
- Number of votes as metric VS number of candidates
- % of Brigades participating
- % of voters participating (maybe 25%)
- Diverse candidate pool (CW to ask D&I Committee about metric)
- Keep track of gov employees running
- Number of votes as metric VS number of candidates
Brigade Census
- Why this is important
- Purpose: Conduct a Brigade census to establish baseline of brigade member race/ethnicity; age; gender and delivery driven government skills, and establish goals to ensure the Brigades reflect the communities that they serve.
- Outcome:
- Data-driven baseline of who is in the Network
- Aggregate analysis shared back to Network; Individual brigade-level data shared with brigade leaders
- Goals and strategy established to improve the Network’s ability to reflect the communities it serves
Other items
Nina/Jason - we should probably mention SCALE 17x
- In case we don’t have time. Nina, Vicky, Hunter, and Jason are applying to have an open gov/open data track on the first day (Thursday) of SCALE 17x (Southern California Linux Expo - the largest community run open source conference in the US), held on March 7-10, 2019, in Pasadena, CA complete with evening meet-up/social for the LA region govies and civic techies. FYI - this is a GREAT, low-cost event for brigades members to attend.
