Hi everyone, This is the first of the monthly postings of SLUG Committee minutes to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for the 2003/2004 committee. Comments can be directed to either [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] as appropriate.
The minutes begin with a list of ways you can help with SLUG activities this month. - Mary Gardiner, SLUG Secretary Helping out with SLUG in April 2003: - attend or help organise the upcoming Trivia night. An announcement will be made soon, people wanting to attend should watch for that. People who want to help out should send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - and I'm sure more quiz questions would be welcome at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Trivia night will be a fundraiser for the workshop (see below). - offer to talk at SLUG meetings. There are three types of talks at SLUG meetings: general talks (45 minutes in length, audience is all meeting attendees), special interest talks (45 minutes in length, talks are of special interest or technically detailed) and SLUGlets (5-15 minutes in length, should be of interest to beginning and intermediate Free Software users). We particularly need "general" talks about things like: the way your favourite Free Software project runs, advocacy skills, important software releases, how to do common desktop or server tasks, and common problems like security. In the near future, SLUG will have another forum in place of the general talk, this time a "distro forum" - advantages and disadvantages of each distro, in order to prepare people for the workshop. If you can do 5-10 minutes of intelligent advocacy for your distro, consider offering to speak at the forum. If you would like to speak at SLUG please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and tell us the topic, length, and intended audience of your talk. - help us promote the Education summit to educators in Australia. Jeff Waugh is organising a two day summit about using Free Software in education, for teachers and educators, mid-year. Anyone who has ideas about how we can advertise the summit to, and make it attractive to, Australian computing teachers (particularly secondary school teachers who are hard to contact en masse) should contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] with ideas. - start thinking about how you could help with the mid-year workshop. We are hoping this will be a major event, and have a quote on a venue. We intend that it will be well-publicised. In order to pull this off we need lots of hands on deck and We are seeking sponsorship and we also hope that businesses will set up stalls on the day. If you can help fund, or find funding for, the workshop, you should contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tony Green will head up workshop organisation. If you want to volunteer to help Tony prepare the workshop, or want to help out on the day, join the festies mailing list - http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/festies - after funding is secured and the date is announced, organisation will move to festies. Meeting opened 7:13pm. Present: Jeff Waugh, Tony Green, Mary Gardiner, Jamie Wilkinson, Peter Hardy, Jaime Hemmett, Jan Schmidt Review of AGM/March meeting: - the quiz was good fun, however it perhaps wasn't ideal for people attending their first ever SLUG meeting, might be better to hold a Trivia Night Trivia Night: - Tony will MC - Committee and others will help out with scoring etc. - Can we get prizes together? - Funds raised will be put towards the upcoming workshop President's report: - Jeff will have a new slide background for a new year Discussion of treasurer's report: - The workshop, public liability insurance and the digital camera purchase were SLUG's biggest expenses in 2002/2003 - There was some discussion about why SLUG has funds in reserve. It was pointed out that, excluding the camera purchase, SLUG's expenditure was roughly equal to its income in 2002/2003. - 2002/2003 was the first year that SLUG did not run on entirely donations and sponsorship. Committee miscellanea: - SLUG will bank with the Commonwealth Bank rather than ACU in future, for several reasons: - CBA has a formal procedure for updating signatories - CBA has more branches - Insurance is not due for renewal until September. Existing talk offers: - Offers of talks currently include: Andrew Cowie (general, Gentoo Linux), Robert Collins (special interest, Squid), Tony Green (general or SLUGlet, Shorewall), Brude Badger (special interest, Smalltalk), Ross Vambuca (special interest, porting the Linux kernel to the PowerPC ATX boards) - Andrew's Gentoo talk will probably form part of a distribution forum, to be held before the workshop Review of meeting format and meeting organisation: - There was discussion about how to reduce the "dead time" during the first half hour of meetings, particular important for people who are at a meeting for the first time. April meeting: - Talks likely: General talk: Tony Green: the upcoming workshop, what it is and how you can help Special interest talk: Bruce Badger: Smalltalk SLUGlets: including Mick Boda on Debian May meeting: - Talks likely: General talk: Distribution forum Special interest talk: Robert Collins: Squid June meeting: - Talks likely: Special interest talk: Ross Vambuca: porting the Linux kernel to the PowerPC ATX boards June/July workshop: - A venue has been found - Funding for the workshop has not yet been found, a total of $5000 or so will be required. - Ideas for funding include (roughly in order of preference): major sponsorship; charging companies to have a stall; charging installees a small fee; charging all attendees a small fee - A BBQ will be held, approximately $15 per head, strictly RSVP. Volunteers may get free BBQ. - Jaime asked whether SLUG should have some kind of formal sponsorship agreements ready to go including sponsors' rights and responsibilities, Tony replied that until we pull the workshop off, we have no examples to show sponsors what they get for their money. - Tony pointed out that any stalls selling hardware must be selling Linux compatible hardware, and must support its use under Linux, otherwise it will reflect badly on SLUG - We need to figure out what attendees would buy from stallholders: examples include books and CDs, but don't include $2000 a head Linux training sessions - Stallholders will probably sell distros to installees, rather than these being provided by SLUG - The date will be set once we have funding, as the press needs 6-8 weeks notice to be able to give us publicity. Education summit: - will show educators how they can use Free Software in education - probably held in last week of mid-year public school holidays - TAFE educators are interested - Jeff is having trouble figuring out how to reach high school computing teachers - would high school teachers be more interested in a training or professional development day than a straight seminar? - should we have a meeting with SLUG people working in education to solict their ideas? Video distribution: - CDs will be cheaper for financial members of SLUG - There was some lukewarm discussion of setting up streaming for members only - video on its own is not as useful as it could be - we'll put together Speex audio, video and the speaker's slides on a CD Website stuff: - the SLUG logo and the front page design will be changed after a competition. - Competitors will be able to submit stylesheets and perhaps some small cosmetic HTML changes for the www.slug.org.au site. Meeting closed: 9:58pm -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
