[Linux-aus] Nominations and their spiels for the LA election

[Anthony Towns]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 12:11:10AM +1100, Terry Dawson wrote:
> >So in the interests of pre-election debate, I'd like to suggest something
> >like this:
> >    - in the interests of promoting Australian free software projects and
> >      hackers internationally, the President and Vice-President of
> >      Linux Australia shall each take one overseas trip a year to a free
> >      software event, to promote LA and keep up to date with events
> I'm going to ask the dumb question. What benefit does promotion of Linux 
> Australia at international events bring Linux Australia, its membership 
> or the Australian Linux/FOSS community? Could you expand a bit on the 
> benefits you see and what process is required to translate attendance at 
> an event into tangible benefit?

Depends where the P/VP go. The thing I remember is Pia going to WSIS in 2003,
on her own pocket, cf:

    http://pipka.org/blog/2003/12/11/20031212c/
    http://pipka.org/blog/2003/12/12/1071210888/
    http://pipka.org/blog/2003/12/14/1071366692/
    http://pipka.org/blog/2003/12/16/1071556511/

Andrew Cowie's been involved with the FOSS.in folks for a while, as they
develop their own top notch community run conference:

    http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/conferences/india/foss.in-2005-always-learning.html

The benefit of having people go out and mingle on the world stage is it
helps introduce you to great ideas from elsewhere, and helps you share
your great ideas with others. For technical stuff, we've got that down
pat with lca; but LA is more than just that: we're also trying to do
good things with legal issues and trying to find ways of helping LUGs
be even better.

If all that means that "in order to promote LA and keep up with events"
should be changed to "in order to promote the goals of LA" or something,
that's fine by me. I'd certainly expect Jon, James and Pia to make it
pretty clear how whatever trip they might end up taking benefits free
software or Linux or whatever.

> >    - each LUG of 50 members or more shall be entitled to ask LA to invite
> >      an Australian free software hacker to give a presentation at one
> >      of their meetings once a year
> I'd have thought that LUGs were already entitled to ask for such a 
> thing. 

I think the problem is more that people don't feel entitled to do so;
either because they don't think of it in the first place, or because
they don't think their little LUG is worth the expense, or they figure
LA is some grumpy bunch of people who aren't worth asking for help,
or whatever else.

We've now had two grants of this form -- TasLUG getting a speaker from
Melbourne, and FOMS getting Holger in from Germany, with the latter only
happening because Pia specifically suggested doing it as a grant.

> I presume the reasonable way to do this would usually be to have the 
> international speaker be one of the LCA speakers, and to have them stay 
> on a day or two longer in Australia to speak at LUGs. Is this what you 
> had in mind or were you thinking we'd actually fly someone in from 
> abroad specifically to speak at a LUG somewhere for a meeting?

Whatever's most effective and affordable. Flying people in specially is
more costly and requires more organisation, but has the benefits that
it's original rather than perhaps a repeat of something people could've
seen by going to lca or downloading the videos and allows a bit more
flexibility on topics, which might be useful. Basically, I didn't have
anything in particular in mind.

Though it might be worth adding some info to this year's lca wiki about
LUG meetings around the country that people might want to visit if
they're staying on in Australia...

Cheers,
aj

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