2017-Apr-17 Communications Reevaluation Subcommittee: Web rights, site design, project mgt software

[download or print PDF]

Present: Reykia Fick, Chris Hitchcock, Mylène DiPenta, Anne Trudell (clerk/recorder)

Mary Conchelos has resigned from this sub-committee to concentrate her efforts on editorial work with the Sunder P Gardner lecture (last year’s and upcomming in May).

We began with opening worship

Has access for Reykia to the business side of the site been established?   

Reykia now has access to the public side of the website for work, but it is not fully in place on the business side. She will do more follow up with Glen.

Has Reykia gotten access to the website’s Google Analytics? 

This is not yet done

Material on what would success look like re the website?  

Mylene walked us through materials she had learned how to put together in the course taken on doing website design with users in mind and will send the materials out to us.

Results of review and work on the mindmap of the website. 

This has been more of a procedural approach looking at policy development and what is missing.  Chris gathered up material and sent it to Mylene.  They did look over the old mindmap and put together a to-do list.  We need to put the results in a project management tool (such as Pivotal or Sifter).   Mylene is storing these historical documents in an archive area on the committee’s website and putting documents in their own categories under Resources.  Notes and Minutes go under News and Updates section of that site.

Reykia’s report on background reading and some of her ideas  regarding the website

She sent us a document and we went through it, discussing the proposed work plan.

To Do:

  • Anne will send Reykia the result of her project tryout of Pivotal re empty landing pages, which is a “hole” in the site and filling it could improve perception of the site.
  • Reykia is starting a style guide for front-page postings.  She will see if it is possible for people to write posts, then she could the final publishings.  Decision for the editorial committee?  Reykia to bring that info to the next Editorial Committee meeting.
  • Reykia will do a diagram to show  how splitting news ad blog apart would look/work and present it  at next meeting.

Project management tool

Pivotal is free for non-profits;  Swifter is $30 a month. We will discuss at next meeting what we would use and not use out of Pivotal and try it for a few months.

Next meeting

Sunday, May 14th, 7 pm.

We close with short period of silent worship

2017-Mar-21 Communications Reevaluation Subcommittee

[download or print PDF]

Tuesday Mar 21, 2017 7-8 pm (Google Hangouts)

Present: Anne Trudell (clerk/minutes), Mylene DiPenta (to-do notes), Chris Hitchcock, Reykia Flick.

Regrets: Mary Conchelos

We began with silent worship.

We welcomed Reykia Flick to the group.

Report on tasks done since last meeting

· Mylene: possible bug-tracking tools. We are currently looking at Pivotal Tracker and SIfter. Mylene will set up access to them for Reykia. Mylene will troubleshoot issues Chris has been having viewing things in Pivotal Tracker.

· Chis: has sent out document re user expereince testing that Archives used –> one downfall of this document: would user be able to find stuff if they weren’t told where to go on the site? Mylene suggested we gather more resources/examples re usability.

· Mary: questions re site’s training materials about WordPress. Mary noted in a separate email that she found that the primary training video proceeded too fast and had too many iterations of how easy WordPress is (without solid examples to buttress this opinion).

· Anne: boilerplate template for unused committee subsites. Anne really liked using Pivotal Tracker for setting up the document she produced which she sent to other subcommittee members.

We are directing Reykia to the web evaluation documents (on our business subsite). Perhaps she can fix the things that are wrong (broken links, spelling errors, etc) in the short term.

Reykia would like to investigate what Quakers use the site for. Chris noted that she posts links in Facebook to newer material on the site. We do have Google Analytics on public and private sides of site. We need to ask Bruce to give Reykia access to the analytics.

Mylene has research work she did in her usability courses that we could look at and use as a jumping off point.

Discussion/decision on tracking tool –> we will hold this to the next meeting after tech issues are sorted out and more experience is gathered, particularly from Reykia.

Website metadata

· who <title>@quaker.ca email goes to — Chris asked Bruce list of quaker.ca email forwards — even for Bruce who owns the machine it is not an easy task to generate the list – need to have a policy for and standard record keeping. The email forwards not always working.

· who has edit rights where on the site – same issues as above?

· other institutional memory aspects — Mylene keeping a running list for now.

Who to contact Bev Shepherd about what she sees as not working in the website: we wait until Reykia has a better handle on things re the website. Reykia will let her know that site issue will be dealt with.

Next tasks

– what would success look like re the website? Mylene bringing material to our next meeting.

– Chris still has the mindmap of the website. Mylene and Chris will go through what Chris has accumulated. Mylene will put them all in one place. (put on next meeting’s agenda)

– Mylene to follow up with Glen about access for Reykia to the business side of the site

– Reykia to contact Bruce re access to Google Analytics

– Reykia to do background reading and report some of her ideas prior to next meeting

We closed with silent worship.