[Announce] Council face to face meeting - key outcomes

[Linux Australia President]

Hi everyone,

In a recent email [0] we flagged that the first Council meeting of the
year was going to be a face to face meeting. That meeting was held the
weekend just past, and as promised, we'd like to keep you informed of
the key outcomes. The full minutes of the meeting will be released in
due course, however the key take-aways are:

  * We started with a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat (SWOT)
    analysis of Linux Australia - and there will be few surprises here.
    We have a number of strengths in terms of our cash reserves, the
    experience and commitment of our volunteers and our strong events,
    but we have weaknesses in our marketing, comms and engagement. We
    have opportunities to do more reach out and strategic allocation of
    grants, but also face threats in terms of volunteer burnout.

  * A budget adjustment of an additional $AUD 35k has been made to our
    sponsorship / grants / donations allocation, from $15k to $50k,
    based on the strong profits of the organisation in recent years.
    This will be accompanied by a more structured grants program, which
    will weight some priority areas for Linux Australia, such as
    outreach to younger cohorts, services for older cohorts, and
    partnership with other organisations with overlapping or similar
    goals. Stay tuned for more information on the grants program.

  * We will be undertaking work to move our Membership platform to
    CiviCRM, after dicussions are held with the Admin Team on the
    implementation and hosting specifics. As part of this, the public
    facing website will be refreshed. As a precursor, Linux Australia
    will undertake some work to refresh our brand identity, via an open
    tender and selection process. More details to come on this tranche
    of work.

  * Linux Australia intends to partner with other like-minded
    organisations on campaigns and and initiatives of mutual interest -
    such as metadata retention. As part of face to face, we spent time
    analysing and categorising our stakeholder relationships, and we
    will be prioritising a small number of organisations initially. Our
    next step is to meet with these organisations and ensure our values,
    priorities and intended actions are aligned, and of course we'll
    keep you informed throughout the process.

  * We discussed how we increase the capacity and capability of our
    organisation, particularly in areas where we have some weaknesses,
    such as marketing and communications and legal advice, and will
    start to experiment with contracting out discrete pieces of work
    where we have capacity or capability gaps. We are also researching
    what short courses are available to Council to help increase our
    not-for-profit governance skills.

  * We also covered a significant amount of administrative ground,
    including banking signatory change overs, review and approval of
    event budgets for Joomla Day Sydney and linux.conf.au 2018, review
    of our operations manual and activities calendar, as well as
    identifying some policy gaps - namely privacy - which we'll seek to
    redress .

As always, your feedbacks, comments and questions are warmly welcomed.


Kind regards,

Kathy, Cameron, Sae Ra, Russell, David, Josh and Hugh


[0] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2017-January/022941.html


-- 

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 

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