New York City Radical Reference Meeting
December 15, 2006
ABC No Rio, NYC
Attendance: Andy, Gretchen, Jenna, John, Julie, Melissa
1. Grassroots Media Conference. In NYC 2/24/07; deadline for proposals is 1/15/07. Gretchen will take the lead on putting together a "Managing Your Information" workshop, with sections covering social bookmarking sites (manage your websites), RSS feeds (manage your online news intake), tracking a bill or issue (e.g. GovTrack.us; manage your government information). Jenna will contact some indy journalists to ask for advice on creating realistic scenarios to use during the workshop.
2. U.S. Social Forum. In Atlanta 6/27-7/1/07. Our little group is somewhat enthused. Jenna will probably be going anyway, and she will put out some feelers to get a sense of what, if anything, Rad Ref could contribute.
3. NYC Anarchist Bookfair. At Judson Memorial Church on 4/14/07, 11:00-7:00. Patric is in charge of coordinating exhibitors — Melissa will contact him to make sure they're not duplicating work. Gretchen suggested RR work with the Tamiment archives at NYU and do something like a tour towards the end of the day. This could be coupled with a joint talk about the value of archives, etc. Andy said Tamiment also always wants flyers and literature from groups, so the bookfair tablers will be a good source for that. RR is going to hang back before proposing an actual workshop, since slots will be limited. One idea if we do do something is "Government Resources for Anarchists."
4. Website workday. There are some concrete updates that need to be made to the RR website. Jenna had sent an email to the list with the details. We briefly discussed the Ask MetaFilter model again — one major appeal is that you don't have the pressure of having to be the sole answerer of a question (this, of course, could also translate to a total lack of accountability and only the easy/fun questions will get worked on). The website workday will probably be Thursday 12/28/06.
Next meetings -- we agreed that the January meeting will be a regular one (Melissa will post possible times for the weekend of 1/20/07 to the NYC RR list) and, per Gretchen's suggestion, the February meeting will get promoted on LIS student listservs, etc. and include a salon discussion of the U.S. Social Forum.