Hi everyone, Here are the minutes of the June 2003 SLUG committee meeting. We held the committee meeting later in the month than usual -- expect July minutes soon.
Past committee meeting minutes are available at : http://www.slug.org.au/minutes/ This mail begins with a list of ways to help out with SLUG this month, and the committee meeting minutes follow. --- Helping out with SLUG in June/July 2003 --- 1. 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. 2. 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. --- Committee Meeting Minutes, 18th June 2003 --- Present: Mary Gardiner (minutes), Tony Green (chair), Peter Hardy, Jaime Hemmett, Jan Schmidt, Jamie Wilkinson. Apologies: Jeff Waugh. 1. Last month's action items 1.1 Commonwealth Bank - all executive members are now signatories 3A - waiting for Department of Fair Trading re-registration of SLUG in order to access the account 1.2 List FAQs - Tony has checked these into CVS with a few small admendments - the FAQs currently contain basic info on the list (such as subscribing, unsubscribing info) - should contain information on spam policy, and posting policies - should contain "what is SLUG?" info and info about our meetings - we will link to the FAQ from the footer of SLUG mails 1.3 Storage at UTS - No further updates 1.4 Department of Fair Trading registration - all forms have been completed - annual report needs to be completed, and registration posted 1.5 Video of SLUG meetings - Jeff is yet to report on vendors' thoughts about selling SLUG video - speakers have requested that they be able to review videos and possibly have a say in the editing - some may make offhand remarks that they do not want to be available on video etc. - Conrad Parker has requested copies in the original DV format in order to test encoding techniques - video needs to be released by speakers before this can happen. 2. SLUG policy 2.1 maddog.slug.org.au policy (the SLUG mail/web host) - SIGs can have slug.org.au subdomains (SLUG already hosts the PIG website) - agreed that SIG organisers can have local access via SSH2 keys in order to edit SIG websites - local security should be checked - all committee members should have sudo privileges 2.2 List policy - slug discussion lists (slug, festies, slug-chat) will remain open subscription. - the committee agreed that the amount of spam on the SLUG lists is small - however, our local spam filters may distort our perceptions a little - current list policy needs to be advertised in the FAQ - Jaime asked what announce@ is to be used for since Tony did not post his provisional Trivia Night there. The general consensus was that announce@ was for SLUG events. Whether general SLUG info should be posted there was not decided. 3. Website/logo redesign contest - Pete has half-written a webpage for the contest - Tony is trying to arrange book vouchers as prizes ($100 for the winner, $50 for runners-up). - closing date for the logo contest will be two weeks before the July monthly meeting - a shortlist will be presented to financial members for voting - all entries need to be licenced for (at least) free use by SLUG -- we will email anyone who submits an unlicenced entry to clarify their licencing rather than refuse to accept their entry - website design contest will be held after the winning logo is chosen (so that designers can design using the winning logo) 4. Trivia Night - very few responses to the call, we will probably hold it anyway - we get a discount if we can get a certain number of people there - date will be pushed back a bit - cost will be around $10 per head 5. Education Summit - probably becoming a SIG 6. Workshop - there was lots of interest at the talk - date will be pushed back again 7. Installfests - since SLUG is not holding regular workshops, Mary suggested that we are not catering to regular requests for installation help - Tony suggested holding small regular Installfests that are separate from the Workshop. Installfests would not be advertised outside SLUG but would cater to new SLUG members - Installfests won't be held on regular SLUG meeting nights, we just need a large room with power 8. Review of May meeting - everything ran much more smoothly - introducing the committee worked really well - Jaime complained that a lot of people approached her thinking she was the treasurer, nametags will help solve this - it was suggested that getting speakers to use the lecture theatre's microphone would be good, but Jan pointed out that they are already using the video camera's microphone - speakers are using the lapel microphone bought for the video camera, but the long cable to the camera introduces quite a bit of noise to the microphone signal. We really need a box to boost the signal level so that the noise is not noticable, and drop it back to microphone levels when injecting into the camera. 9. Review of May SLUGlets - May SLUGlets was a "themed" discussion of backup tools and similar things - there was lots of positive feedback and people preferred it to the existing SLUGlets format - Tony will organise future SLUGlets by watching the mailing list to see what are popular problems in the fortnight or so before the meeting and organise a SLUGlet around one of those themes - Jaime wondered if we could announce the theme further in advance, but since Tony is going to base it on topical mailing list discussions, he won't decide the theme too much in advance 10. Review of meeting format - video of existing talks will hopefully cater to members who are interested in topics covered at previous meetings - Jaime suggested advertising meetings centred around a particular topic, and have all three sessions cover a similar topic from different angles - we still need to be better at keeping in touch with speakers 11. June meeting - Distribution forum - Gus will talk about mod_perl and Apache 12. Possible future talks - Jon Teh on iptables in July (general) - people from the SIGs may like to do talks - Conrad could update us on what's been happening at the Audio/Music SIG - we could have "techie forums" as well as general forums - a "database forum" was suggested 13. SLUG to give Spice Boys an endorsement -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
