Meeting secretary: no one officially (notes below by Bob Doyle)
Date: August 3, 2006 Time: 9am EDT - 10:15 EDT
Attendees: Rahel Bailie, Mollye Barrett, Bob Doyle, Mary Laplante (Board), Laura Walker
Absent: Theresa Regli, Janus Boye

A new version of the Strategic Plan was reviewed.

The current Strategic Plan refers to seven major objectives:

• Knowledge Resources - especially Best Practices
• Improving on the Mailing list - perhaps with a member blog
• Developing the Member Directory to improve access to Mentors and Experts
• Better member networking - improve Member Profiles
• Overviews of CMS Systems (CMSML project)
• Resource Library and Glossary
• Publications, especially a Content Management Lifecycle Poster

The new version identifies critical success factors, actions, key performance indicators and quantitative measurements for the Communications, Knowledge Resources, Marketing, and Member Relations areas.

Quantitative measurements include - number of posts of new material to the website, number of published press releases (we have had none since April), and feedback from volunteers to the MC Directors who lead their efforts.

Once the Board approves this new Strategic Plan, it will be published to the website.

Laura described Summit Program development being led by Scott Abel, Mary Laplante, herself, and Summit Coordinator David Pearson. Pearson's work has not been shared with Communications and Marketing Directors. Laura explained that other people in the Massachusetts Community are helping in the development of the program and that they are not ready to share their work widely. She said sometimes it's best to leave things to be done by a small group and expects the Call for Papers will go out next week. Rahel and Mollye asked that they be included in the loop, at least to keep them informed so they can do their jobs, if not in the comment and criticism loop. Mollye asked if information could be posted to the web somewhere, so she could see it. Laura said there is a Summit workspace and will point to it.

Laura said she would prepare a summary for the MC of the Summit decisions already made. She hopes the Summit Planning might be more transparent.

Mary Laplante said there are regular weekly meetings on the Summit on Monday afternoons. Since the Summit is the Monday after Thanksgiving it should be short, sweet, snappy, and local. She does not expect attendees from outside the Boston area and says the event will be marketed heavily to the Boston Community, contacting STC, etc.

Rahel proposed we develop communications channels to our different audiences - consultants, practitioners, vendors.

Mollye asked for copies of renewal reminders. She said the August Newsletter request for stories would go out shortly.

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Meeting secretary: Theresa Regli, Knowledge Resources Director
Date: June 21, 2006 Time: 11am EST - Noon EST
Attendees: Theresa Regli, Bob Doyle, Laura Walker
Absent: Rahel Bailie, Mollye Barrett, Janus Boye

Last week’s mgmt committee meeting was a discussion between myself and Bob Doyle (and briefly, Laura) about the KR section of the site. Now that I have a job that allows a lot more flexibility in my schedule I have been able to take some time to look at the KR section and have some ideas to make it more sustainable. Generally the themes of my discussion with Bob and Laura were:

* We need to make realistic commitments
* We need to “recharacterize” what makes sense to contribute to KR
* Best Practices creation should not be an attempt for us to establish industry standards – rather, it would make more sense for us to, say, link to everything that has been written about a given topic
* Need to think about intellectual property policy – many people will not contribute or publish a proprietary methodology, so would it make more sense to really make the KR section member-driven (bottom-up) rather than top down?

Recommendations:

* Keep newsletter as is
* Determine volunteer to own & update glossary
* Have an online forum in the KR section, rather than the email list (make the email list a summary of forum topics that people can click to get into). This would bring more traffic to the web site.
* Re-introduce best practices as a collection of links to expert opinions on BPs, and enable community commentary, input as part of the forum.
* Along the theme of “realistic commitments,” there is no commitment in this fifth bullet

Thoughts?

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Theresa Regli | Principal, CMS Watch

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Meeting secretary: Scott Abel, Vice President, CM Pros
Date: May 9, 2006 Time: 11am EST - Noon EST
Attendees: Janus Boye, Heather Hedden, Scott Abel
Absent: Laura Walker, Rahel Bailie, Mollye Barrett, Bob Doyle, Theresa Regli

Agenda:
- Identify near-term priorities
- Establish 2006 goals by quarter
- Identify volunteer needs, by role
- Formalize 2006 Program of Work

Actions taken:
A quorum was not present. No official actions were taken. All agenda items to be moved to next meeting.

Discussion:
The following issues were identified during a discussion period:
- The need for strong management and oversight of the management committee
- The lack of leadership
- The need for a formal definition of each role and how various roles interact/relate to one another
- The need for a MC meeting date selection process that allows everyone who wants to to participate
- The lack of information available about the Next Generation website (progress, deadlines, deliverables)
- The need for a single point of contact to report progress of the team to the MC
- The need for a team of content creators whose role is to develop/maintain content on the current website
- The need for someone to coordinate our many smart, capable volunteers
- The need for a process for sharing information between MC roles -- Member Relations, Communication, Marketing, etc.
- Clear communication channels and repeatable processes or sharing information
- e.g. Discounts to conferences are member benefits, but they are also fodder for newsletter, marketing vehicles

Action items:
- Heather will organize face-to-face meeting at upcoming indexing event in Toronto
- Needs:
- Copy of CM Pros flyer
- Help publicizing the event through CM Pros marketing and communication vehicles
- Janus will promote CM Pros to German attendees at upcoming conference

Notices & Announcements:
- Heather Hedden announced her resignation from the MC
- Heather did agree to continue working on the indexing of the website with the help of volunteers
- Need to determine which MC member manages this role

Next Meeting: TBA

Scott Abel, Vice President
Content Management Professionals
vicepresident@cmpros.org

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Attending today: Rahel Anne Bailie, Janus Boye, Bob Doyle, Erik Hartman, Heather Hedden, Theresa Regli, Laura Walker

Quick review of the agenda (Laura Walker)

Focus on the future

Creating a couple of bullets for each committee, establishing some goals to work towards, not necessarily deliverables

What’s been identified as goals, are they still relevant or beyond our capabilites?

Have to rely on voluntary workforce – very challenging, be mindful of that

Establish goals that are realistic and practical

Identify goals of previous management committee

Reviewed president’s report to look at goals from last year, need to determine what’s still relevant

Erik said member’s directory is a key tool for the new strategy

Member survey, member relations, member directory, discounts, coordination of volunteers

Coordinator for volunteers is Dorine, Heather will support

Knowledge Resources

Struggle with population of knowledge resources

Ideas around what to do with this area

Other ways to archive and create content for this area

Save threads of the CM list and put that on the site

Moderate a blog? Wiki? Listserv archive?

Sort by category – Benelux community is already doing some of this stuff

Erik to share with team

Need a plan for this area to “maintain itself” with user contributions

New posts on the blog done by whomever wishes to add on

Not really our role to “define” what’s right – rather, promote the community discussion and debate

Marketing

Gotten people to help out on the volunteer side, working on that

Very busy like the rest of us

Growth and publicity is the key theme

Dedicating weekend to helping out with CM Pros

Areas of contribution

Publicity news releases

Keeping things in the public eye – having a reason once a week to send out a news release

Formal collateral packet?

Would be easier to market if we could enhance the site? If some things on the site were fixed, it would be easier to market

Area with the most demand for tactical action

Bob – Infrastructure

Resource Library - there are a whole bunch of them that are of interest, how can we correct the problem of people not finding them?
Bob volunteers to add anything that’s worth reading

Open to suggestions on what can be better

Thinks the member directory is great

Idea to add member profiles to enhance the directory. - Profile editor hasn’t made a lot of progress. Scott Abel adding Profiles by hand.

We post links on the home page to good list threads – can already archive, [need a volunteer to edit threads and make them work, but need a volunteer to edit the threads?] – tried this a few years ago but it didn’t get a lot of traffic. How can we make this more “findable”?

Glossary – 250 terms, now syndicated out to 2 or 3 other places.

Beginning a translation program. Website navigation first.

Executive Director

Laura pointed out the necessity that we need to be editors of our own sections

Concern that CM Pros not likely to create intellectual property.

Next steps: set regular time for management meeting every 2 to 3 weeks

Update committee charters

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Attending today: Rahel Anne Bailie, Janus Boye, Bob Doyle, Heather Hedden

Participants discussed ways to bring value to members and grow the membership:
- build the knowledge base
- getting the initial "big push" through use of grad students
- getting media passes to conferences to write articles (we should run this by the board in case it has charter implications)

- mine other sites for articles
- connect with other communities
- Janus to offer CM Pros memberships to the CN Forum members
- Bob to leverage Janus' offer by talking to the CM organization in Japan
- create more networking opportunities

Suggestion was to reschedule the meeting when more members can attend. Other agenda items were deferred to the rescheduled meeting.

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Attending today: Scott Abel, Bob Doyle. Note: the regular meeting for September 21 was cancelled.

Laura Walker sent an email with recaps of ED work

- 3 new chapters news release going out 10/6
- Summit program news release going out 10/10
- Summit program finalized and published; collecting bio info. will update site and send detailed program to cmpros@ 10/10
- Webinars - waiting for Magan to get back to me on topics & dates (week of 10/10). everything else (incl. news release) is ready to go.
- record-breaking 52 new members in September. Yeehah! [may include some renewals?]

Action items

Summit Agendas from all MC members for committee meetings on Tuesday 29 November.
Newsletter: Someone to write a feature article for newsletter & solicit other members for contributions. We need a newsletter BEFORE the Summit!
Sponsors for the Summit
Personalization of CM Pros home page. Discuss at Summit.
Architecture for Chapter subsites

Scott Abel suggestions

Create a volunteers@cmprofessionals.org mail forwarding address.
Send notes to volunteers with easy things for them to do, promote CM Pros at events, pass out buttons, print out PDFs and circulate them, etc.
A syndicated web service of the Resource Library contents that could appear on member sites, as we now can do with the Glossary.
A message at bottom of Glossary entries - how to add your terms and definitions to the Glossary.
A Search the Glossary tool, which also could appear as a syndicated widget.
Sponsorships needs a landing page that explains how to send you payment, with a link to the shopping cart.
Scott can make small variation on our existing CM Pros logo as needed.

Bob Doyle reminders of earlier actions

Member Speaking Engagements Form.
CM Pros Calendar with XML suitable for chapters, collaborating organizations.
Member Profile Editor (metadata to improve Member Direcory).
CMS Overview page. (CMSML)
CM Pros Poster.
Resource Library additions.
Glossary additions.
Newsletter Mailing tool.
Renewals Management tools.
Press Releases Blog (we have both a web page and a blog version).
Member Sites with CM Pros Logos on home page.
Member Survey analysis (now 85 submissions).
CM Pros Bookshelf (with links to Amazon affiliate program for CM Pros).
Policies and Procedures (Wayne Glover).
More website content contributors and content ownership.

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Attending today: Scott Abel, Bob Doyle, Christine Pierpont, Theresa Regli, Laura Walker

Action Items

Scott and Bob will research XML Calendar options to extend the current CM Pros Calendar (now syndicated from CMS Review) to include other organizations events, specifically STC. This will extend recognition of CM Pros. XML press release technologies are NewsML and RSS (Prism now outdated?)

The Press Releases blog that was opposed by some many months ago should be revisited. Please look at http://www.cmprosold.org/press/blog.html. It can already do RSS, and may satisfy Scott's needs.

Laura will ask all members to tell us where and when they have speaking engagements. We will add their presentations to our calendar and ask them to use a CM Pros info slide at the end of their talk. Laura will create a draft of that slide. Theresa's Seybold talks are already in Calendar. We could add her workshops?

Scott and Laura will assemble a spreadsheet on these presentations and events to follow up in future years.

Members with links to CM Pros will get a tiny hyperlink to their site in lower right of CM Pros home page. This will improve their Search Engine rankings. If more members add our logo, it will improve our rankings.

Laura will share responses from new members to her three feedback questions (by cc to the MC and to the membership@cmprofessionals.org mailbox).

Member Survey should be examined for similar marketing info, and reevaluated for another attempt to survey all members. Little use was made of the existing survey. Only question 5 was analyzed by Ann and Erik for the Board priorities, policies, procedures discussions (which fizzled out). So we should not invent a new wheel until we try to make use of the the existing survey, which auto analyzes new data added incrementally. We could fine tune the questions.
https://www.cmprosold.org/membership/survey/

Summit publicity - next week, Laura and Scott

Bob will train Christine to enter resources into the Resource Library. Bob and Christine will work through Theresa's list of websites, with comments prepared by her deputy.

Bob, Christine, Theresa's deputy, other volunteers? will look through the Glossary and identify the few dozen entries with inadequate definitions. We need to divide this work up. e.g., Christine A-M, Bob N-Z, or more divisions if volunteers. The deputy, others, and/or Bob will draft new definitions by end of September.

A new CM Pros Bookshelf page will feature pictures and comments about critical books, with links to Amazon that exploit our Amazon Affiliate program to get commissions on sales. Scott says a general Amazon link on the page may earn us commissions on other Amazon purchases by our members.

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