# 20130801 - Oriental Tea House (Little Collins St.) #
## Planned Agenda ##
* Committe members intro
* How we each become interested in free software
* Current interests
* Brainstorming about where we'd like to take Free Software Melbourne
* What are we doing well?
* What aren't we doing so well?
* What would we like to work on over the next few months?
* Sharing committee member phone numbers
* Guidelines for mail list usage.
* Pirate Party at the next meet-up.
* Software Freedom Day
* Meetup.com: Lev recommends highly, Ben S. a little unsure
* Other agenda topics for the next meet-up, including:
* ownCloud
## Meeting discussion notes ##
* Where to take FSM?
* Things we feel we have been doing well include:
* Still strong 3 years in
* Name tags
* New members; regular & casual members
* Cater more as a discussion group among peers, so opinions are shared.
* Topics are engaging
* Non-regular meetings have worked well too: BBQ, games night
* Website active, current topics listed.
* No inappropriate conduct to date.
* Having members of the Women in Free Software group participate.
* Things we can improve on include:
* Delegation of chores: food, after meeting, clean-up.
* Appeal to demographics other than young single men in CBD.
* eg. parents, distant living
* Key people have been missed, such as members of the Women in free software group.
* Mailing list - make topics more clear?
* include different mediums?
* web forum apps?
* Website polish. Suggestions include:
* CSS styling improvements. See the [Twitter Bootstrap](http://twbs.github.io/bootstrap/) framework for examples of improvements that can make the site more readable and visually appealing.
* Social engagement, such as [Planet GNOME](https://planet.gnome.org/), [Planet Fellowship of FSFE](http://planet.fsfe.org/) or [Planet Debian](http://planet.debian.org/)
* Links to wiki topics pages, perhaps automated via a cron job or some such to always be up-to-date.
* Possibly distancing ourselves from *Australian Free Software Association* which appear defunct. Perhaps the website base directory should serve as an index for user groups associated with "Free Software Australia", which aggregates all activity across the country?
* Better structure in regular meetings
* Predictable schedule
* Food & drink, general stack organisation
* Should we consider finding funding (perhaps through membership fees), and take a cut for a food budget?
* Possibly advertise food options up front
* Tidy-up at the end
* Outreach and Promotion
* Aspects of software freedom to promote, including:
* Privacy
* flexibility
* Take advantage of current events
* outreach to specific, related groups
* Posters could be placed around RMIT and Melbourne Uni.
* Determine how to engage more people, and interest those new to the idea?
* *The Lifelong Activist* has been suggested as a good read.
* Women in free software meeting
* Social conduct, encouraging
* Ideas to give more thought to:
* Funding for consistency WRT provided food and drink for meetings
* Donations/activism to other groups.
* Affiliation with other activist groups?
* Remote access to meetings
* Audio recordings
* Live
* Software Freedom Day, and other events.
* Survey of members' preferences on meetings, such as:
* Venue
* time slots
* topics of interest
* format
* Demographics of members
* Aggregation of member blogs posts (see 'Social engagement', above).
* We love the new room... although Alex says that getting it regularly could be problematic.
* Meeting agenda for 2013-08-15
* Ben McGinnes, Pirate Party Australia
* Regain some privacy from government and corporate abuse with GPG.
* NSA, PRISM
* key signing, WOT
* Ask people to bring in photo IDs and certificate fingerprints.
* Software Freedom Day 2013
* Lev eager for help/delegation.
* Adam and somebody else (Ben M or Sven?) to assist.
* Other action items:
* meetup.com
* Alex to investigate and report back.
* Syndication feed for events
* New opening available for the role of *Walled-garden services ambassadors*
* We will ask a member who already uses such services (eg. Twitter, Facebook) and who can publicise meeting notifications and special messages.
* Committee member phone numbers to be shared with each other. Alex to have his GPG fingerprint confirmed.
* Committee member phone numbers to be shared with each other. Alex to have his GPG fingerprint confirmed.{: page-href="wiki:///CommitteeMeetings/20130801"}
