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

[James Purser]

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 00:11 +1100, Terry Dawson wrote:
> 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?

To my mind, I can see this benefiting both the australian community as
well as the wider regional community. There are nascent groups starting
up in South East Asia and the pacific that could benefit from hearing
from a group thats managed to do things reasonably right. And in return
we get to here about "teh c00l" people we may not have heard from
before. We can build connections that would allow for greater
interaction between the regional groups. This could lead to visits from
some of the hackers from FOSS.IN or perhaps an up and coming
kernel/Debian/Gentoo/KDE/GNOME hacker from south east asia, doing talks
on what its like to hack in a culture which is quite distinct to our
own.

> >     - 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
> 
> To make this truly effective I think I'd ammend this to read:
> 
> "Each committee member shall speak at LUG-related event or meeting, 
> other than LCA, that's at least 100 km from their hometown and has not 
> already been visited by any other committee member at least once during 
> the year".
> 
> I'm not sure what problem you think this solves, but I can see some 
> benefit in ensuring that the committee are personally active in speaking 
> on behalf of the Linux Australia organisation to the membership of a 
> reasonable number of LUGs each year. With the size of the present 
> executive committee it would result in at least 12 LUGs each year 
> getting at least one speaking attendance from a Linux Australia 
> executive committee member each year. Given the number of active LUGs in 
> Australia this might be viewed as significant.
> 
> >     - 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. Do you mean that Linux Australia should take on an obligation to 
> reasonably honour such requests? It seems to me that the existing Grants 
> scheme might reasonably be extended to cover such requests already. If 
> there is genuine benefit to be had, it's something we should be considering.

I would suggest a complete review of the Grants Scheme. As this year has
shown (yes under my watch as Grants Tzar) it may not be meeting its
targets. Lets have a look at what it should be doing, has the focus
shifted? Do we suck at promoting it?

> Why do they have to be software hackers? Can they not be other active 
> and significant community members? For example, if a LUG in some area 
> were interested in starting a ComputerBank chapter, could they not 
> invite an existing ComputerBank representative to speak?

Software hackers appeal to some and community hackers appeal to others.
A nice mix would do nicely.

> >     - 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
> 
> I'd be interested to know how much value our membership actually feels 
> is associated with this idea. If, for example, we only had enough money 
> to do this, or to organise some annual convention of LUGs, but not both, 
> which would be preferred?
> 
> 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?
> 
> I personally favour the idea of having Linux Australia sponsor some sort 
> of LUG representative get-together. A face-to-face get-together would be 
> expensive, but a regular teleconference could be quite economical.

This could be handled within the framework of LCA perhaps. We may not be
able to afford to fly in every representative who wants to come, but we
could organise something. In the meantime, I'll second Terry's and
others calls for a regular meeting, possibly via teleconference to get
LUGS actually talking to each other (those that want to of course).

> regards
> Terry
> 

-- 
James Purser
Ordinary Committee Member
Linux Australia
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