Agenda
- Check In
- Review WWWs
- Weekly Events Logistics
- Review Agenda
- Viventibus Galaxia ritual
- Funding:
- Children International
- Website
- Gaia's Heartbeat
- Spiritual experience experiments
- Evaluation
Items for future meetings
- Solstice
- Spiritual experience experiments
Check In
- Ben ... I just caused substantial scrapes on the side of my rental car and to the back bumper of a van, but while I was trying to get paper to make them a note they left and so I cannot leave them a message.
- Eric ... in fact fell aspleep in this chair and Patrick just woke me up.
- Brandon ... Having a good day and a good time
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/photography/photos/milestones-photography/afghan-girl-portrait/ http://lookbook.nu/look/2358487-God-Weeping-Willow-Thrift-Store-Skinny-Belt http://www.hdxwallpapers.com/images/Fantasy-Slave-Tree-Girl.jpg http://www.bellasugar.com/Easy-Last-Minute-Halloween-Costume-Ideas-5635291?slide=19&image_nid=5656535
WWWs from last time
- <s>Brandon ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Brandon ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Brandon ... make ammonite shakers ... by next call
- Eric... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Eric ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric ... Send recipe for galaxy plate to everyone ... by tonight</s>
- Eric ... Write community garden sponsership proposal ... by next call
- Eric ... Spend some time creating pages on call subjects ... by next call
- <s>Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing</s>
- Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- <s>Ben ... check with the Sanders about revised meeting times ... by tonight</s>
- Ben ... do a draft proposal about Children International ... by next call
WWWs
- Brandon ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Brandon ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Brandon ... mail ammonite shakers to Ben and Eric ... by tomorrow
- Eric... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Eric ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric ... Write community garden sponsership proposal ... by next call
- Eric ... Invite Michael Dowd to the next call as a orientation call ... by this call
- Eric ... Spend some time creating pages on call subjects ... by next call
- Ben ... follow your topical community protocol for this week ... ongoing
- Ben ... meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
Weekly Events Logistics
Service rotation: Eric, Shelley, Brandon, Ben
- November 9 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Eric) First week of Viventibus Galaxia
- November 16 Service: 9:00 am PDT (12:00 EDT) (Shelley)
- November 10 Work-Bee: 1:30 pm PDT (16:30 EDT)
- November 17 Seeing Nature Readings and Practices (Ottawa): 13:00 EST
Viventibus Galaxia
- The ritual page still says we're lighting floating candles rather than a galaxy plate
- Should we use tea-light containers or other floating metal bowls containing the alcohol and boric acid?
- Brandon is concerned about the safety of the plate
- Eric is planning to put the plate on a cookie sheet or cookie tin lid for safety
- Where to put the Sol candle?
- Probably right next to the plate
Proposals for what to do with funds
Children International
- A charity that gives you some contact with the people you're helping ("your chance to build a lifelong friendship with an impoverished child")
- For $25 per month, you become a sponsor for a single child
- Eric has heard of a religious group that does something similar, but drops support for any child who becomes pregnant because she's a "sinner"
- Children International doesn't appear to be religious anymore, but Eric thinks the group he's thinking of hides their religious nature to some degree
- Proposal: We sponsor 4 children (one per active member) for $100US a month ... Shelley has ability to veto this once we pass it.
- Discussion:
- Ben: look at website, see what we think. Secular organization (didn't used to be) ... they support "all faiths".
- Brandon and Eric: The organization Eric was concerned about is probably Compassion International
- Brandon: It would be pretty lousy to withdraw our support before they've grown up
- Vote: Unanimous support for the proposal as amended with veto for Shelley
Website Design Help
- Proposal: We've had 104 clicks at a cost of $121.27 so far. Not one of those 104 has signed up on the email list. Brandon is ready to put in some time on the website design (http://join.solseed.org ) and he would like to set aside $1500 of virtual for use to hire help on the design as needed.
What say ye?
- Discussion:
- Ben: do we want to experiment more with ad wording first?
- Brandon: We don't need more clicks, just more conversions of the clicks
- Brandon: I imagine doing a bunch of iterations of the website, slowly using up the allocated $1500 (an image here, a graphic design consultant there (odesk, vworker, etc))
- Ben: Counterproposal, before we approve this, Ben takes a stab at this ... basically let's do what we can for free (because it would be easy to improve the existing site)
- Brandon prefers moving toward a professional site rather than getting stuck at an amateur local maximum
- Eric: We have some money now, none of us have a huge amount of time. The 4 of us are the only people who can generate ideas for SolSeed. We can't hire people to "come up with SolSeed" for us. But we can hire people to do graphics, etc to help us. Let's hire people to do "X" for us so that we can focus on SolSeed.
- Ben: If we had six members and I had a choice between being on the governing committee and being a graphic designer, I would rather be the graphic designer. Brandon, you speak about supporting passionate amateurs.
- Brandon: I would like you to work on the music video.
- Ben: but that's harder (plaintively).
- Eric: What if Brandon took over "The Seed" music video and Ben took over the website design?
- Ben: I do have some very definite ideas of what I want to put in the music video
- Eric: I can't imagine you'd have the time to do both projects
- Ben: I can't imagine a single iteration on this simple website taking that much of my time, but many iterations would get time consuming
- Eric: I think we want to do many iterations.
- Brandon: Ben, is the money the issue, or that you don't want someone else doing the website?
- Ben: I say that I'm SolSeed's media guy, and I feel bad about turning over the website to some outsider
- Eric: Are you worried about losing the title of media guy within SolSeed?
- Ben: If we're going to say that my work isn't professional enough for the outward facing website, that hurts my self esteem a little. After all, we've been putting images that we created almost from scratch on our wiki for a long while, and now you are saying that we need to turn it over to someone who knows better than us what looks good.
- Brandon: I think we should take a week to think about this and come back to it.
Gaia's Heartbeat (Music Video)
- Proposal: I'd like to set aside $3000 of virtual to hire John Boswell to compose and produce a music video called "Gaia's heartbeat". It will take 2-6 months to finish. We'll write the words, John will turn them into song. This video will serve as core content for the new website as well as something to attract people from youtube. As we finish the seed music video, it too will function as core content.
- If we buy stock footage ourselves, this could add around another $1000 to the cost; this will be a separate proposal if needed.
- Discussion
- Ben found some content that would be awesome for this if we could get the permissions for it. Videos are timelapse of tides.
- We could also get Gus to make timelapses for this.
- Ben: I think it's awesome to have John as a resource (given his proven ability to make highly emotionally impactful music videos) and I don't think I should say we need to wait for me to do the editing, given that I'm not even working on my own music video right now.
- Vote: unanimous (Brandon will check with Shelley for possible veto)
Website TODOs
- Change <title> from "funnel" to something decent
- Move signup onto first page (no extra click required)
- Make it purty
Michael Dowd
- Eric proposes inviting Michael to an orientation session to be held during our next work bee call
- Brandon and Ben approve
Evaluation
- Brandon: enjoyed the call, feels like we are making progress, wish the audio/video was better
- Eric: enjoyed the call, I like the feeling of deciding on projects and doing them
- Ben: I'm hesitant about making these big decisions, and I don't like arguments, so talking about who should do our graphic design is difficult for me.
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