October 25th Meeting Minutes

Discussion:
1. CIC Seminar
You can suggest speakers for Fall 2009. There are already some suggestions and instructions for suggestions at http://web.me.com/deatkins/CIC/Speaker_Suggestions.html. In addition to submitting them to Dan, it would be good to post them on the blog (tagged "speaker suggestions").
One idea that came up was to make the seminar 3 credits instead of 1.5 which would allow for more discussion and CI introductory literature to supplement the speakers.
2. CIC Specialization

I’ve started a thread in the discussion forum (http://cic.si.umich.edu/forum/276) called CIC Specialization to post feedback and ideas for the ever evolving specialization. The current specialization brings together existing SI courses that have community informatics components, but no new courses have been developed yet. Since the specialization is so new, we really have an opportunity to shape it. If you have ideas for new courses or projects within courses, post them there (title, description, suggested readings). There a “CI Specialization” task force in the works for next semester. It would be good for us to prepare before them.

Some people mentioned that SI 645 has been a good foundation course for CI. It’s unclear if Joan will be teaching it next year though. A couple mentioned that it would be good to archive the class to ensure that it could be taught again. Kathleen suggested dScribing it for the Open Educational Resources initiative on campus and offered to help in the process.

Someone mentioned that it would be useful to have a class similar to SI 682 in which the CHI competition is a large component. Are there any similar competitions in CI?

It would also be good to keep in mind what sorts of unique skills are needed for work in the Community Informatics skills – how can we build those skills, how can we present them to employers, etc.

3. Incorporating content from other sites (social bookmarking)

Many of us bookmark CI-related websites and articles on various websites, e.g. Delicious, Facebook. What’s the best way to aggregate the info for the website?

(NOTE: For an update on this, see Travis’ blog post.)

4. CIC Student Group role

CIC is not only an organization for the students, it’s student-driven. If you have a speaker, project, event, etc. in mind, you need to speak up, try to recruit people for it, or join an event/project that someone else is organizing. CIC doesn’t have a formal president, vice-president, secretary, etc. role. We didn’t really plan well at the beginning of this semester so the only two assigned roles were CIC seminar assistant (Lisa) and website coordinator (Kathleen). For next semester (and maybe the rest of this semester), if would be good to have a little more leadership structure – perhaps bring back the idea of the Communications and Planning Committees. Regular meetings (weekly or bi-weekly) would also be helpful.

5. CIC Mailing List

Some people mentioned the desire for a discussion list. However, using the website for discussion would allow us to archive it for future reference. Users can subscribe to the RSS feed for the website. We agreed to use the website for discussions but decided that we need to send out the instructions for how to subscribe to the website to si.all.open.

(NOTE: After the meeting, Kathleen created a page “How to Stay Up to Date” with the email RSS feed instructions and more.)

6. Ideas for events

This semester
· Alumni talk – It would be useful to being together alumni for their ideas on skills and courses for the CI specialization as well as project ideas and to build connections for internships for the first students. There are several alumni in town and others that are not in town who have expressed interest. We talked about doing an in-person panel discussion coupled with an online chat or perhaps two separate events. The end of the semester is quickly approaching so this should be before the end of November if it’s going to happy this semester.
· CIC Orientation – There was no CI kick-off at the beginning of the CIC seminar like there was last year. Although we had the CIC dinner during orientation and the potluck, the first-year students didn’t get a chance to hear about the faculty CI research projects and how they could involved with that. Not all CI students are in the CIC seminar. It would be good to have a CIC orientation to bring together CI-interested faculty and Masters and PhD students to present their work. We could also explain CIC to the first year students and inform them how they can contribute to the website and projects. This is tentatively schedule for Friday, Nov. 21.
· Organize another vision session
· Organize another happy hour event

Next semester
· Tech tools for nonprofits (http://cic.si.umich.edu/node/834) (this was originally planned for the fall semester but we might not be able fit in)
· Brown bag lunches (monthly?) with CI faculty
· Weekend trip to volunteer with Grand Rapids Media Center or One Cleveland (both of which were Fall 2007 CIC Seminar speakers)
· Beth Kanter talk (through Nonprofit Management Center?)
· Mentor program with first-year students and second- (and third-) year students

Action Items

· Create forums for specialization, projects, and transition checklists (Kathleen) (Done)
· Organization CI/CIC orientation for Friday, November 21 (Emily) (in progress)
· Send email to si.all.open with instructions for how to subscribe to the CIC website mailing list (Meico)
· Talk to Kelly Kowatch about organizing an alumni chat (Kathleen)
· Talk to Joan about dScribing SI 645 (Travis)
· Look into what external content and/or social bookmarking websites we should pull into the CIC website (Travis, Meico)