In spite of the horrid weather for the monthly Communications meeting we managed to have enough people to get some progress on advancing the new DPOE web site.

In attendance:

• Toni Gilpin
• Adam Finlayson
• Fayette Aurelia Nichols
• John Welch
• Rene Rivera

Not in attendance:

• Chris Hart
• John Zbesko
• Ginny Holbert
• Daniel Biss

To summarize the consensus was to move ahead with the structural development of the web site as follows:

1. Start with a cleaned up version of the existing content in the new Drupal+CiviCRM setup.
2. Do minor refacing of the basic web style to make it minimally presentable. I.e. using the existing colors and logo but in the existing Drupal style.
3. Launch as soon as we have presentable content, with a target of soon after the start of the year (2010).
4. Continue development of structure, content, and features in parallel with development of new style.
5. After basic functionality the next priority is to have an event calendar.
6. For developing of the new style we will selectively solicit our membership for expertise.
7. Forum functions are low priority at this time.

There where a few policy questions that came up during the discussion that we should bring up with the Board for:

• Who do we allow to post comments to the blogs?
  • The consensus was for allowing any registered user to comment on blogs with moderation at first.
  • Adam volunteered to help in moderating.
  • We need to compose a posting policy that new users need to agree to before being given an account.
• Give paid members their own blog to post, and possibly to promote to other public parts of the web site. This is both a service we can promote to our memberhip and gives the web site a grass-roots development aspect. And makes the membership generate a good portion of the up-to-date content we might want. 
  • The consesus was for giving paid members blog posting privileges.

Tasks for the immediate future:

• Selective query of memberhip for web graphic design expertise.
• Adam will send Rene art files for the current logo.
• Get Communications Committee members to create accounts on the staging site.
• Toni and Fayette will collaborate on filling in some of the more obvious organizational content.
• Create a posting, and site, user policy statement for users to agree. Volunteers needed for authoring this.
• Install additional Drupal modules to make it easier for editing the blog posts and page content. Rene will be working on this.