Subscriber Meeting 19th January 2009

From NodelWiki

Subscriber meeting 19th January 2009 Held at Dekspace

Main aim of the meeting is the redevelopment of the Website.

At this meeting - apart from many other things - we discussed the NODE.London 2009 Web Development process.

Attendees: Adnan, Saul, Ruth, Manjit, Keith, Liza Hazkall

THe main object of this meeting was to discuss the website development. Saul explained our Ace Application proposal, and the plan to have to have six meetings of discussion, review and testing. We discussed the form these meeting could take, Manjit suggested a storycars system he has used before. Liza asked if the content from the old website should be transferred to the new site, it was generally agreed that it could be, but the old site could remain as it is.

We discussed time scale and outcomes, it was agreed that the development time should follow its natural course, if we have one meeting per month, then we are looking at six months to a finished site, but further testing and development may be required, which would need further funding.

We discussed the possibility of the next festival being on Spring 2010.

We discussed that, with a small budget we had to decide where the money should be spent on design or structure. 80% of a budget can end up being spent on design. Ruth mentioned that the question is whether people use it. It was agreed that the site must be kept simple, with minimal functionality, the design should be quite basic. Node London is about openness , and these policies must be explained, people could easily misunderstand the intentions of what we are doing or the functionality of the site.

The interface of the old site got in the way of its functionality. Maybe currently it is too heavily branded? And we could go for a much more utilitarian approach.

We need to make sure ACE England know that this is our intention to have a stripped down design but with very good functionality, and that the site will go through rigorous testing and using before it could be called successful. We discussed some of the tools which the site requires, such as Calendar, integration of the mailing list, venue and artist links. We agreed that we dodn’t want people to still be using the only the mailing list in 18 months time. Whilst this is very successful, it is not good for networking and building the community.

We agreed that we should look for members of Node.London or others that aren’t currently part of Node. London who are organising events in the future. These could be invited to the development meetings and we could use their real world events to build and test the new site.

We identified Space, BDS, E:vent, Shunt, Area 10, Furtherfield, Julian Greenman as potential contributors. Each of us took on the task of contacting them. But they must be asked to ‘buy into’ the process and attend all six meetings, as consistency is important.

Saul offered to run the next meeting,( Monday 9th Feb) and Adnan the one after (Monday 9th March).

We discussed the possibilty of a Stand at Kinetica Feb 27th -Mar 2nd 2008. It was agreed to go ahead with an application, but only if Keith would do everything! (I have talked to Rachel baker, Ace, since, and found that we could not get the funding in time).

Please check above, apologies for omissions or mistakes... Keith