Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

There will be no Webcast.

Agenda

Notes:

• Recap of the blog meetup last week
  • LW: it was fun, met people who don’t come to these meetings, but it was difficult because we couldn’t hear everyone at the meeting
• Lisa’s interest in getting political candidates blogging
  • (Note: the link goes to a Yahoo! Group message that may require a login.)
  • There’s a potential Congressional race for a spot representing some of the suburbs of Boston. LW thinks getting the politicians blogging could be a good thing and wants us to help them.
  • LW: They’ll have to get their own blogs established, not blog on Harvard’s server.
  • BI: What would our role be in this?
  • LW: providing tech support, helping them get going
    
  • LW: outlined three issues: authenticity, naming, and examples
    • how authentic is it if the candidate doesn’t write his own blog?
    • MF: are we doing the right thing giving them blogs? They’re small candidates, small office, will they have the time?
    • A politician will blog when a blogger gets in office.
      • LW: Lis Riba, a blogger, was considering running.
    • BI: Roland Tanglao was involved in something like that or the company he works for does
      
    • LW: “We should look for candidate blogs written by real people. I know of at least 5, but they aren’t local: Missouri, Illinois, Oregon or Washington, California … They’re out there, we just need to find them.”

    • MF: let’s use LW’s form letter
    • LW: can we name our group something for the letter that doesn’t offend the Berkman Center?
      • LW can’t call it a Berkman Center project for a number of reasons, but we can say it’s a project of bloggers affiliated with the center.

    • MF: let’s get them a blog on Harvard’s server
• Update on the blog server
  • WK: Berkman has hired a Userland guy to work on the server
  • Berkman is working on offering an alternative platform that they will also host
    • Frassle is one of the platforms they’re considering offering. WK didn’t name any others.
  • Berkman will not shut the server down
  • Is it possible to get at least one of the server administrators to come to a future meeting?
    • (Note: the link goes to a Yahoo! Group message that may require a login.)
    • Wendy has a pretty decent update; if after that we still want a sysadmin to come, we can work on that
• Harvard blogs’ aggregators should now be able to handle Atom feeds
• Locking the managing editor out of the blog
  • Apparently, if you delete all of the e-mail addresses in the managing editor’s box in the preferences on a Harvard Manila blog, the blog can lose all of its managing editors. There is no mechanism to prevent someone from being locked out of a blog. Please be careful!
• MF: Purpose of the group
  • j: Do we need a real purpose other than just meeting?
  • MF: Yes. Proselytize blogging (like teach new bloggers, support development of new projects), conferences, research, and social stuff.
  • SR: We need momentum, but not anything official, like officers
  • SR: We need a better blog or site that explains what the group does
    • j: what would you want to see that’s more than this Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog
• LW: We need to have special guests at each meeting
  • Someone suggested bugging former bloggers, group members to come back
  • WK: This week, it’s Nathan of Nate Knows Nada
  • LW: really wants guest speakers
• Sun: we need a name for our group