[Bookstoprisoners] Conference meeting minutes

[Suzanne Linder]

Hello all--

I'm sending the minutes from our meeting on Thursday night to the whole list
because I know that there were some people who would have liked to attend
the meeting but weren't able.  Our next meeting will be Monday, June 25th at
7 pm at Jay and Suzanne's house.  Anyone is welcome to join us!

In attendance: Deb, Jay, Barbara, Max, Yvette, and Suzanne

We started out talking about needing to write a mission statement for the
conference.  Ideas we generated were to:


   - focus on the expressed needs of prison book projects
   - serve established groups and provide support for emerging groups
   - invigorate a network of people doing prison book projects

Suzanne agreed to write a draft mission statement to share with the group.

We discussed if there would be a charge for the conference and decided on a
$20 registration fee if people register by September 15 and $30 after that
date.  We will advertise that there are a limited number of spots in the
hopes to get people to commit to coming early (so we can have an idea of how
many participants we should expect).  We discussed providing one meal a day
to conference participants and that is what the registration fee will
primarily cover.  We also discussed advertising that we can guarantee free
housing to the first 50 people who register.

Suzanne agreed to contact Faith Swords to learn more about how they arranged
housing for the RFU barnraising and Barbara agreed to work on coordinating
housing for conference participants.

Jay suggested the we promote our conference at the US Social Forum and at
the upcoming American Library Association conference.  He agreed to create a
flier that people who are attending those conferences can print out and
distribute.

We discussed people's hopes for the conference:  Jay said he hoped that the
conference would created community, accomplish things that can't be done
over email, and be fun for the participants.  Deb said she wants to help
other organizations grow.  Yvette said that interpersonal communication and
connection is what she sees as the most important part of the conference.

We discussed having topic based round tables rather than panels both to make
organization easier (so far no one has stepped forward from the national
list to put together panels) and to encourage everyone to participate.  We
will also be looking for a lawyer who can present about how to handle
returns (books that prisons won't accept).  There is a lot more to be
discussed in terms of conference content.
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