On Thursday night,
Scott Hudnall and I got together for the first Bay Area Go Metric meeting (this one was at
Tokies in Foster City, suggestions for future locations appreciated).
Here's some notes about what we discussed.
Things to consider working on to improve metrication visibility
- Talk to graphic artists about improving shirt design.
- Something trendy that hairdressers and other people in high visibility professions might wear.
- Look at the viability of going to street fairs and giving out stickers/t-shirts and talking to people about metrication.
- Check out cost.
- Many coming up as end of Summer approaches.
- Also consider designing and handing out information fliers.
- Cafe's and other places fliers are usually left for people to pick up.
- Informational boards at museums and the like.
- Add a campaigns section to the website.
- Need to get people thinking at a more local level.
- Local issues are smaller and easier to deal with, so people are less likely to give up as too difficult.
- Scott has a friend in SF doing video.
- If we want to ask him to help, we need to work out a few ideas and do some basic story boarding.
- Organization with the aim of dealing with the social aspects of metrication.
Had a discussion about going after medicine for metrication as a campaign
- GP software (some requires input in customary units, this has to be changed).
- FDA/CDC/EMEA for drug dosage and overdose information.
- Hudnall to ask library services at his work for places to find information about overdose and other medical errors.
- Consider unreasonable fears about understanding mL instead of customary.
- GPs are mostly older and stuck in their ways.
- Dosing is always in mg/kg or mg/m^2
- Mercury sphygmomanometers are being phased out, this is a good opportunity for using kPa instead.
- Need a public awareness campaign.
- Get fliers into doctors offices and pharmacies.
- We should be able to get funding for a public awareness campaign from pharmaceutical companies and medical associations.
- More story boarding.
- Contact Amy from Ametrica for help with graphic design and similar activities.
Go Metric Non-Profit
- Start a 501(c)(3).
- Minimally need a president, chairman of the board and corporate secretary.
- For both registration and getting funding from others, we need to have a clear vision and goals. There's already a lot of this on the Go Metric site.
- Consider putting how we're going to achieve that in our stated vision (e.g. "Achieve metrication through public outreach and media campaigns").
- Aim to raise public awareness and social acceptance of metric in the USA.
- Complementary to the USMA, they're aiming more at NIST etc, we're aiming at the average person on the street.
- Consider for profit metric company.
- We could open a store that does clothes using metric standards (use EN 13402).
- Lots of clothing companies in SF which we could either get buy in from or get good people from.
- Trendy....
- Consider a setup like REI. They have a social goal and education built into their organization.
Website
- Need to fix it so more people want to get involved (it's a wiki, so people can, but few people do).
- Possibly make starting a campaign a fairly easy process for anyone.
- Sell fashion (t-shirts, pens etc).
- Logo/Brand on the site and on items sold on the site.
- Paul needs to update reading list.
Merchandise
- Some people don't like the URL on items.
- What's important is people getting out the message so produce a line without the URL.
- Consider "Go Metric US" as a substitute for the URL (if you type this into a search engine, you'll get the site).
- Logo.
Regular Meetings
- Have a book club approach to important reading material (swap good books or we all get a copy of something that someone has recommended).
- Read the book and then all sit down and work out how we can use what we've learned to further metrication.
- local action groups (see local thinking and campaigns).
- Get others starting local groups to discuss and take action.
- meet up monthly.
- Regular meetings to swap books, plan and generate new ideas.
- Get others who are interested along as well.
