MEETING PURPOSE

The purpose of the meeting was to gather information from non-profit and community group leaders from Sonoma County, information in relation to how information technology in general (and specifically wiserearth.org) might best be used to help local environmental and social justice organizations be more effective in collaborating with each other and getting their constituents into action.

Only a few people attended; however, I was able to get good information from Tanya Narath and Terry Taylor about specific actions that non-profits engage in, which was the focus of the meeting. We will be meeting again soon with more local folks, as well as more non-profit representatives to further refine this list and to look at next steps.

Here's what we came up with during the meeting:

LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE BACKGROUND

Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy (LIFEE - www.ecoleader.org)'s mission is to educate current and future leaders, as well as the local community, on the need to integrate environmental, economic, and social equity issues in order to live sustainably and ensure a high quality of life for future generations. LIFEE offers an eight month long class for local leaders and activists to learn about issues and policy making and the political process. It also offers public programs about current local issues, and community networking events.

The graduates of the class (known as "Fellows") have been elected or appointed to city councils, county boards and commissions; the goal is that they will take what they've learned and incorporate it into local governing policy. For example, Fellows have been appointed to Santa Rosa's green builders advisory committee; taking what they have learned about green building and getting this knowledge and best practices reflected into SR's building ordinances.

ACTIONS/ACTIVITIES


The following are activities (and issues with those activities) that LIFEE engages in currently:

-- Nine month "Leadership Training for a Sustainable Future" class
    - One full day per month (e.g. first Friday of the month) for nine months
    - Gather in various locations

-- One-time short (2-3 hours) pubic events. Example: Dr. Schnieder climate change event: a UN association put on this talk, and scheduled a follow up event
    - multiple groups coming together to do this event
    - When there's a good speaker in town - we organize around the event with other organizations

-- Conferences. Example: yearly smart growth conference
    - Day long events with multiple speakers
    - Plenaries with break out groups; sometimes just plenaries
    
Issues:
    - Need to find ways to get those not "in the know" to come
    - Need more effective marketing
    - Conflicting events: what else is going on so were not scheduling a conflict


The following are activities that LIFEE would like to engage in, or engage in more effectively

-- Creation of a more effective web presence (potentially the Sustainable Sonoma website)
    - Create a place where people can enter event info without central person/org having to create the listing or manage it
    - Survey: what *do* people want? Buy stuff? Event listings? Consumer/peer reviews of local companies

--  LIFEE wants to be able to make Fellows accomplishments more visible; what they've done and what projects they are working on
    - to collaborate and connect (I can get help from them),
    - be more transparent (break out of silos)
    - inspire others ( can do what they did in my town),
    - get acknowledgement.
    Issue: Paper directory is static. May have issue with people not wanting to put too much up for public (maybe have private site?).

-- Create a web forum for Fellows
    Issue: how does it connect


CHALLENGES/IDEAS

-- Marketing/filling seats: want to more effectively communicate, promote, and get people to come to public events

-- Individual keeping informed: Fellow of nine-month program kept hearing about events that had already happened, and they would have liked to have gone
    - Want centralized place to find out what everyone's doing
    - Make it as local as possible (I define local -- e.g. distance from zip code?)
    - Calendar of events - easily updated, but effective at marketing

-- Levels of event coordination
    - Want to create a place where if you want to know what's going on in Sonoma County, you go here
    - Offer links that let people go deeper into a particular event
    - In depth 1: Volunteer detail, be able to volunteer for specific area, where the person in charge will be alerted
    - In depth 2: Post event follow-on, recap of workshops; pay a fee to see/hear what happened; Create community behind event - people connect & want to be informed about who's doing what next (often people come up to me after a conference and they want to help, but time moves on; helpful to have some kind of automatic reminder when events happen.

-- Collaboration across multiple organizations - each organization has goals, some of which are similar
    - Some cases there are opportuniteis to collaborate that we can't see
    - Would be great to have some kind of "Sonoma County Sustainable Council" - coordinating and facilitating all of what's happening, helping create and nourish alliances and partnerships

-- Spreading ideas on and getting support for policy issues. Need a way of sharing an idea that people can collaborate on; help to create stronger proposals and action plans, stronger because more people are involved
    
-- Ability to have non-techies use IT: withough knowing how to "Yahoo" or "Wiki"
    - have collaborative documents go through refinement process to get to a point where it's good
    - start own workgroups on own initiative

-- In house IT Issues:
    - Too many tools, websites - clutter, cost, implementaion, learning curves, server/equipment cost
    - what's the best tool for the money? Is facebook good umbrella tool to use?
    - LImitation of IT:
        -- risk of creating more isolation -- people behind computers too much
        -- takes a lot of time for me to get my information in
        -- takes a lot of time to review information
    -- Don't have the staff to do IT properly;
        -- systems are cobbled together, multiple databases, hard to keep website up to date w/ latest info
        -- Volunteers cause more problems when working on databases; end up being duplicates, incomplete data, gobbledygook. Systems must either be well designed and documented for volunteer work, otherwise has to be done in house and kept under control.
    -- Need IT consulting and tech plan, but costly, not in budget.
    -- How maintain data, even with perfect system?
    -- Ease of use is huge --  as easy as online shopping (no training required)
    -- Big issue: things don't talk to one another: SS of fellows, database of fellows and donors, Word document of fellows. Multiple places to update data, big headache. Islands of automation.

LIFEE IT software and uses
- Exceed - Donor database
  -- Need: to be able to add custom fields for "fellow" information (elected, appointed, etc.)
- MS Outlook - email
- MS Word - documents
- MS Excell - financial data; also have a spreadsheet of all fellows (how keep current with Exceed?)
- Constant contact - email blasts (how keep current with Exceed?)
- Quickbooks
- Eventbrite -- EXCELLENT tool, very easy to organize event registrations (tickets, money, attendance lists, easy data download)
- Paypal
- Groundspring -- online donation software ("donate now" buttons).
- Dreamweaver for website (hard, intrigued by the site building websites; can they really deliver?)
- MS powerpoint occasionally (Microsoft is complicated)
- Yahoo groups -- good for announcing things, everyone on current class is on it.
- vBulletin - current forum; not working well, low participation. Want it to be like WaccoBB - digest of data (push mechanism). People not using it; want some kind of web forum to be place where fellows can announce what theyr'e up to. We don't want to be in the middle (keep getting request of fellows: "can you send this to your email list?").


Features discussion:
    When I sign up for something or want to attend, very handy to have "download to your calendar?" option
    Forum: option to receive messages via email, and clicking on "take me to message" doesn't require login, just whips me right to message

Local Son Cty orgs

BALLE
Daily Acts
Livability Project
LIFEE
Post Carbon
Climate Change Coalition
Riverkeepers
Transition Cotati


Philosophical stuff (unrelated to IT)
    Have younger adults in focus group
    Have the current class plan as their class project an annual meeting of all fellows
    How do you get mainstream media have an "environment" and "social justice" section, like they have "sports" and "business." Is newspaper obsolete? Design strategy around how people get their information.