February 28th, 2016 Regional Meeting
Held at Somerville Public Library. Jamie, Noe, and Steve attending.
Somerville Pirates will start holding monthly meetings. 2nd Wednesday of the month at the Blue Shirt Cafe.
We have roughly 8 weeks to get candidates on the ballot for 2016. This will be a priority over the next two months. We have a list of people who've expressed interest in running for office. We'll try to get in touch with each one personally, either via phone or email.
We discussed some of the Sec. of Commonwealth's policies on voter registration, and on political designations. Jamie recounted an experience where MA's Elections Division would not permit two designations to merge. We joked at how easy a merge would be at a database level:
update voter_registration set affiliation = 'G' where affiliation = 'J';
We were curious about the commonwealth's voter registration database. So, we'll send a them a public records request (for user manuals, training material, etc).
We'd like to post a statement on proposed changes to MA public records law (aka S.2120). Steve will work on this. The Senate bill is better than the house. Should talk about good points in the senate bill, and note what could be better.
We should probably write a couple of position statement on the FBI/iPhone case. Will ask for volunteers to write.
We've been asked to participate in an GMO opposition event. Probably in ~ 3 weeks.
We discussed Arlington's proposed anti-camping bylaw. Steve plans to file a substitute motion, if the current version goes before town meeting.
CiviCRM TODO task: deprecate tags in favor of the "interested in" field.
Survey for PirateCon 2016 is nearly done. Will need some testing before we ask people to participate.
This year, we'd like to stream video of PirateCon 2016. We'd prefer to put the camera in the middle of the audience, while taking audio feeds from the PA system. This will require a couple of direct boxes and long XLR microphone cables. Desired arrangement
- Tap audio from the mixer to one laptop, for dedicated audio recording
- Send copy of audio to camera for video recording
- Digital output of camera -> laptop for video streaming. Camera or laptop also records video for later editing/posting.
We'll have to figure out which streaming service to use. It might be icecast, UStream, or something else. As a point of reference, HOPE X used https://livestream.com/ for streaming.
We'd like to organize a pirate meetup at Hope XI.
