Meeting Notes

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
bootstrapping new space in a low-friction way that allow us to interface with each other and the outside world and continue to survive
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
Agenda
MVP for Launch
website 
static page on existing heztner account
just use namecheap for hosting
TODO: @p set up namecheap hosting with @llama
list serve
deprioritize for other pressing things like IG, cal.red, other stuff
TODO: @p email riseup today and see if you can get a list
password manager
i created an account on bitwarden
TODO: @p can @llama add the account credentials that have control over the ridgewoodcommons.nyc domain
TODO: @p onboard others to the bitwarden
calendar
TODO: @p create a filtered version of the ical output
donor platforms
withfriends
patreon
TODO: @LP photo deliverables
TODO: @LP withfriends event management research
social media
we still need to talk about how they're going to be managed
google account
deal with this in the near future
note that our gmail account is used for more than email-- calendar
TODO: @p change recovery addresses away from gmail
wiki migration off woodbine.nyc
TODO: do we need to preserve 
TODO: send out bitwarden creds
finance software updates
- invoice ninja doesn't seem geared towards 
Spokescouncil Proposals
community announcements: FA that adds individual w/ their affiliations

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