07-12-2012 Meeting Minutes for Northern Wisconsin NORML

7-12-12 Meeting Minutes for Northern WI NORML

The meeting was called to order by Jay Selthofner at 5:40pm.

Roll Call for BOD: Present:
Rich, Jay, Jessie, Jason are all present – Brian is not present due to his work schedule, but checked in with Jay several times this week.
In addition, there are 4 regular members, and 7 new members present who have not attended meetings before.

No public comments

June Treasurer’s Report was given by Jay:
Beginning Balance: $550.96, contributions 947.83, Expenses $764.88, Ending Bal $801.18.

Jay asked that someone take on the rubber bracelet project. In the past we had purchased some bracelets that said “Marijuana is Medicine”. We have run out. We need someone to come up with some sayings, get some prices from different vendors, and present it at the next meeting so we can vote on it.

T-shirt Vendor project: We need someone to take on the project of screen printing and Tshirts. The screen printer that we had previously been working with is not able to take on our projects at this time. We need someone to create our screens and print our shirts. We need someone to take ownership of this project, who can get us “at cost” Tshirts for the chapter. Any leads at all, send them to the board. We don’t mind paying for shirts, but we would prefer to always hire a member, supporter, or patient whenever possible.

The Tshirt of the month idea: We have not received any new submissions for Tshirt ideas. So, we are going to back off of that right now, until we have more submissions coming in.

Jay has the Free Fishing Weekend survey, we will fill that out after the meeting.

We do have a quote on printing our Tri-Fold brochure and membership forms – we ask that all members and new attendees tonight please take a copy home and proof-read it,

We spent some time discussing the Activist Kits and Tshirts and the whys and wherefores and costs of things.

Jay turned the meeting over to Rich. Rich’s computer is down this week so Jay had created the notes and started the meeting.

Rich went over the Job Descriptions document and informed people of the different roles in our organization and the types of roles we need filled or just need additional help with.

A new attendee suggested that we should look into Native American Pow Wow’s as an opportunity to vend our shirts and other awareness materials.

Jay gave a brief overview of tabling 101 and event coordination.

Jay also discussed that we should be encouraging people who live far from Appleton to attend the hangouts and invite 5 friends over to their house to watch the hangout. Nox gave a brief overview of how google hangouts works for the new people.

A new member asked a question about what kinds of parades or events we participate in. Jay started by describing the Madison Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Fest. He gave a very brief breakdown of our medical marjuana movement in Wisconsin in the past few years. JRMMA, lobby day, publicity stunts, protests, etc.

Jay stated that the 4 areas of focus for our group are:
1. Organization
2. Fundraising
3. Public Education
4. Lobbying

What we need is specialists within our group that are going to make each area of focus their specialty. What does each member enjoy doing? How can they help with one of our four goals?

Tim, a new attendee, told us that he is from the Green Party and that they are in favor of all of the same policies that NORML is. He is from the Green Bay branch of the Green Party. He told us that the Green Party is having their convention this week. Jill Stein will probably be the presidential candidate for their party. He would like to leave some information for our chapter about Peace Day that they are holding in Green Bay in September. We informed him that we cannot endorse any particular candidate or party, but we are very glad hat he came to our meeting to inform our members. He informed us that he is following us on facebook and that is how he heard about our organization. He was impressed with our facebook and website and thinks we are doing a good job with our organization.

July 22nd is the Harvest Fest planning meeting in Madison – Jessie and Rich are going – contact Rich if you want to help!

Regarding the .net domain name and possible uses:
We had a discussion of the various possible uses of the .net domain name. This is a separate project and we would like ideas.

Jessie’s Ideas For the .net domain –
1. it could be a public forum where we post about our events and information, with some private forums for members and activists only. We could use something like Joomla, or PHPBB, or one of the many free / open source forum scripts that have been around forever and a day…
2. I think that we should have some kind of rideshare section for those planning on going to meetings regardless of what else we do with the site.
3. “Activist Tasks” – basically, where we write a series of blog posts / instructions / etc… and then activists can start at step 1 and work at their own pace to catch up to the rest of the group. for example, Task 1 for a brand new activist would be to “Like” us on facebook, and a list of all of our facebook pages, board members to “friend”, etc. Task 2 would be to join our feedburner email list and leave a comment on an article on our blog. Task 3 might be to open a digg account and follow the official chapter Digg account and to digg our submissions regularly. Task 4 might be to sign up for Twitter and and follow our official chapter twitter account, with instructions about how to set your account up to auto-tweet Northern WI NORML’s blog entries and get new followers. etc etc etc

One of the new members asked if we had heard of LEAP, and we all laughed and said yes. Jay gave a brief overview of his efforts on LEAP’s behalf, a bit about how the speakers work, and some general information.

Jay officially adjourned the meeting at 7pm.

The journalist who came to our meeting gave us his URL, http://wisconsinconfidential.blogspot.com/