General Meeting Minutes: Sunday, May 15, 2005

With nine in attendance: Ashar, Alexander, Bob, Byron, Catherine, Chris B, John, Possum, Sandra.

Minutes taken by John Gilbert 416-481.5668 (godhas4legs@allstream.net OR AnarchistUniversityOn_ca@allstream.net)

Agenda:

Class proposal by Catherine in her field of Immunology, Microbiology and Bioethics. Her course will explore the related HIV virus, Ebola, Marburg and others. Keeping classes lively and not technical, she will have handouts and the study sources will be web references instead of book reading lists. Soon Catherine will add a few more detail or maybe she will update these minutes which can help visitors to AnarchistU's website see that her course is interesting. Come to the next general meeting to get a copy of her formal submission brief when her course will presumably be ratified by AnarchistU.

Discussed at the meeting:

opinions about AnarchistU's website:

• Should we totally redesign the website? We spent five or ten minutes on this question. I think it was Possum who said "There's always ways to improve it."

• Should the website have a calendar for the courses. The consensus seemed to be - yes.

• Should there be an intro on the website for those not familiar with AnarchistU? I don't remember it as being a strong discussion. If a few of us were to compose an intro, I think that the others would help refine it. Others may say "An intro, what the fuck for?". Googling - "Free University" OR "Free School" will show if others are using intros, and if so, which intros are crispy and how the intro encourages the viewer to continue reading.

• Should there be a message board, which would be our innaugeral emergence from our little enclosed Toronto bubble to become interactive? As we are now, the subscript is "Listen to us but no backtalk please". Do we want to interact with anarchist groups elsewhere? Does AnarchistU want it's members to have a transparent place to share ideas and combine the use of our brains as a hive-mind or is one brain better than the collective brain? Would it also help us get to know each other better ifwe talked to each other online collectively and transparently via our website? Is the medium the message - is the interactive website the anarchist? When we vote about having a message board, there are those far far away who love us and want to do things to help us, but they can't vote for a message board at a general meeting because they don't live in Toronto. Maybe their exclusion makes them have paranoid thoughts causing them to have false visions that the Toronto anarchistU folk in Hogtown want to be their hierarchical leaders in the geographic isolation sense.

• Should those who wish to promote AnarchistU have access to the complete inbox for info@anarchistu so that they can scan all the Senders and select specific inquiries that reflect an overlapping experience, and reply with a welcoming and persuasive message that might begin to convert the inquiring persons into permanent active participants of AnarchistU. (We lost an eager new person who came to a general meeting, but won't be coming back because he says he was snubbed. You can foster new AnarchistU leadership with new members or you can take a protective attitude of the wise oldguard and smugly roll your eyes when the new guest bubbles over in their excitement of having discovered that AnarchistU is a place that he wants to call home.+...sad, ...goodbye Dave, we hardly knew ye.) (Dave: lostcount@gmail.com .) Is it possible that Dave's idea was snubbed by those without enough Internet experience or vision, rather than Dave himself? Possum generously reminded privately that just because the subject of message boards was turned away at previous meetings, doesn't mean it can't be reopened. These rough edges that develope between members are very unfortunate, but there is a way to help resolve issues when mature non-flaming debaters can't do it face to face - without any input from members at a general meeting, an independant AnarchistU website may spring up as a work-around solution for frustrated communicators who want to think globally and act locally, and if so, no one would allow for a new separate URL to become a place to take cheap shots at the Mother Group (when 50 % of marriages end in divorce, nobody says this is going to be easy). These are the minutes of the meeting, but without recourse to a messaging system to the membership, some lattitude is allowed those acting as takers of the minutes, until an alternative becomes available.

• Should we have an AnarchistU telephone number on flyers and on the website. Currently those without e-mail are ex-communicated.

• Should we move the website page which displays posters for promoting AnarchistU. Should we delete the phrase "make your own posters" because we expect that it goes without saying. (<---the minutes taker may have gotten the former question wrong?)

• Possum said that we can add an anarchist related link to the website's list of links, by submitting the URL or wiki edit your link addition yourself.

• Potential course proposal facilitators can ask AnarchistU to post their idea and phone number on the website so that potential course facilitators can receive inquiries and suggestions from website visitors - a pre-promo as it were.

NEXT GENERAL MEETING:

7:00 PM, June 5 2005, Uprising Books, 168 Baldwin -- FEEDBACK - We want YOU to tell us if you can come to

none of the AnarchistU meetings if they are always held at 6:00 PM Sunday evenings. Also tell us if you can only come to about half of the meetings if they are always held at 6:00 PM Sunday evenings.

NO FEEDBACK - NO CHANGES - NO ACTIVISTS