Meeting Notes

• TechComms Meeting notes 07/26/25
• TechComms Meeting Notes 08/04/2025
• Comms/Tech Meeting 09/09/2025
• Impromptou working session 8 may

TechComms Meeting notes 07/26/25

Attendance: LP, P, J----

Agenda

No agenda

Notes

What is the history of communications in space, challenges?

Mailing lists, moved to signal groups (30+ groups)

Groups are mixture of open/closed, some groups developed 2nd chats: Pantry/Pantry regulars, Kitchen/Kitchen 2

Operations chat

Comms issues:

Signal to noise
Shared culture
"Missability" / ease of missing notifications in groups
Discoverability / Invitationality / Lack of way-finding / sense of place

Mention of previous comms work being done by Ella/LP via operations group, inspired by Spanish squat with plaques per group.

Review of gym operations and culture

585 has no...
..bulletin board
..community chat
.."democratic" or aggregation-based broadcast system 

Issue: Information isolated in DMs

Interview groups re: comms problems, within group, with other groups, with greater org?

Why would groups want to talk to each other?

"Comms towards collective culture"

Desire to cultivate vibe sharing & a sense of care about other groups, even without involvement

Minimum set of projects/services to support RC

• Website
• Calendar
• Email
• Mailing-lists
• Donor platform
• Social media tech (registration, credentials, documentation, "workflow")
• Doc store (if only for core spokes functionality)

~~~

• Strategy
• Outside communication

What is actually needed in intra-group comms?

Website

• Explain the space
• Code of conduct
• Calendar
• Onboarding
• Group list / who uses the space / entry points

~~~

• Forms: General contact form, rental inquiries, issue reports (facilities, tech).

Calendar

• Rental booking
• Public event listing
• Program scheduling
• Meeting schedules

What does calendar represent? Main space, gym, basement?

Email

• Connection point for financial and contractual issues
• Variety of emails for specific functionality
• No personal emails

Transparency?
Hosting?

Domain

ridgewoodcommons.nyc 3/3 votes
commons.nyc - experimental staging and link shortening

Mailing Lists

• Rise-up
• Hosted via electric embers (https://electricembers.coop/services/sign-up/)

Donor platform

• Pact (open collective)
• Camraderie
• Patreon
• Withfriends

Donor strategy? Presence on many platforms with seasonal push to preferred platform? Single platform? Use of actual Patron features re: perks?

Social Media

As above, this group should be limited to tech aspects, not directly involved in content.

Doc Store

When is shared docs useful, when is it not?

Some obvious stronger intra-group comms, e.g. finance with rentals

Action items

TechComms Meeting Notes 08/04/2025

Agenda

Two streams of work

1. bootstrapping new space in a low-friction way that allow us to interface with each other and the outside world and continue to survive

2. transitioning culture and practices for the future

   • doing working group outreach to understands:
     • what is currently working for individuals / groups
     • what wants and needs exist
     • how disruptive and in what way potential changes would be
   • external outreach and research into alternative tools & infrastructure

Near-future needs:

• website
  • starting with a simpler static self-hosted site feels reasonable to me
• email & calendar
  • Vanessa set up a gmail account for email & calendar
• mailing list
• donor platform
• social media tech
• document store

Notes

• bookstack is totally public as it is. we had to redact contact info from the charters

• llama bought the .nyc domain

  • last meeting we talked about full domain for external facing and commons.nyc for experimental stating, link-shortening, and

• desire for semantic emails. info

• p cm: most pressing action items seem to me to be

  • static landing page (or just a linktree) and audience capture

    • mailing list

      • mvp could be just setting up subscribe@ridgewoodcommons.nyc

      • could be a simple as a mailto link on a linktree (but this could be confusing for less techy / younger people)

      • how many people are actually on the current mailing list?

        • there are many list and we don't know how many people are subbed and where they are or if they are paying any attention

        • we can use riseup for free, or pay electric embers- this would allow our org to create a bunch of WG- or task-specific email lists

        • micro: we need to disclose guarantees for any services we provide

        • LP willing to do due dilligence on mailing list providers

      • MVP is a mailtolink and/or contact form

    • social media

    • donors

    instagram annoucement: - dual post on IG between the WB and RC - next steps, set up business for IG-- gives us analytics api access which would let us use tooling like buffer, zapier etc - who even controls that account

    next action items:

    - lp: do due diligence on mailing list providers, write or collect blurbs for working groups
    
    - micro: set up landing page with links to
    
        - donation platform
    
        - email list signup
    
        - social links
    
        - blurb for public-facing working groups (question mark)
    
      - p cm: figure out current situation with domain, who owns the ig account, reach out to advisors on capturing social media, donors
    

Comms/Tech Meeting 09/09/2025

Impromptou working session 8 may

tech admin spent a few minutes figuring out what work we wanted to do

ended up on 'setup bookstack on wiki.rc.nyc and move our data to it' as a step

first is making a repo of the existing coop cloud .abra/servers config and cloning that
second is making a repo of the existing coop cloud .abra/recipes/bookstack recipe and clone that