too sleepy
some great meetings today...
Lunchtime powwow to spur activity in high tech manufacturing.
swung by a college fair to do some guerilla advertising for my non-profit's fair in the spring.
EFF Board meeting... I narrowly escaped being nominated for an office... I accepted and then at the end of the meeting relented because I don't want that responsibility... Discussion of mission statement- but that will be turned into an email discussion, I'm tasked to do more research on non-profit articles of incorporation (between you and me, I had done some research beforehand so now I'll just fill in some gaps!) , election of officers (Jonl is new President, Don volunteered for VP, and Steve is secretary. Treasurer spot is open... I raised a small fuss of wanting to make sure we get someone in there that knows what they are doing because finances for a 501c(3) are pretty tricky and recordkeeping must be rigorous.) uber-geekdom in that room; quite intimidating, but pretty exciting. We've some interesting activity in the pipeline. My personal mission is to do a pretty aggessive marketing and education campaign: targeting populations that may not have been reached before by eff-austin (I like "effa"... I'm going to use "effa" and see if it catches on). Jon did a pretty quick rehash of history and discussion around the national eff and its relation to effa (nutshell: eff national is a completely seperate entity from effa. We aren't a franchise or local chapter of eff; we're our own beast. We have a reasonably similar mission, but effa will not focus as much on lobbying and politics as much as providing services and throwing parties and events to raise awareness. A couple of specific ideas in the works:
- EFF and ACTLab co-sponsoring an event at SXSW Interactive
- EFF and ACTLab co-sponsoring a lecture series
- EFF organizing regular socializing/networking events for opensource folks
- EFF creating a panel discussion for educators, students, and parents (my baby, obviously). The minutes will be posted on the eff-austin website Rescheduled board meetings to avoid blog meetup conflicts. Yea.
After the board meeting, I called Kathryn to see if the blog meetup was still there. Yes, it was, but she said only Prentiss was there with her. So they stuck around for a bit. Then I pulled up to a very fortunate parking spot in front of the UT Starbucks on 24th and saw Adam and Adina sitting at one table and Prentiss and Kathryn sitting at another! So the turnout was actually five people altogether (including me). I was way too tired by this point to add much to the conversation and these folks had already been talking for almost 2 hours already, but we talked about the usual blog stuff (privacy, appropriateness of topics, software features), and we also talked a little bit about the "rule of not changing what you've written." It seems that there are two schools of thought with shades of gray in between: a blog is a self-publishing tool- implying there is a need to edit and change the living document (dates and times simply indicate a sequence or thread and aren't literal perhaps?) OR blogs are a historical document that should be preciously preserving details like time accurately.
I definitely fall in the "diary" camp where I want to look back on my blog and know definitively that what I wrote is what I wrote at the specific time indicated by the timestamp.
There was a notion of "grandfathering" a blog entry: if it's more than a week old, for example, you may no longer touch it except to add addendums... beyond that, you may freely change what you write.
Everyone seemed to agree that addendums are a pretty good tool and that typos or obvious grammar problems were less important to preserve than actual stylistic or content editing.
Of course, we're inventing the rules as we go, and the rules are going to be completely different for every person based on what their goals are.
On the way home, Parmer and Mopac was scary because about 9 police cars were strewn about and CSI-activity was going on (picture taking, measuring of distances on the ground, collecting samples, etc) I don't know what happened, but I do know I had to detour and invent another way onto Parmer... I ended up driving (and probably freaking out the driver I was following, uncomfortably close) through a residential section with street names like "Columbine" and "Warpath." Not really encouraging.
The net result is that I am going to bed now and will try to upgrade MT later.
