Radical Reference Montreal meeting
November 13, 2010

Present:
Alanna, Megan, Vince, Cassie

Rad Ref’s current mandate and preliminary projects were discussed. New people are joining since the Mirror article was published, and it’s great that new ideas are forming. To move forward, we’ll need to choose some concrete directions and go from there.

We also discussed that we are a consensus-based group; events or projects (or vetoes of decisions) must relate back to our mandate.

The question of decision-making via e-mail is still under discussion. At this point, members are expected to attend at least two meetings before organizing events, etc. These details need to be written up.

A few events of interest have been sent around to the mailing list. The Montreal Montreal Media Co-op invited us to a meeting/5 a 7 on November 25. Alanna plans to go. Some people are also planning to go to the next geek montreal meeting on Nov 20 (http://www.geekmontreal.com/).

Beyond the current initiatives around virtual reference, street reference, and skills training, lots of other potential project were discussed! We will set up Google documents for project planning, allowing us to form some concrete goals and strategies.

Here are some ideas:
-Indexing existing collections of radical materials that haven’t been catalogued or documented. E.g., CKUT materials and the Dominion (http://www.dominionpaper.ca/)
-Creating some way of searching across or bringing together existing collections that are now only accessible separately
-Collecting a directory of social justice groups in Montreal. This would include contact information and profiles. Another step might be to collect/document their flyers and other materials
-Research the histories of local radical groups: written documentation and oral histories. The sharing of oral histories could maybe be done with student radio stations. This topic could also be approached by looking at histories of movements more broadly and examining in what ways they were successful.

A key undertaking at this point is to really form contacts and find out what needs there are in the activist communities. It’s not about what we want to do as much as finding out about them and contributing where we can.

We will continue to build the Google doc with groups to contact that either have an affinity with our work or who we could. This list could form the basis of a comprehensive directory later on. One group brought up was Coco Montreal (http://www.coco-net.org/en/home). Vince will contact.

Along with the project documents, we also would like to start having meetings that focus on particular projects so that we can start to move forward with concrete plans. Perhaps one or two people can volunteer to bottom-line certain projects and look after their progress.

Megan will set up a doodle poll for the next meeting with a mix of days/times.