NDSA:Outreach Meeting Minutes 03-11-13

Attendees: Deb Rossum, Heen Tibbo, Catherine Skinner, Carol Minton Morris (rec)

Discussion topic: Draft Guidelines for a "No Budget" NDSA News Bureau

INTRODUCTION The goal of an NDSA news bureau is to gather and push news out from NDSA working groups and member organizations to extended audiences that include member email lists and press contacts. An "no budget" NDSA news bureau will not be an NDSA news repository, archive, serial publication or web site, but rather will serve as a dynamic distribution hub for short news items with annotated pointers to content residing elsewhere on an ad hoc basis. Two key inter-related efforts are required to launch an NDSA news bureau are 1) workflow and methods for gathering content from NDSA working groups and member organizations and 2) workflow and methods for editing, packaging, redistribution.

This draft document lays out suggested steps and roles for the NDSA Outreach Working Group to launch a "No Budget", lightweight, NDSA News Bureau.

CONTENT

Acceptable content Small documents and content One-pagers, primarily current news items–appropriate to be sent via email Short press releases Annotated links to content

Non-acceptable content Large or complicated white papers, proposals, articles or reports Data sets Media files Digital collections

Format Text and PDF files accepted

NDSA WORKFLOW

Who's involved? NDSA Outreach Bureau Chief NDSA Outreach Editor 1 NDSA Outreach Editor 2

Review Item meets guidelines and is received by Bureau Chief Item is sent to editor 1 or 2 for editing and packaging into ---NDSA News Bureau templates for press release or small news items Item is reviewed by Bureau Chief Item is scheduled for distribution Items is distributed

Distribution NDSA list with request to reflect out further Press list email list social media: twitter, Facebook and other channels that NDSA members are already members of

TIMING AND FREQUENCY Items will be released when review and packaging is complete on an ad hoc basis

---

Discussion

This is a reasonable plan Even this reduced NDSA News Bureau scope may be too much for OWG to take on If roles were divided among several people it might be possible This approach would require additional meetings and coordination among people who would be sharing news gathering and evaluation roles Educopia is trying to identify how to promote similar kinds of information (internal NDSA and member organizations) to strengthen the collaborative environment Big question is how or if an activity like this would align with individual member organization objectives which would allow for greater participation Some level of interest, although it gets difficult to commit when real work is involved

2-fold communication mission

Evaluate what NDSA has accomplished and describe for external dissemination Reflect out member organization news On one hand the commitment is light; on the other hand might inspire more work

Roadblocks

Politics involved If we undertake something like this in the name of NDSA to what degree do we have to be aware of politics? Time commitment in coming out with balanced stories and balanced coverage of member organizations More time consuming than most OWG members can take on We do have [1]; NDSA could have a presence there; something that people can add content to

How can we use the DigitalCurationExchange channel?

A team (or teams) of students could work together on this type of activity (Kim Shroeder)--call to NDSA programs from NDSA OWG

Actions

Coordinating Comm is meeting next week; possible topic Carol to tweet out NDSA News Bureau link for more feedback.