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

[Anthony Towns]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 07:41:01AM +1100, Pia Waugh wrote:
> President
> ---------
>     * Jonathan Oxer (jon at oxer.com.au)
> Vice-President
> --------------
>     * Pia Waugh (greebo at pipka.org)
>     * James Purser (purserj at k-sit.com)
> Secretary
> ---------
>     * Anthony Towns (aj at azure.humbug.org.au)
> Treasurer
> ---------
>     * Terry Dawson (terry at linux.org.au)
> Ordinary Committee Members
> --------------------------
>     * Stephen Walsh (steve at nerdvana.org.au)
>     * James Purser (purserj at k-sit.com)
>     * Janet Hawtin (lucychili at gmail.com)
>     * Karin Purser (fireflysummer at exemail.com.au)
>     * Pascal Klein (klepas at klepas.org)

I've thought for a while (some would say harped on about, perhaps) that
having people you can talk to directly about LA stuff is much better
than only being able to follow what's going on online...

So in that vein it seems like the 2007 committee will be from Vic,
{NSW,NSW}, Qld, NSW, {Vic,NSW,SA,NSW,ACT}, without anyone from WA or
Tas or the NT (or north Qld, or country-NSW, or central Australia,
etc). There was a bit of talk on the teleconference this evening about
getting people who aren't on the committee more directly involved in LA
on a regular basis; perhaps having a monthly get teleconf of interested
folks from various LUGs to try to help everyone keep in contact and
share ideas and so forth. Since we've got lca coming up so soon, that's
probably an ideal opportunity for folks who are going to be there, and
would like to be involved in keeping Linux users around the country in
touch with each other, and make use of LA's resources to achieve that,
to chat with committee members and come up with ways of staying involved.

We've tried to keep in touch with LUGs a bit, particularly when we go
visiting a city for a face-to-face meeting; but I wonder if we should be
more active about that, and have committee members and other Linux folks
fly around the country to gives talks in other cities/towns a bit more
often. I suspect the main reason we haven't done that up 'til now is that
it can be a bit expensive and time consuming getting around Australia,
and the committee's been a bit reluctant to spend money without some more
explicit feedback from the community, such as via the grants project.

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

    - each committee member shall participate at an event other than LCA
      that's at least 100km from their hometown at least once during the year

    - 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

    - each LUG of 150 members or more shall be entitled to ask LA
      to invite an international free software hacker to give a
      presentation at one of their meetings once a year

If LA were to pick up the bill for those things, and you assume Australian
travel costs about $600 on average, and international travel about $2000,
that's 2x$2000 + 7x$600 + 20*$600 + 7x$2000 = $4,000 + $4,200 + $12,000 +
$14,000 = $34,200, less if some of those can be done by car, or combined,
or similar. For comparison, the grant scheme has a budget of $12,000 a
year, and uses up probably $6k-$8k. Is an international speaker for each
major LUG worth a similar amount? How about having some good non-local
speakers at smaller regional usergroups?

Go on, tell me how it's a stupid idea and what would be better :)

Cheers,
aj

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