Disorientations Weekly 2020-06-19

--- tags: meeting notes --- # Disorientations Weekly 2020-06-19 4:30pm PT / 6:30pm CT / 7:30pm EST **Attending**: Casey, Joanne, Emma **Facilitator/Notetaker**: Emma ## Agenda - Intros [if needed] - Check-in question! - What are you noticing in your environment that relates to this project? ### Discussion Items - Eyebeam Rapid Response Interview (Satuday June 20, 3:30pm ET) - Questions from Eyebeam: - Which of the interrelated lenses in the open call connects most with your project? * • **Increasing accessibility of online platforms** * • **Ethical or values-driven technology** * • **Impacts of Covid-19** * • New, online public spheres * • Creating space for imagination * • New and necessary skills for artists * • Democratic engagement and fortification * • Health and well-being * • Development of public policy * • Individual autonomy, borders, and immigration * • Artificial and natural intelligence - How are you considering and planning for the impact of your project? - What does this unique opportunity at Eyebeam allow you to do that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise/anywhere else? - Eyebeam as an amplifier platform; school programs with high school kids! Community of youth would be really nice to connect with. - Art, technology, and justice triangulate this project - A lot of avenues of support in the future (eg: university library), but they might be slower; student activists can't be the core support all the time; archivist groups are more professional + picky; this is a more grassroots/volunteer project - getting activism off of extractive platforms, thinking of an infrastructure level, how technology can be used usefully + not exploitatively in support of activists - greatest contribution an institution can make is context; for Eyebeam to say this project is real, relevant, and urgent (and to give us money) gives us momentum and legitimacy (a double-edged sword, starter resources/elevated platform vs. grassroots) - this is an attempt to support people who need it (i missed a few words) - What is your personal criteria for success? - (Emma) Thinking about what it means to be a student activist, for my friends. Students as opposed to others outside of institutions: don't have intergenerational, institutional ebb and flow. Graduate after 4 years and lose momentum because of that. They fill that role. Successful project links back to intergenerational connection. And link intercollegiate network. - (Joanne) [Marshall Ganz†](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/marshall-ganz) organizer for decades, now teaching at Harvard, creating an organizing framework for the Obama campaign. Difference between campaigns and organizations: campaigns are blurred of a lot energy -> organization to sustain it but also subverts it; there's always going to be cycles of students and campaigns. mobilizing for activism is easy but sustaining it is the hard part. (easier to do a protest and march than the backend.) lack of archive is indicative of the lack of back-end, you can't think about campaign and organizing at once; our role can be threading between the two. success would be buy-in from all the schools; impact would be something self-sustaining (being able to walk away from it) - (Casey) two timeframes - short-term success would look like paying student activist publishers (hence the grant), creates connections, responding to the fragmentation of organizing, takes disjointedness and turns it into connection, recenters dialogue (the truth vs. chronicle articles on higher ed), creating change and new paradigms - long-term: successful if it relieves student activists from passing the torch by seeing the history of your own institution or an issue across institutions, visualizing a larger struggle, anti-alumni association, a sustainable cooperative platform, contributing back to open-source software (creating tools people can use to create other archives), being able to clone the project (tools for writing your own history), non-propietary, generate more publications where they don't yet exist (bringing them together + contextualizing them could help people make them), make student activism more effective (eg: see all the ways people map power at universities) - not reinventing the wheel, but right now most of them aren't connected; a lot of promise in ideas of taxonomy (what kinds of ways of filtering these things would be useful for activists, researchers, alumni, etc.) - local versions + merging; regardless of what happens people will be doing this work - Important question: If we get money, where does it go, and how do we make decisions? - Casey's proposal: we need clear decision making structures, a protocol for disagreement, and handling funds. - Casey's initial thoughts for discussion: money goes into an [Open Collective](http://opencollective.com), ask Eyebeam if they can be a Fiscal Sponsor, and we look at [CLEAR Lab Handbook](https://civiclaboratory.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/clear-lab-book.pdf) and [Collective Rule](https://communityrule.info/templates) to think about different kinds of decision-making protocols, then report back with proposals. - if we get money, where do we put it and how do we make decisions about what it's for, what do we do about conflicts? - thinking about this early allows us to set it up so that it's not about us; value transparency (also as a preventative measure), a good model for a small project, allows us to receive more support (more grants, smaller donations), a continuous kickstarter - open collective: anyone can submit invoices, can go directly to individuals or organizations, a transparent ledger system, unlike a regular finance backend, you can set it up so anyone can submit requests - if Eyebeam is down for phase two, worth asking if they can be a sponsor - who gets to decide how that's spent and how? - participatory budgeting, self-determination should be a principle of the project vs. paternalism - universities make it hard for people to receive money as student orgs - what is x kind of labor worth? someone can just submit an invoice for "ten hours of design/writing" and get paid immediately - clear outline for finances? we still don't have people who are students and don't have a grant. a double imaginary, we can set an intention (eg: transparency of finances, managed via a clear decision making system) - after the interview, we can reach out to groups more intensively (we want to do it regardless of the grant), there's nothing prohibiting us from just going ahead (?) with it ### Followups - **Development**: Discuss Github Issues/Roadmap (time permitting) - Github issues: everything vs. everything except coding - should we use other tools for non-coding issues? - Joanne mentioned circles: people use one space for different types of issues, but you can see it all or focus on one - **Collection**: Adding new items to catalog - Emma has Omeka account now and is otherwise onboarded, Casey and Emma to setup a time to go over how imports work? - We decided on Sunday (6/21) at 2:30pm! - **Collaborators**: Gathering contact info and reaching out to groups - Renaming/rethinking "outreach" as "partnerships" or "collaborators"? - > From [CLEAR Lab handbook](https://civiclaboratory.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/clear-lab-book.pdf): "we do not use the terms “community outreach” or “public education” in our work because these terms assume something called the “deficit model,” where publics/communities need to be educated by academics. This is not solidarity with humility. Instead, we “collaborate with,” “work for,” “work with,” pay, “learn from,” and “partner with” other groups, all of which allows value to flow in two directions, and on shared terms." - what we're asking people to do and how do we explain what we're doing? - "outreach" as othering (via CLEAR Lab) - does it make more sense to say "collaboration" or "partnership" - language is something we keep learning, no need to police ourselves too much - appreciate awareness; it's totally okay to start off + learn Open next steps from last week: - [ ] Matt scope feature on extracting tags from metadata -- add to Github Issues? - [x] Emma check if Slack for covid intercollegiate is active -- any update? - Emma heard from friend at Duke Diso, had a bit of controversy. Predominantly white and asian, not representative of black and brown student organizers. Lends to our discussion on composition as a group. Thinking critically when we reach out: who are we representing actually in our archival project? How much say do we have in the disos that are local? Not our role to tell people what the work should be. - Which groups needs a more high quality upload. Saw lots of OCR that's jumbled. Can definitely get higher quality PDFs from groups. - would like to collect pdf for print and web, start collecting printable ones - reached out to U Chicago United, friend who graduated said they were organizing around UCPD rly busy. - intercollegiate slack hasn't updated since May 22 - facebook groups, zoom university facebook group; participation should be open but we should talk about questions of race and representation; random people might be interested; more clarity on this for ourselves might be helpful for when people do join us - Joanne more of an email person, how can I help? - Don't join facebook for this!! - Emailing, based on emails on publications; a better way to do it might be to look at publications in the last five years as a window for recently active groups, a data collecting problem? so far the first 5 emails have been random - [ ] Everyone take a look at the questions for student activist publishers and add comments/edits -- any update? ## Notes ## Decisions - Rotating facilitation roles - Meeting takes an hour long for today, in the future we can have meetings where we work together and can decide then - CLEAR Lab, protocols for collaboration! Check-ins and check-outs come from that, ease into meetings + collaboration. - We've moved to the next stage of Eyebeam fellowship, good job! The questions are to think about in advance - do-ocracy: we should split it up but don't feel like you need approval or need to wait to do something ## Next Steps - Eyebeam interview 3:30 - Casey and Emma will meet about Omeka imports this Sunday 6/21 at 2:30pm - **Anyone**: going through emails on the publications and [add to airtable](https://airtable.com/tblm45dKLrGn5QKnO/viwrc9VoOMPznlerq?blocks=hide) - **Emma**: reach out to duke/uchicago friends, facebook groups, what are helpful questions to ask; if someone reached out offering xyz what would be awesome? - **Casey**: share template already written - writing/editing an email template? what we're asking: "do you want to collaborate in general?" if so, join the chat :) - for your group: - are you working on a dis-o this year? - is there any help you need? we're creating infrastructure + funneling resources - **Next week**: joanne can facilitate, we can talk about changing our weekly meeting schedule - there's a template agenda