<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<p>Hi everyone, <br>
</p>
<p>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: <br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>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. <br>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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. <br>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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. <br>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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. <br>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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. <br>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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 . <br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>As always, your feedbacks, comments and questions are warmly
welcomed. <br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Kind regards,</p>
<p>Kathy, Cameron, Sae Ra, Russell, David, Josh and Hugh<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>[0] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2017-January/022941.html">http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2017-January/022941.html</a><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
--
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Kathy Reid
President
Linux Australia
0418 130 636
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:president@linux.org.au">president@linux.org.au</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://linux.org.au">http://linux.org.au</a>
Linux Australia Inc
GPO Box 4788
Sydney NSW 2001
Australia
ABN 56 987 117 479 </pre>
</body>
</html>