Attendees: Jill Bjers, Dawn McDougall, Chris Alfano, Jason Hibbets, Emma Burnett, Neil Planchon, Nina Kin, Janet Michaelis, Laura Biediger, Christopher Whitaker, Hashim Mteuzi, Veronica Young,
Pre-Meeting Updates
Upcoming Calendar
- NDOCH (August 11)
- Congress (90% sure it’s October 19th - 21st): Charlotte
Upcoming Workshops
- June 18: NDOCH Virtual Workshop
- July 9: Brigades Present Housing Projects
Brigade onboarding / offboarding
Onboarding- Hack Michiana, Code for Sonoma County (awaiting signature of MOU), Code for Fort Collins, Code for Homestead
Offboarding- Hack for LA has a new fiscal sponsor, figuring out transferring of funds
Wins/Props (please include links and/or storytelling)
- Data Ohio meeting this am - all Ohio Brigades tuned in. Supporting Open Data legislation
Attendee Updates (pre-meeting)
Neil
- Code for CA/CA Civic Building momentum
- CA Water Data Challenge - June 26: Lots of Gov agencies, Hack for LA, OpenOakland, Code for Sacramento
- Encouraging subscription to Discourse
- Slow/No responses to Slack requests for engagement and sharing of celebrations, challenges and Agenda
Janet
Dawn - Brigade Congress content advisory committee
- Keeping up with brigade captains
Laura
Jason - Participated in the workshop for NDoCH planning earlier this week
- Good movement on the IDEA BAT, with great discussion ← great use of DIscourse
- Been trying to keep up with Discourse and chime in on a regular basis
- I’m on vacation from June 25 - July 10
Emma
Chris - Discourse!
- Valuable materials accumulating, conversations happening
- How to get NAC members using as their megaphone?
- Progress with OPS proto-BAT
- Zeroed in on courtbot as an ideal pilot project to support
- Helped courtbot community start to organize via discourse
Nina: Not much!
- Promoting Discourse.
- IDEA BAT still needs to submit their proposal.
- Interested in prep for Brigade Congress + further building out some of the great ideas we’ve already had.
Jill: - Not much to update. I’ve been working on developing the recognition letter to go out with the stickers. Also, thinking about how to improve the recognitions for next year.
- I’d also like to do hex stickers for all the brigades and have started working on designing them.
CFA Updates
ST
- Hiring update:
- Applications are coming in.
- Nina and Emma agreed to be in interview process
- Still looking for talented candidates - please keep getting the word out. The JD is here.
Christopher - Steering Committees in general
- National Day of Civic Hacking
- Version 1 of website live: nationaldayofcivichacking.org
- Version two will build out the site to give NDoCH it’s own branding / looks sharper - more like what opendataday.org has
- Version two will also focus more on general audience - right now just getting event signups
- Signups now live
- Goal is to get 80% of Brigade Participation with 50% of government partners taking part
- Meeting with ELGL to try and get more government staff involvement
- Staff Travel
- Staff will be travelling to St. Louis; Dayton; Charlotte; Orlando, San Jose (Currently working on, not final)
- Will be a mix of the Network Team and other CfA staff
- Brigade Congress
- Fully funded! No sponsorship needed!
- Dates will Oct 19th - 21st
- Still verifying the date with the venue. Back up date given is the next weekend.
- Half day Friday, Sunday
- Will announce dates when we have the venue locked down
- Veronica leading training day
- Steering Committee Recruited! (Thanks Dawn!)
- Steering committee will outreach to Brigade to get insight on content, training needs
Hashim
- Community Fellowship convening June 27th - 29th
- Public Interest Tech Job Board
- Volunteer needed to participate in user research
- Public Interest Tech video from Summit. Video
Questions for NAC (ideally answer by each NAC member)
What was the most valuable part of Summit for you?
- Jill: Seeing everyone and developing face to face relationships and conversations.
- Nina: In person conversations with gov and brigade people.
- Jason: Being together, helping my Brigade buddy, Keynotes – having brigades and the NAC highlighted on the main stage; training was great too
What was the least valuable part of Summit for you?
- Nina: Early mornings following late nights? Hah! Seriously though - poor understanding of which Summit sessions would be best for Brigade members, vs Government employees, vs Vendors.
- Jason: West coast trips are hard
What would you like to see changed?
- Nina: I’ve heard from some people that they missed having a quiet room (they thought that’s what the Brigade Lounge was going to be). I see a benefit from having two room/lounge/areas - one that promotes interaction and one that is a quiet retreat.
Raise Your Hand NAC (these are items that should be shared tasks)
Listening Tour with Brigade Day Attendees - the idea is to personally reach out to Brigade Day Attendees to get feedback and suggestions. Some will have filled out survey but a personal connection is always amazing.
Agenda
Health Check-in (10 min)
- Neil- feeling energized!, Nina- taking it easy, Janet- fine, just fine , Laura- good, Emma- recharging, Chris- doing great, Jason-fabulous, Dawn- really tired, Jill- overall good
What was successful this month?
- Summit!!
- 37 survey responses
- Discourse is being used!
Do you need anything to increase your “health”?
- Need help forming steering committees, how will they be structured, expectations for committees
Election Review - Jill (5 minutes)
- Form a small committee 4-5 people to discuss how we get clear feedback and recommend changes to the election process.
- Hands Raised: Jill, Nina
- Recruitment of: Mohith,
- Formulate ideas about what we should revisit about election process, what NAC should present to CfA and NAC (committee of no more than 10 people, mostly non-NAC folks)
- Need more than 1 week notice
- Who’s raising hand for review of election process: reach out to Mohith (OpenSTL), Jill,
- Workshop ahead of Congress? And announce process at Congress
After Action Review - Jill (25 minutes)
Brigade Day
- Survey Response Review- 37 responses
- Overall feedback: Brigade Day was impactful
- Too many Different channels, information in too many places
- Communicating to Brigade members what to expect at Summit
- Laura- big fan of newsletters as way of communication (once a month, with information about action required, open for all Brigade members)
- Do we want to reach out to those registered
- Does NAC want to reach out to folks who registered for Brigade Day at Summit?- Yes, Jill creating list
- Delivery
- What did we do well
- Laurenellen!! +3
- First workshop got great feedback, second one seemed to get less positive feedback
- Recognition was great, stickers were great conversation starters, maybe improve on execution
- Grouping of the regions
- NAC social- good venue, games, rogue swag
- Next year: Civic Trivia!
- Sticker table
- Civic trivia!!!
- What can we improve on
- Better execution of recognition
- What do we want people to broadcast conversation starters?
- More regional connections
- What did we do well
- Brigade at Summit
- What was delivered well?
- It was great to have a space. However, it was rarely occupied by Brigade members and those non-brigade members in there weren’t interested in interacting about Brigades.
- Stickers were great and drew some people in.
- Wall/Hall of Brigades
- Include recognition in there.
- More stuff ilke Code for Asheville and Disaster Relief
- What can we deliver better next year?
- Brigade Track would be amazing
- Brigade Lounge- expand??, need more signage, maybe a hall of Brigades?, social media handles
- Lightning talks turned into presentations
- Tech/project (tech fair?) highlights like we did two years ago, but in the lounge instead
- Have a giant sign that says brigade lounge and a smaller sign on a tripod that explains what it is
- What was delivered well?
MOU Update - Christopher (10 minutes)
- In speaking with both Brigades and CfA staff we’ve found no show-stoppers to the current MOU. Which is good!
- Next steps will be laying out a calendar / workshop meetings to talk possible improvements and adding supplementary material
- Timeline:
- Congress
- Early Nov Draft
- Late Nov Review
- December - Signing Month
- ACTION for Brigade congress: explain MOU process and how big a brigade needs to be
NDoCH Update - Christopher (10 minutes)
- Steering Committee
- The idea is that the event will be more of an advisory but will have more network buy-in. Steering committee and NAC are complimentary.
- More staff support than in the past (marketing team is interested in helping), CfA staff traveling to NDoCH events
- Responsibilities: website makes sense, outreach and marketing makes sense and working for community, looking for stories for national press.
- Questions about NDoCH?
- Meeting cadence: TBD, private channel in slack, less meetings more slack conversations.
- Timing:
- Jason: Yes, please September, mostly because 1) more planning time, 2) students are back 3) let’s be consistent year over year 4) about a month before Brigade Congress
Brigade Congress - Christopher/Jill (15 minutes)
- Ideal dates for October 19-21
- Backup date is October 26-28
- Suggested goals:
- Strengthen [something about CfA relationship with brigades- like operational/ administrative?]
- MOU discussion
- Communication
- Strengthen the network (connections with / between brigades)
- Networking
- Sharing ideas
- Strengthen the individual brigades (leadership, etc.)
- Leadership
- Practices to use in brigades
- [something about relationships with government partners?]
- Strengthen [something about CfA relationship with brigades- like operational/ administrative?]
- Steering Committee; how large?
- What time of training people want
- What type of content people want
- Basic feedback on how the event is shaping up.
- Touchpoint between network and curated feedback.
- How can ensure diversity of participation and an inclusive environment?
- What Summit activities should we bring over?
- Sticker exchange
- Rogue Swag (Charlotte team is already thinking about that)
- Civic trivia
- Questions about Brigade Congress?
- NAC (Jill): When do we want to have the NAC meeting around Congress? Friday?
- Jason: Yes for Friday (I will not be able to attend on 10/21 due to a work obligation)
Zoom Update - Christopher (5 minutes)
- List of questions to ask Brigades
- When is it best to have National Day?
- When is it best to have Brigade Congress?