From president at linux.org.au Tue Aug 8 09:14:03 2017 From: president at linux.org.au (Linux Australia President) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 09:14:03 +1000 Subject: [Announce] Rebranding, Membership platform, Grants budget, Pycon and other interesting updates from Linux Australia Face to Face Message-ID: <9cb2fb52-dcd5-a60e-4096-0f1b9d8e6942@linux.org.au> Hi everyone, Hope this note finds everyone safe and well, and a big shout out to everyone heading home or catching up on Pycon AU. Pycon AU - August 4-7th, Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, Melbourne Speaking of which, a huge well done to Richard Jones and his outstanding team for delivering another brilliant Pycon AU in Melbourne - where he was ably supported by an exceedingly competent and committed core team and group of volunteers. Thank you all. The videos from Pycon AU, with thanks to the crack team of ninjas under the guidance of Ryan Verner at Next Day Video, are already up. Outstanding work. https://www.youtube.com/user/PyConAU In 2018 and 2019, Pycon AU will move to Sydney under the direction of long-time community advocate and previous Linux Australia Council Member, Katie McLaughlin. Well done Katie and team on your successful bid. http://2018.pycon-au.org/ Given the size that Pycon AU has now grown to (600-700 this year), Linux Australia will be working with the Python community to look at how we can make the bid process more transparent, and further updates will be provided in due course. You may have been following the #pyconau hashtag over the weekend, but if not, we're experimenting a little bit with Storify (yeah, we know it's not open source, but we couldn't find a similar alternative), and you can see some highlights of #pyconau at: https://storify.com/linuxaustralia/pycon-au-2017 DrupalSouth Auckland 2017 - November 16-17, Q Hotel, Auckland https://drupalsouth2017.drupal.org.nz/ Early bird tickets are on sale now, and the first Keynote announcement has been made - Michael Schmid. You can follow all the updates on the website above, or @DrupalSouth on Twitter. A huge thanks to Pam Clifford, Nicole Kirsch, Dave Sparks and the team for all their efforts. linux.conf.au - January 22-26 2018, UTS, Sydney With a huge thanks to Michael Davies, Michael Still and the Papers Committee, the CfP for linux.conf.au closed yesterday, with a last-minute spike in submissions (a pattern that has now been well established!). A huge thumbs up to everyone who has now made the job of Papers Committee very tough (sorry! .... not sorry ;-) ) Bruce Crawley, James Polley and the team are doing a fantastic job, and we're all looking forward to a deeply technical flagship event in Sydney next year. Keep up to date with all the goings on at https://linux.conf.au, on Twitter @linuxconfau and #lca2018 and and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/linuxconferenceaustralia Joining the Dots data visualisation symposium, Melbourne, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, August 18th Linux Australia is sponsoring this event at the intersection of data science, data visualisation and digital humanities. If you #dataviz, come to #joiningthedots https://joiningthedots.github.io/ Linux Australia Council Face to Face meeting, Melbourne, August 5-6th While Pycon AU was happening down the road, the Linux Australia Council met for our second face to face meeting of the year, where we tackled the 2017/2018 budget, discussed areas where we need to improve our governance and continued planning on key projects. The headlines are: * Overall we've been very pleased with the successes of the 2016/2017 Grants Program, and have allocated a similar amount in the 2017/2018 budget for a program to run in next financial year (1 October 2017 to 30 September 2018). We are likely to review the Grant Program requirements before the next Program runs, and will seek community input on this. The funds allocated to this year's Grants Program are now exhausted, but we haven't closed Grant Requests - if one came in we could choose to overspend budget if the request was worthy, or defer payment to the new financial year. * We've allocated around $30k to the Membership DB and website replacement, noting that although the quotes we received were lower than this, we will likely need some supporting services such as training, and may need additional help with ETL tasks. * We have resolved to seek legal advice on a number of matters, including whether our legal structure (an incorporated association in NSW, regulated by Fair Trading NSW) remains the most optimal structure for us, seeking advice on provision of childcare and how to streamline this while remaining compliant, and on a number of other items, such as whether our Constitution needs amending (last amended in 2011). * We have resolved to seek financial advice on a number of matters, including whether our current financial accounting system is optimal, and whether our current approach to term deposit to gain interest earnings is the appropriate investment for Linux Australia (keeping in mind risk and return). We've allocated $20k to financial advice and legal advice. * We're also very aware now that we don't just have one large event (linux.conf.au), but now have two large events - linux.conf.au and Pycon AU - and that our strategy of keeping a "war chest" to run linux.conf.au in the event of unforeseen issues - now needs to extend to Pycon AU as well. * We also gave consideration to some of the "bigger picture" pieces we would like to see over the next 2-5 years within the Aussie open source community, including a mentoring programme and other efforts to encourage younger members to engage with the community, and an Open Source awards (akin to the NZ Open Source awards). * We looked at ways we can be more efficient and make our meetings quicker * We met with Toby Ansell, graphic designer, on our rebranding project, and aim to have some rebranding options within a few weeks. * We met with George Fong to discuss the current actions for the Beyond 2020 Alliance, and Josh Stewart, Cameron Tudball and Sae Ra Germaine will be more involved in this going forward. * We began planning for the "end of year rush" that we have in in terms of producing end of year reports and financials. LCA2020 Bids Will open soon(TM), we promise! Social media goodness A reminder you can find Linux Australia on the following social media: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/linuxaustralia * Facebook: https://facebook.com/linuxaustralia * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/2966738/ As always, your feedback, comments and concerns are always warmly welcomed, Kind regards, Kathy Reid, Cameron Tudball, Sae Ra Germaine, Russell Stuart, Josh Stewart, Hugh Blemings and David Bell. -- Kathy Reid President Linux Australia 0418 130 636 president at linux.org.au http://linux.org.au Linux Australia Inc GPO Box 4788 Sydney NSW 2001 Australia ABN 56 987 117 479 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: