User group meeting & agenda 9 December 2008

= Proposing ideas for this agenda =

To propose or discuss ideas for this agenda, please use the Discussion tab above. As the meeting draws near, we will review the items proposed on the Discussions page and decide which ones should get highest priority on the agenda.

= Agenda =

Administrative items

 * 1) Assignment of time keeper and note taker
 * 2) Introduction of new members: 10 seconds for name and desired takeaways.
 * 3) Prayer --
 * 4) Review of Minutes
 * 5) Today's agenda preview

Information items

 * Interest in partnering with Kentucky Technology in Genealogy group (see Lise Embley's email to Mollie Forbes, and comment on Discussion Page).

New Items

 * 1) Research Wiki User Group Evaluation  * What is working well with our Research Wiki User Group meetings?   * What isn't working well - what can we do to improve?   * Should we be looking to increase our numbers?   * If so, how?
 * 2) Research Wiki Evaluation  * What is working well - what do I like about this wiki?   * Is the wiki helping people find their ancestors?   * What isn't working well - what don't I like about it - how can we improve it?   * What is keeping people from finding their ancestors?   * How can we increase the number of people using the wiki?   * What can we do to encourage content growth and contributors?

= Minutes =

Facilitator was Jim Greene, Note taker was Jimmy Parker, Time keeper was --.

Prayer by Darris Williams

This week, there are now [#] registered users of the FamilySearch Wiki. That is an increase of [#] new registered users over the last week.

Attendees
Jim Greene, Darris Williams, Stephen Bobowski, Diane Loosle, David Samuelson, Sister Felsted, Jimmy Parker, Alan Mann, Don Stringham, Baerbel Johnson, Kip Enger, David Crowther

Remote Attendees
(Anne Roach), (Jim Greene), Lise Embley, Thomas Lerman, (Mollie Forbes)

Items Discussed

 * The minutes from last week were briefly reviewed. The Action Items from last week will be carried over to next week.
 * Jim Greene gave a brief report on the latest sprint (#10), which ends tomorrow. He indicated that in some ways this sprint was a disaster, although in a way, it will prevent some future disasters. Some of the Project Team went to a users group meeting for Semantic Media Wiki, recently held in Boston. It was learned that this tool has been and is being written by computer "geeks" who care little about usability. It does not work with the FCK editor being used for our Wiki. So, a decision was made to put its use as a search engine in the Research Wiki on hold and to use the current search engine for our release FamilySearch. The sprint was also impacted by the Thanksgiving holiday and by personal leave which must be taken by some of the staff before the end of the year.

Action Items

 * For next week's meeting, a demonstration on how to flag and article and how to explain why that page was flagged will be made by Michael Ritchey.
 * For next week's meeting, good and bad examples of the use of religious images could be presented by Michael Ritchey.
 * Kip Enger will invite Mark to next week's meeting.