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

[Janet Hawtin <lucychili@internode.on.net>]

hi folks

i think if we could progress the pli for lugs and foss projects it would be a 
good infrastructure thing to be able to do. (declare personal interest - it 
would be great to be able to cover bettong so we can do community events without 
the 700 overhead) this directly makes it more possible for people to do stuff in 
AU. ideally i think it would be good if we could find local councils who 
understand foss and who eventually sponsor our pli so that foss funds can be 
spent on actual fossness rather than permission to do fossness but where that is 
still a work in progress having LA backing would be good.

i think if we pay for a speaker it would be good if it could get to the lugs 
generally rather than one decided on numbers.
some people wont want to do a tour and thats fine but it would be great to do a 
video of those events. i find videos of moglen and doctorow etc very informative
it would be great if we could collect foss casts and videos of the speakers we 
pay for, means that you can have a lug of 3 and still get some interesting 
information which you wouldnt have seen without LA support.
does this mean we have a video camera that has an airport proof carry case and 
get it sent around for special speaker recordings or is that too high risk?
i am going to see if i can find a group that hires video cameras locally.

barcamp is interesting and challenging
venues which permit sleepovers look to be fewer now that pli has changed fire 
safety guidelines or some such.
getting bandwidth on paid for for the event. trying to run an event which doesnt 
have the same kind of big ticket profile as LCA, which internationally has an 
expectation that sponsors will flock and you'll get to do it free with tshirts 
and locally which feels like it will generate around 60 people doing interesting 
things for a weekend and will likely be self funded byo type of thing.
it is hard eg to have something which is open to all where you offer to provide 
food and drinks and camp freely with a random number of people coming etc.
perhaps we do a card which gets stamped like the adelaide lca icecreams.
how can LA best support that kind of activity? tshirts are a high effort item
because getting all the right sizes sent out is a bit fiddly but perhaps that is 
the kind of thing where the economy of scale of doing that across all australian 
barcapms would be good? if so we would need to get the sponsorship approved in 
time to allow the groups to order and the printers time to do the shirts.
Perhaps there is a better project than shirts which would promote foss for all 
barcamps?

would it be possible to use LA money to start a program on the activities 
happening around australia for community TV? we probably dont lead with a 
sponsor offer to the community tv station but lead with a how do we contribute a 
program offer and use the funds as we need to.

long term and far away if we save up i think it would be great for
LA to be able to buy some spaces where foss can be promoted so that
lobbying for a space to show people free software is no longer a problem.
we own our spaces and people will always be able to find access to these 
technologies there.

there is a half built building in adelaide across the road from where they are 
closing the technology school of the future available for 170k in a 
neighbourhood full of 350k properties on the fringe of the city.
it would take a lot of work to make it viable and i dont think we are probably 
ready for that kind of thing right now but it did make me think when i saw it 
that owning our own spaces would put us in a different league.
http://www.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=o&id=103462836&f=0&p=10&t=res&ty=&fmt=&header=&c=45225857&s=sa&snf=rbs&tm=1168292934

And heres one they prepared earlier
http://www.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=o&id=103462836&f=0&p=10&t=res&ty=&fmt=&header=&c=45225857&s=sa&snf=rbs&tm=1168292934

Cheers

Janet