The last community meeting - and moving forward

We had a nice turnout at the last community meeting for Wis.Community - perhaps the free beer and pizza helped. 

There was a lively discusison at the meeting, and there were a few clear ideas from the meeting:

• There was a strong interest in doing more government transparency work, particularly through videotapes of local government meetings. Although the meetings in Eau Claire are all video taped and shown at Valley media Works and the  Eau Claire community TV station, the meetings in Menomonie are not. The city has been interested in doing this but has no budget for it currently. We are going to make an attempt at doing some recordings of the school board and city council meetings in Menomonie, but we need to work out a volunteer staff to do this, and iron out some equipment issues.  In particular, these meeting rooms are particularly challenging due to layout and the way the meetings are conducted. There was an inital attempt at recording the last school board meeting. We will be trying to do more if possible. Consider these recordings an experiment. We may need to determine if there is an interest in continuing based on how often they are viewed.
• The general belief at the meeting was that an area where we can really contribute is by doing more outreach to under-covered communities in the area. There was a particular interest in doing more outreach to the Hmong community in the valley and to work on telling their story better. This is in the works. 
• We're starting to work more with Valley Media Works for the purpose of training and developing content. Some initial discussions are underway about doing a regular talk show to interview people of interest in the area.
• I've put up a survey  asking our readers what directions we should be taking in the future.