Notes of DissConnected brainstorm meeting, 29th Feb. 2008 at Les Amandines.

: Gary Alexander, Mark Bishop, Dom Jarvis, Geoff Dixon, Stephen Gordon, Jasmine Rivett, Madeline Lees, Sally Wilson, Sue Woollcott,

: Jon Chambers, Nick Farrow, Vivienne Weeks, Jane Trippett-Jones, Jane Taylor, Adrian Roy, Geoffrey Leigh, Tim Holt-Wilson

1. Everyone present introduced themselves.

2. Gary gave a short talk, outlining the DissConnected project and the reasons for it. Some key points were:

• Connected Communities are a social structure in which people in a community support each other using communications technology as infrastructure.
• Main activities: social events (largely based around food and local food) and an exchange featuring both free and paid exchange.
• The website is there for support and communication, but the real project is the interaction between people
• To maintain stability and effectiveness a culture of empathy, able to handle conflicts creatively needs to be created.
• A real, not just token, green initiative, that could be a prototype for others.

3. Mark Bishop ran a brainstorming session “to start to get the ideas out of Gary’s head and into practice”. Some of the key points made were:

• We should go for ‘low-hanging fruit’, i.e. easy starting points. For example: listings of events by other groups, listing of farmers markets and their traders and other local food sources
• The importance of simple, easily understandable first steps: i.e. meetings at which people exchange garden vegetables
• Creating a village network, linking the surrounding villages (say 10 miles radius) to Diss
• A physical notice board in the Market Place with DissConnected notices to bring it to public attention, plus a newsletter-like publication place on various notice boards around the town and in the villages
• We should work towards a big public launch, probably in June.
• The need for ‘brand recognition’: people need to recognise DissConnected.
• A marketing campaign starting with finding out what people want. Surveys and questionaires.
• A ‘sprint’ (short intensive group effort) to create content for the website, probably early April.

• market research (led by Geoff),
• an initial database of information about surrounding villages (Stephen)
• a social sprint gathering content such as venues and events, local food sources to put on the website
• a critique of the website by a sub-group

This will be brought to the next meeting.

5. We agreed to form a Steering Group for the project and all present wanted to be part of it. Everyone volunteered to make some contribution to the project. (This list is probably not accurate.)

• Marketing: Geoff, Gary
• Village network: Stephen
• Events listings: Sue, Madeline, Jasmine
• Website critique group: Gary, Stephen, Jaz, Dom, Jon (in his absence, volunteered by Jaz), Geoff, (probably others too)

All to create accounts on DissConnected.net, try creating some content (ex. their own page) and consider the strengths and weaknesses of the website.