ACTIVITY REPORT

Civic.Asgardia Management Meeting SUN 15 JAN 2017

Civic.Asgardia is an officially-endorsed volunteer organization that provides an administrative infrastructure to manage the many volunteers and civil projects of the developing Asgardia micronation. We provide organizational support to the community and encourage unified standards of content and behavior. Senior Staff meet weekly to discuss the needs of the community, to coordinate volunteer activities, and to provide feedback to Asgardia Officials.

Attending: Rebekah Berg, Cheyenne Voss, Christina Cole, Dominic Sturt, Oriane Kaesmann, Nikari Steve MIller.

General Updates. Discussed translations of Dr. Ashurbeyli’s January video address. Volunteer translations are proceeding well. 70 volunteer translators participate in that team with a strong focus on cross-Chapter translation, training documentation, and public release of official addresses.

Staffing. Training material for Cultural Sensitivity and Professionalism being planned. Shane Watt and Alan Player end probation and are promoted to Moderators of Facebook General, Facebook Fun, Forum General, Forum Education and another forum of their choice. We congratulate Christina Cole on resuming her studies at university. She will focus her volunteering on Asgardia’s U.S. Chapter. She will remain available to train team leads for the Translation area. Alex Fiume resigned his position as Moderation Supervisor. We appreciate his contributions to organizing Facebook groups, training moderation staff, and many other talents that he shared in helping to begin the civic support of Asgardia.Space. Active moderation staff was identified. Jason Rainbow, Zahira Yahyaoui, and Monir Zaman are very responsive and pro-active.

Forums. More help needed in Constitution this week. Voted to shift all moderation staff from Interest Group to the Global Moderation group. This allows far more flexibility to manage ad-hoc issues at any time of day. Concern was voiced about the need for social media channels to support Persian, Arabic and other languages which need script written right-to-left.

Facebook. Response to forums is lower than anticipated. There is discussion about re-opening select Facebook groups as the forums are under review. A richer feature set is being tested to improve member engagement in the Forums.

Chapters. During the first quarter of the year, increased focus will be given to the National Chapters with training, staffing, and coordination. More advocate engagement is needed.

Official Updates. Business planning is nearing completion. The official team is very busy with scientific and business development.

Department Roundtable (Status, Updates, Issues)

Scores of applications were received from members to become Moderators in our social media area. Intake and screening of the applicants continues; they are vetted but many are unable to pass the English reading comprehension assessment. Interviews are being set up. This week two moderators are coming into live-training and six applicants are being processed Among the applicants are also candidates for administrative assistants and translation positions.

The second edition of the Moderation Guide is almost finished. Integration of the new Code of Conduct is complete. Staff discussed benefits of translating the manual for non-English moderation volunteers. Languages under consideration are Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese.

Translations are going well. They are seeing more use of Google Docs for collaborative, real-time processing of localising documents. Reliable translators are being identified. There was discussion of different dialects of Japanese, Italian and Arabic.

Law forums are doing well, things are stable. Awaiting official posts about constitutional issues and policies.

The Administrative Affairs forum is being underutilized. We plan to use it share activity reports that inform members of volunteer activities and projects. This will increase transparency and enable constructive feedback.

Note to members: Any Asgardia member is able to welcome to help organize our community. We have positions available for volunteers with experience in forum moderation, office administration, volunteer coordination, localisation/translation, project management, and other areas. Applicants are screened and expected to meet the requirements of a position description.

Respectfully submitted,
Rebekah Berg, Lead Community Administrator
Nikari Steve Miller, Administrative Coordinator

Thanks Nikari for posting this. This kind of update report really gave me the feel of where we're at in the process. I can imagine the stress level that everyone experiences when other Asgardians continue to ask questions regarding certificates, and updates, when just a little searching in the forums will provide their answers. Thanks again for everything you and the teams are doing to keep us informed.

One humanity, one unity! Leo

@Nikari, it would be interesting to include the status of the IT group to keep us informed of the issue.

It is something that we are very worried about and we have very little information nowadays.

I guess it will be good to share this kind of reports on Google Docs for translate. As you know many people did not check all topics but sure they check all topics on their country forum. we can translate and share all reports on our country forums.

Sultanovich, we are improving feedback between our staff and the AIRC IT department, especially regarding progress on Forum development. We will keep people updated. For now, we have a better process set up to make sure that IT regularly gets a prioritized list of feature requests and bugs each week. Their team works on many systems; our forum is not their only project... but we do try to help them tune things.

Ozgun, I was thinking that, also. The Forum gave me attitude when I tried to upload a PDF of the report. Pasting it in lost much formatting, such as bullet points. I may try a view-only link to a GoogleDoc this week.

Thanks for your input.

@Nikari, if we could contact or help the IT team then they would not be so overworked.

I would appreciate it if you would take a moment to think about this comment.

how do you find other Asgardian citizens in your community , to help further the effort and for friendship ?

Currently, you don't.

However there are geographically relevant sections. If you'd open a thread up in your local region's section maybe interested parties will post to it.

Agreed with  Ozgun (Asgardian, Translator) .

I could do the Chinese mandarin translation and share that on Chinese forum.