The Employee & H9 Meeting Notes: August 16, 2022

Hi Josh!

Thanks again for the meeting yesterday. Please find below our meeting notes from August 16, 2022. Hope this is helpful. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

Talk soon,

mark

Email archive

• Josh: I’ve received confirmations and some rejections from most people (minor refusals so far). The original email had a signature in it that stated the emails might be collected for a project.

• Redaction / re-download in same format 

• Josh: Emails will all be on the website, not in the publication, and the website will be just the emails.

• Josh: I was thinking of a homepage that’s a timeline that’s designed like a subway map. The email archive starts with project framing. The first emails are between me and the director at FCG. It grows and progresses from there. 

• Farah: Louis and I will have to talk about the subway map idea and how it could work. Are you open to other ideas?

• Josh: Yes.

• Farah: Basically at the end of the day this will be a 1-page website.

• Josh: It’s important that it’s chronological for its narrative structure. It also has to tell the story so that each conversation collects visually into the project tree, but it can also be read individually. 

• Farah: In the development of it, we’ll have to see how we connect all the stations in that way. It’s not possible to build something that’s so automated yet. It might require a coding language that we don’t have at the moment. 

• Josh: Thinking about distinguishing the conversations, which is why I’m thinking of a subway map with different colours.

• Farah: How many separate conversations are there though?

• Josh: It could make sense to separate some by organization (i.e., there’s three people at a funding office who all use the same email address)

• Josh: Fundamentally, it should be chronological, starting in 2018. 

• Farah: Are there ever moments where different conversations are mixing together?

• Josh: No. For hiring applicants, there are separate conversations where I’m writing to Terese, and then I’m writing to Matt and Teresa. Camille will have to have one of her own lines. There are very few situations where the lines will cross

• Josh: I don’t want it to look like a mind map

• Farah: How important is it to the reader that it is always clear which conversation they’re looking at? Are we going for clarity? Or are we going for “there is so much” content?

• Josh: Option 1

• Josh: Each string on emails tells a story. There are all these personal stories of burnout/crisis. I feel like there should be an awareness of the massive amount of work. But being able to tell these stories in the correspondences is really important. 

Dev Questions for Josh:

• Where are the emails currently hosted? (An easy thing with Gmail is to export, export everything, and then decode it with a code)

• Josh: I think redaction should be done manually by me. There are specific things outside of addresses. I’m just worried about people who haven’t consented yet. 

• Confirming: we’re not adding any new emails, yes?

• Josh: Correct. No new emails after launch. The cut-off will likely be close to publication. Officially, the project is over. 

• How will the emails be accessed by the viewer?

• Farah: pngs or jpegs

• Will there be any emails you need to remove completely? 

• Already discussed. Josh will do this manually.

• What will be removed from text? (I.e., remove all email addresses except yours)

• Already discussed. Josh will do this manually.

• Hosting? What does that mean moneywise? Domain name?

• This is something Josh will have to do. 

• H9 to share Alex’s hosting document (recommend IONOS)

• Does it need shareables? Should it be indexed by Google? Or should the emails NOT be indexed by Google? What are we letting Google see from this website (just domain and mini description, or also every email has its own URL)

• Josh: NOT indexing. 

• Are we able to share emails with people? (i.e., domainname.com/email32)

• Josh: NO sharing. It should function as a visual display, rather than a communication of documents. I want it to read like a book, not like the Internet.

• What kind of behaviour do you want the website to have for extras (shareables), or should it be bare bones?

• Farah: Barebones. 

Next steps:

• H9 can start thinking about wireframe organization

• Josh will keep us posted about grant funding