Event:2014/11/04 OptikAllusions Meeting

Attendees

Ice breaker - "What's the weirdest date you've ever been on?"

• Noemie: "He was German... I won't go into any more details."
• Sarah: After being dumped by the love of her life when she was 17, she said to herself, "Fuck men. I'm going to date women." She went out on a date with a very small girl that she liked a lot, but after awhile the girl said, "A date? I thought we were just hanging out." Sarah said "Fuck this, I can't be friends with you." The girl said "Wait! But I've always thought about dating a girl..." and she kissed Sarah. That's when Sarah knew... it would never work out.
• Patrick: In highschool, he went on a date with a girl he really liked. He could tell that the girl had made up her mind that they were going to kiss that day, and she got dolled up and they went on a hike. He was super nervous the whole time, until they they finally kissed. The date ended uneventfully.
• Sam: doesn't have a story to recount right now...
• Jesse: Dated a super Christian girl in high school. She convinced him to go to her church group at the Nazarene church. The group was full of jocks and cheerleaders from his school who were always getting high and partying, but they were repenting and crying. Jesse still doesn't understand how he got sucked into it, but pretty soon he was also doing confession and crying. He snuck away when no one noticed.
• Liz: Long story, but she accidentally went on a date with an older guy she met at a rave. They went to the San Francisco Zoo. At the end they walked to the beach and ate gummy bears and he tried to kiss her, and she had to turn him down. They never talked again.
• Joe: too many weird dates to recount. Meta analysis is that Joe is just into crazy girls.
• Hayley also in attendance

Announcements

• Noemie made a quick Einstein video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRE5wqxjSvQ&feature=youtu.be) and has made contact with Oakland North, a hyper local news station.
• Occupy the Farm (the movie) just came out! Noemie is going to see it with some Occupy Oakland people on Saturday night. Screening here at Omni!
• Sarah has an announcement: She finished half of her script!
• And now, A TOAST! TO US! *clink clink clink clink!*

Proposal for Omni

W.I.P! :D https://docs.google.com/document/d/173vqdRxICqY4ZnAo48NeSjyB6J7mgftdTi5ZF7VwG5E/edit Liz, Sarah, and Noemie have been working on it, but feel free to give feedback. Please don't delete anything, just add comments or new sections.

OPAL Website

Action items to get our website: choose a domain name! Some people think we should change the name, we're going to work on it for a week.

Omni fundraising video, discussion

Some people feel like their time and work was not valued and that Noemie made decisions that disregarded people's work and the collective.

• Intro: Is bringing all issues to the collective for the sake of transparency always the most fair thing to do, as opposed to having interpersonal interactions?
  • Noemie: I actually think we should be communicating in an interpersonal level with each other, and bring it to everyone if we haven't found resolution. Bringing issues to the collective is also not always the fairest thing to do: transparency and collectivising issues actually prioritizes the ones that are the most entitled, the most privileged, and for whom it is easiest to speak in public.
• People's experience of what happened: Noemie feels like her role as a director was disregarded.

"Joel didn't do his work as an editor. Jesse and Joel disregarded my input as a director. Didn't answer my emails. Jesse started colorgrading although I was still trying to initiate a dialogue with Joel on the choices to make for the edits. Danny sent Jesse emails about what needs to be done. My role was disregarded. I think there is a gender issue behind this. When we met you only had half an hour and Joel was not there. I was rushed. When I sat with Liz it was finally doing the work that I was hoping to do. I learnt a lot from it. It was great and I don't regret it. I made the decision to do the editing with her, and I advised you by SMS the next morning. At that point you were the only other person involved so I advised you. It's not true that I didn't advise you."

• Planning the production (and post-production) workflow and schedule: what was the deadline here?
• Communicating our expectations and defining roles clearly:
  • Who was directing?
  • Who in the fundraising committee is charge of communicating with us about the video? (matt)
  • How to define roles clearly so that people's time is valued.
• Is it a problem to make several versions of the video? (learning through do-ocracy, remix, reuse)
• Jesse was disappointed that the cut he did was not included in the screening at the Omni meeting
• consent on the goal to empower women and folks who are usually less privileged (women, people of color, queers, mentally diverse and differently abled folks) to take leadership in the projects they bring to the group.

Conclusions: how to do things better in the future

• Make sure all email conversations that contain information that is pertinent to the whole group get CC'd to the listserv (or whoever is necessary).
• Have clearly defined roles in the future.
• Separate roles from hierarchy; they do not have to be the same thing.

Creating a curriculum!

Hayley: Villagecraft has a meeting of all the folks who want to do a class, where people pitch their ideas and meet each other. She thinks using this forum would help bring awareness to the classes we would like to teach. She'll send an email with more details! Anyone who wants to teach a class, start working on the syllabus!

Consensus Items

• CC licensing : initiate a discussion on our view on CC licensing. Even if we end up having diverging opinion and practices on CC licensing, it is worth discussing having it in our values/vision.

For clarification, there are several kinds of Creative Commons licensing, combining any and all of the following clauses: BY - attribution : you must properly cite the creator of the work. SA - share-alike : if you remix or add to a work, you must license it under the original license. NC - noncommercial : no commercial use of the work. ND - no derivatives : no remixing or adding to it, essentially proprietary. Another alternative to copyright is "Copyleft", which is similar to CC-BY-SA. Yet another option is to release work into the Public Domain. For further research, go explore [ http://creativecommons.org ] and [ https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#If_I_derive_or_adapt_material_offered_under_a_Creative_Commons_license.2C_which_CC_license.28s.29_can_I_use.3F ] Advice from Joe: Type of licensing always depends on the project. In the past, Joe has gotten a conventional copyright for his work, and then release another version under a CC license. Indie artists and individuals were free to use his work according to his license, but if any corporation picked it up (as Fox did once), he still had a copyright hammer to prevent the corporation from capitalizing on his work. YEAH GO JOE!!!

• Why should we strive to make our work CC licensed and claim it aloud? Why should it be nodal in the definition of our mission?
  • CC licensing is the continuation of OpaL's work to put resources and means of production in common. The idea is that the products of our culture and civilization should be accessible for the public to see and remix.
  • Exclusive rights regimes (copyright) use intellectual property to control and dominate. In resistance to the power that be, we would commit to anticopyright, where we would subvert the traditional notions of creative expression in favor of remix culture.
  • By chosing to release our work in CC license, OptikAllusions would commit to creating a new paradigm, dwindling the power of the middle men, the majors, the producers, the TV channels and the institutions, in favor of the artists and the public. This new paradigm allows for the public to have access to the product of our culture, while allowing authors, creative people of all sorts, to receive a more direct retribution for their work.

In order to preserve rights formally for others whenever possible, we would use creative commons license or equivalent. But we would encourage people to use their rights of fair use or fair dealings and otherwise repurpose works freely, without fear, in a spirit of solidarity and encouraging collaboration over competition. See Aaron Swartz Open Access manifesto, it applies to film! https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

Action items

• Think about alternative names,

MEETING ADJOURNED BY SARAH AT 8:50, WOO

Creative chaos

"She stuck her tongue ALL the way down my throat." "Well, that's not necessarily a deal breaker for me..." and SAUCE EVERYWHERE Haley just spilled tamarind sauce all over the table and her hand, cute climax!