Hi Starchild (+activists list for thoughts from everyone)
Last year, we spend a good deal of time talking about getting more activism through the Board of Supervisors meetings. Now, half a year or so later, we haven't really made any headway on this. I'd like to revise our approach to this.
As of right now, we only have weekly recurring meetups to remind people that this is something we would like to see. However, I'm worried this is doing more harm than good. I would like to remove this meetup event and pursue some other approaches instead. The reason I say it could be harmful is that it clogs our calendar and makes it difficult for people to see things that would have a more broad appeal (like the Mises event yesterday, tabling at Pride, our panel discussion, etc). Most importantly, people in our group will get notifications about every one of these events (maybe multiple notifications) and it could lead to people ignoring these reminders or leaving our meetup group altogether (though I don't have evidence of this). It is certainly distracting to me, since I pay close attention to these but am unable to attend on Tuesday afternoons. Furthermore, I haven't seen a single event from this series with another RSVP. I am worried that if all our events show "1 person attended" this makes it look like we are much smaller than we are. I suggest removing it from the LPSF meetup group and GGLR as well, since it is ineffective.
Instead, I'd like to try some other approaches to highlight this. For starters, let's lead by example. If we want people to come and get their voices heard, we had ought to show them how exactly to do that. Speaking for myself, I've never been to a meeting and don't really know what to expect-- I can imagine it is intimidating for anyone. How about we pick one date in particular and try to show up en masse? The scheduling is still difficult, unfortunately, and I don't think it will be easy to get many people to come.
Second, let's start highlighting what is happening at the BoS meetings to make it clear why it helps to be there. I could imagine a regular report on the website of what the BoS is up to-- this would be useful to share at our meetings as well. I can work on this some, but would like someone dedicated to helping with it if we agree it's a good idea.
Finally, if we do think this is a valuable task, let's make a hard objective out of it and commit to attending X meetings a month. Speaking as an engineer, setting these kinds of goals is the only way to really ensure anything gets done. If we can't commit to this, then either it is not as high a priority as we thought or we need to come up with a strategy to reach that goal.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thanks,
Nick