Elephants on Bicycles

This week has been a busy one with me and my friends at WOSU/COSI. Monday there was a small planning meeting held where WOSU really emphasized turning the keys over to the rest of the group. No matter what they do WOSU will remain a large part of what drives this group just based on their prominence in the community both at large and in this smaller “community”. Tuesday I had an opportunity to lunch with Susan and Tim and subsequently ran into my friend Melissa and Ruben. Then last night was our becoming-more-regular-not-quite-monthly meeting of the Columbus Social Media Cafe.

The meeting on Monday with the smaller group highlighted the fact that we, as some sort of loose organization, must take greater steps to share the leadership and responsibility for the group. At last nights meeting we put that into action by having Jeff Johnson [Urbaninfill blogger] lead the meeting. Besides stating the obvious that Jeff did a fantastic job in this role I would like to point out that while he had a set of ideas to follow through on he, along with the rest of the group, did a great job of reshaping those thoughts to fit in with the direction of the conversation. This may sound like it was meandering but in reality the group was a healthy combination of new faces and veterans so this flow of conversation really helped to get everyone on board, moving in a similar direction.

So where are we going? What did end up coming out of the meeting last night. Well, first of all was the consensus that it is time to break out of our COSI location. We have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use such a nice space – thanks COSI/WOSU! – however now is the time to start bringing in more voices to this conversation. We discussed this in terms of our groups values as being one of inclusion. One strategy we discussed was moving our meeting location around to other neighborhoods. The plan for the next meeting is to try and secure a place at the Worthington Public Library during the last week of April first week of May. Thanks to the inclusion of George from OCLC we may have both a new “in” with some of the libraries as well as the voices of library bloggers from around central Ohio.

At the meeting last night were a couple of self-proclaimed “mommy bloggers” who I think we made a connection with. They believe in the possibility of bringing out more voices like their’s through these neighborhood type meetings. I hope that this meeting mobility will allow us to interact with more people in the not-yet-blogging or social media networking world as well. This brings us to a second value that was discussed, diversity.

Sitting around the meeting last night we noticed some diversity of blogging topics but not necessarily a particularly large gap in age range or ethnic background. As a group we hope to change this and to diversify the group not only on content production but also on community backgrounds. An overall goal that several of us share is to truly bring out a diverse set of community voices; voices which today do not receive the coverage that they deserve.

How are we going to do all of this? We aren’t an official group per se, I mean, we aren’t a 501(c)(3) nor do we want to be. We are attempting to move forward without specific leadership. We don’t have a specific meeting time or place and have innumerable options for the like online. For these reasons we have talked about injecting some structures and tools into the process and here is what we came up with.

First is obviously to use the mobile meetings to make the group more appealing to new people by coming into their neighborhood, and reaching out to them. WOSU has committed to helping with some of the outreach using their media outlets. The rest of the outreach, at least for the time being, will take place on my website, on your website, in all of our conversations as we bump into people on the street or at the store or in the park.

A next step is providing our members, however transient or static they may choose to be, the tools to be leaders within the organization. We discussed some of our core values last night as a group and we would like to continue that discussion online. We hope that the core values lead to a mission statement. Our assignment for the next meeting is to have fleshed out enough ideas that we can put something like this together at that meeting. The mission statement can take on a few forms; broad and soaring or realistic and goal oriented. Personally I believe ours should focus on some specifics goals that we can reach but should lean more towards the broad and soaring. My hope for our mission statement is that it develops by consensus, is inclusive and exalts diversity, that it is easy for outsiders to hear and understand; most importantly that it provides a framework for everyone who enters the group to work within.

With a mission statement and a core set of values listed and publicly available to any individual joining into our discussion we will have great flexibility to allow the same individuals to form smaller groups which will be able to go out and accomplish goals and tasks not suited for the group at large to take on together. In last nights meeting this has already begun by getting individuals in the group to take on certain tasks for future outreach events.

Other, more tangible tools will need to exist somewhere for group members to use. Currently the Columbus Social Media Cafe wordpress blog will function in this capacity but we believe that there are much more useful and powerful tools that should be built. Off the top of my head I can think of a couple of these tools. First would be a central calendar system that would allow for members to schedule with each other both small task oriented meetings and the larger full group meetings. Another tool would be a place to pull in these outside voices. WBEZ in Chicago setup a site called Vocalo.org which allows anyone to call in and provide content which is available on site and, depending on quality and content, may end up on the air. WOSU has stated that they would be willing to host such a site on their systems but it will require a group effort to supply the backend programming, graphic design, and front end support and administration to make it happen – they just don’t have the resources to provide all of that and, well, this is OUR group so WE should all pitch in on projects like this.

Having tools like these will make it easier for group members to reach out to each other for help as well as bringing in new members. I think a large component of all of this “reaching new voices” is to educate those voices on how to speak in this language. An older gentleman at a meeting I attended recently discussed this as being the difference between a native speaker (those of us first adopters, particularly those of us that grew up with it) as opposed to the non-native speakers (late adopters and older generations) as opposed to non speakers (people who have never adopted to new technology). I hope we reach all of the non-native speakers and as bring as many non speakers as we can into the non-native class.

Finally we had a specific event idea which was to host a booth at ComFest where we would (through the help of possibly the city of Columbus) provide free wi-fi allowing ComFest attendees to grow that community spirit beyond the physical realm and into the online world. This event would require volunteers and some level of marketing material as a take-a-way for individuals interested in our group.

D’oh – I forgot to mention that we’re brainstorming names as well. I’ll throw mine into the hat as NextVoices – NextVoices.org is in fact available for purchase too. Just a thought.

Ok, well, I’ve probably made you cross-eyed if you read all the way down to this point. I’ll update my site with some links as I see other meeting attendees posting about last night. I think I did a fair job of covering my perspective of the meetings. We’ll give a heads up once our next meeting is scheduled.