[Announce] 200407 - Committee News

[Pia Smith]

Hi all,

Linux Australia been catching up with a lot this last month. I would ask
that if LUG cttes that feel this would be of interest, to forward it to
their LUG lists. Thankyou :)

FTA
===
Our efforts have certainly been successful. We have several politicians
referencing our issues, and quotes by some of us. We have many groups
rallying behind our issues, and although there wasn't an ammendment
directly about our issues, on of the ammendments was concerning
pharmacutical patents. This is good news for us because it has taken to
the public arena the issue of patents. We can use this to leverage our
own patents concerns, and then other issues. Good work to EVERYONE that
has been and continues to be involved in educating our politicians,
organisations and companies. We were involved in the first
cross-industry press conference expressing concern about the FTA, and
the statement and associated press can be found on our FTA page
(http://linux.org.au/fta/)

Patents plan
====
On the topic of FTA, we have a contingency plan in the making. Getting
the Australian Open Source community involved in the patents process, we
may be able to stop the most insane ones going through by proving prior
art. This would have two positive results:
	- We would have some input to stopping ridiculous patents
	- We would over a period of time have a good, quantative argument
against the patent system as is

Ghosts meeting
=====
We have the ghosts meeting for the Canberra LCA crew. This means we get
some knowledge transfer from old LCA crews to the current one, and try
to cover all bases. The Canberra crew are doing a good job, and we look
forward to hearing more of the progress then :)

LCA 2004 CD
=====
The CD and DVD are compiled, and only yet need to be pressed and sent
out. Many thanks to Jason King who took over the CD and got it
organised, and to all the LCA2004 crew who have put the efforts in. We
shall be making sure that in the future the CD/DVD will come out within
a shorter period of time post LCA.

Linux Australia Treasury Update
===============================
This is new, and we will be adding to it in the near future an
indication of the financial status of LA. Thanks to all the feedback on
the linux-aus list about this.

Items of Note
---------------
o  Post Box redirection with Australia Post is now live
o  BAS statments are completed and posted to ATO
o  Details of Computerbank Grant still in progress
    - Contract done, awaiting news from Computerbank
o  Handled grant for linuxsa.org.au domain name to LinuxSA
o  Completed trial of banking arrangments with Westpac; and 
   advised transferring our day to day banking to them.
o  Handled paperwork associated with Media Training
o  In process of closing off LCA2004 books
o  Updated details with ATO for Linux Australia

Cheers all,
Pia

-- 
Pia Smith <pia at linux.org.au>
Linux Australia