[ Mehmet, please don't trim attributions. It is hard to discern who
said what now ]
On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 01:28:13AM +1000, Mehmet Ozdemir wrote:
> > > Jeff while making sly references may seem all good and well, it does
> > > reflect on the organisations marketing ability.
> >
> > Marketing is not really what we do. Things like the SLUG stand at the
> > recent business expo (thank you Chris and others), our regular installfests
> > and the national one we participated in last year represent our... hmm...
> > outreach to people beyond SLUG.
>
> Then should it be something that is done?
I don't think so. And since I represent 1/32nd of SLUG I guess my view
counts for something. Those of you interested in making your views known
will probably take the time to email us at least and/or even become a
member and get (re)involved.
> I mean marketing in a fairly loose sense, after all if the aim is to get
> paid up members then maybe we should go out there looking for them.
Our expenditure is fairly limited. Installfest rooms average around
$200 - $500 (8 x $25 - 20 x $25) so at these rates and at what I
suspect we have in the bank we aren't likely to have financial problems
any time soon.
But perhaps we should be doing more with our money, like, funding linuxtv.org
or xine with money to buy TV specification and/or documentation? Or how about
having someone use freetds to write a SQL command wrapper that translates
Sybase and Microsoft SQL into MySQL/Postgresl?
> > Hopefully you were tuned in to the troubles we've had with our business
> > documents and bank account - if we had had a list of members, we would
> > certainly have done more with it.
>
> Sorry I can't say that I was. Like I said my new little beastie is
> taking up a lot of my computing time. Any chance of brief recap, or a
> pointer to when this was disussed on the list so I can catch up.
Basically our treasurer disappeared. Thus we were stymied through
lack of access to our records and funds. Hopefully the problem is
under control this year and we won't have the same thing happen.
> > > organised do you actually enforce the discounts to only payed up members
> > > (ie proof of membership required) ???
> >
> > Been to a fest recently?
> >
> > [ Read: DISCOUNTS?! They're *FREE*! ]
>
> Great !!!, but round about the time I signed up this was be spruiked as
> one of benefits, Slug members would getting to fests/events half price.
And no doubt a number of things. Hard to go to, say , Hotline books and
say "oh, we have some number of members - care to give us a discount?".
They want numbers so that they can caluclate the marketing money they
are saving by providing said discount.
We would like to pursue som thing that to make membership 'valuable' but
it isn't a primarily goal for us at the moment.
>
> >
> > > If these thing are done then why would anyone bother.
> >
> > I can answer for myself: a) It pleases me to support the continued existence
> > of a great group that has brought me out of the horrid darkness of
> > proprietary software, and b) it allows me to vote, and also have at least
> > some claim to being a "SLUGger".
>
> This I accept, and really $25.00 + GST isn't really going to be missed,
$25.00 (inc. GST).
> but one may still ask the question what the $25.00 gets them, other a
> peice of papaer and voting rights.
The right to sit on the committee as well.
What do you expect for your membership? Your (plural) feedback will us
to decide what our priorities as a committee should be.
>
> >
> > We're doing what we can to patch up a few uglinesses (the constitution), and
> > thankfully we now have all our documents and business in order; hope I've
> > answered all your queries and explained why things have been the way they
> > have.
> >
>
> Will these change be put to a vote ?
Naturally, we require 24 members (of the current 32) to either put in an
appearance or a proxy vote; and at least 5 members to show up in person.
> It would also be helpful for this info to be online, the site seems to
> be missing this sort of stuff. Also I remember last year at the AGM that
> a member was asking for financials to be published, and the president
> (Conrad) agreed, this sort of transparency still doesn't exist :(
Indeed we are aware of the problem and hope that publishing our committee
minutes will start to ameliorate that.
Thanks,
Anand
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
