[Linux-aus] LA Council Face to Face meeting

[Anthony Towns]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 14:02, John Ferlito <johnf at inodes.org> wrote:

>  http://wiki.linux.org.au/Ctte/NextF2FCouncilMeeting


Some suggestions:

> Review existing policy: / Grants policy (especially as applied to travel)

I think the purpose of grants is to promote/advance Linux/FOSS in Australia,
and grant requests should say something about awarding the grant will do
that. (I've always considered that implicit, but I don't think it's
currently explicitly said anywhere)

I think travel grants are a good idea; the only drawback is travel is often
expensive so the benefit should be proportional. Spending a couple of
hundred dollars to get a good talk at a reasonably well attended Aussie LUG
(30-50 people?) is probably about right; while spending $2000 so someone can
fly to a European conference probably isn't. OTOH, $2500 to have a core
developer fly to an overseas conference, present, learn, and come back and
give a summary talk at a couple of LUGs might be good value for money.

Travel's something of a challenge in .au -- both getting people based in
different states together, and mixing with the international crowd. LCA
makes it a lot better already, but doing more is probably useful.

In the past, requests for sponsorship to attend overseas conferences haven't
made any headway ttbomk. There's been at least one request for local travel
that's been granted, which was Melissa Draper giving a talk at CLUG [0],
[1].

[0] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2007-June/015680.html
[1] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2007-June/015658.html

Of course, there's other ways of promoting stuff than just giving money to
people who ask for it. Could be interesting to have a prize for the best LUG
talk in 2011, or for the LUG who hosts the most talks in 2011 or similar (as
judged based on video uploaded to mirror.linux.org.au of course ;).

> Meeting the financials AGM requirement: move AGM(?), close the financial
year at a different time(?)

LCA is effectively LA's AGM as far as "annual in person meeting" goes.
Presenting financial reports and inducting new members at LCA seems like a
pretty sensible thing to do. And we already moved the financial year once
(from Jul-Jun) to meet the constitutional requirements, fwiw.

That said, I don't think it should be much of a challenge to keep the
records sufficiently up to date to present the past calendar year's info by
around the third week in Jan. Presenting quarterly updates to linux-aus
might be a good start. (Mark used to present them weekly to the committee
while he was treasurer, I believe)

(It's currently almost three months since last year ended; that financials
haven't been presented yet means there's definitely problems other than the
timing of the FY versus the AGM. Might be good to fix those first...)

> Improving the Ghosts event

Might want to talk about that on the lca-ghosts list (and possibly check
it's up to date with new batches of ghosts) too.

> New policy documents:

Have all these been posted to linux-aus already? URLs?

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at erisian.com.au>
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