[Linux-aus] Ctte News

[Pia Smith]

Hi all,

by popular request, I'm going to start with the regular ctte news again.
When the new website goes up (soon!) it'll all be simpler :)

Meeting Sumary from 28-01-2004
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- Spoke about administration and having a single person responsible.
- Handover business
- Charter Discussion - we are tossing around an updated charter, we'll
post this to linux-aus for wider discussion soon! :)
- Trademarks discussion - more to come when we've cleared a few things,
sorry for the delay
- Taking money on behalf of organisations (such as Debian, or SAMBA). We
have the credit card facility, and are looking to set up a site to give
projects the ability to accept donations over the web through LA. Credit
card facilities can be hard and costly to set up, so why not utilise
what we have? Looking into it now.
- National installfest. Is there a place or need for it? Would a
roadshow be more appropriate?
- Best of CD for Australian PC magazines. FLoated the idea of compiling
a best of cd and getting it out to some magazines. Partly for
visibility, partly to show off the excellent efforts of all the lcas :)
- T-shirts - we have many more dot-tux t-shirts to sell. Who wants some?
- ACS

We recently had some discussions with ACS. ACS have taken an interest in
FOSS and advocacy. We have been given an excellent opportunity to get
some real community input to some interesting projects. Projects such as
a FOSS FAQ sheet with community/vendor/government support to be used in
education and as a reference, suggested policy ammendments to the SA
FOSS bill that was rejected, plus a few other possibilities. The plan
would be to bring all works to the community for input. It is an
opportunity for us to work in conjunction with the entire OSS community
for a common goal :) that of education and acceptance of FOSS solutions
as legit and professional solutions. Pretty exciting stuff! More to come
on that. Still sussing it out at this stage.

What else? We have a face to face meeting in late February in Melbourne
to determine some strategies for the coming year. There has been a lot
of discussion on where LA should go, and what it is capable of, and it
can go wherever the community wants it to. There are certain needs to be
fullfilled, such as a FOSS media conduit, a FOSS education program (such
as a roadshow), better national communication, distribution of
resources, community incentives and lots more. Figuring out whether LA
is the right medium for all these goals is the latest challenge, one
that won't be answered in a few days :) so lets continue to explore the
possibilities.

Pia
-- 
Pia Smith
President of Linux Australia
pia at linux.org.au