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Thursday 20 June 2013

When: 18:00
Where: VPAC Head Office Training Room
Level 1
Building 91
110 Victoria Street
Dinner followed at Classic Curry.

Meeting summary

  • Started with a brainstorm of topic ideas. Ideas included:
    • Ouya - game console based upon Android, and supposedly open.
    • Google Talk being replaced by Google Hangouts
    • PRISM
  • Committee election - Led by Ben Sturmfels
    • The reasons to have dedicated committee members include adding redundancy and stability to the group.
    • After some discussion, it was agreed that committee members are to hold their position for roughly 6 months, after which time another election will take place. If you couldn't make the meeting, you won't have to wait long for your chance.
    • Next election will take place during our January meet-up (possibly during a BBQ).
    • Elected people, positions and responsibilities include:
      • President: Alex Fraser
        • Being a point of contact for the group
        • Defacto responsibility for everything if not otherwise delegated
      • Vice President: Ben Sturmfels
        • Taking in turns with President
      • Secretary: Adam Bolte
        • Sending out announcements to our mailing lists
        • Publishing discussion topic summaries.
      • Treasurer: Ben Finney
        • Handling collected donations
    • Many other people also expressed interest in helping to share responsibilities. Thanks to everyone.
    • Tasks that need to be handled to see our group meetings run smoothly include:
      • Thinking up topics.
      • Coerce people into talking about them. :)
      • Booking a venue.
      • Showing up early to let people in.
      • Organising food and drink.
      • Promoting our group outside of our mailing list.
      • Chairing/coordinating the discussion - making sure we finish up on time
      • Software Freedom Day
      • Special once-off events such as Brett Smith's talk from the FSF.
      • Website, wiki, mailing lists maintenance
  • H-Node (and other hardware considerations) - Adam Bolte
    • If you haven't already done so, stop reading these notes and go add your hardware to the h-node.org database right now! It is important to do this regardless of how well your hardware may or may not work.
    • Hardware must be tested with a fully free-software distribution such as Trisquel to qualify, which can be annoying since many of these free software distributions are slow to support newer hardware.
    • The h-node wiki has a Discover your hardware page that describes how to use dmidecide, lspci, lsusb and lscpu for hardware identification.
    • Bleeding edge GPU/APU graphics compatibility information might be available from the intel, nouveau and radeon project wiki pages.
    • It is possible to make an educated guess as to how well a computer might function with operating systems that comply with the FSF's Guidelines for Free System Distributions.
  • Think Penguin - Ben Finney
    • Hardware that has been thoroughly tested to meet the Free Software Foundation's strict guidelines.
    • The guys there are regulars on the Trisquel site and eager to help work out compatibility issues and the like.
  • Raster Storage Archive is a Java-based project to help store and process geospatial raster datasets, optionally with multiple bands and a temporal component.
    • Alex Fraser has been working on it for 3 years, but only very recently has the project been released as free software, and under the GPLv3 no less.
  • Software Freedom Day - general discussion led by Ben Sturmfels.
    • Definitely some interest in organising something, however we don't want anyone to suffer from burnout.
    • Possible ideas include:
      • Could be low-key. eg. Get together at a pub, restaurant or a BBQ.
      • Write to local papers to highlight the importance of free software, in case they are interested in including an article on it for SFD.
      • Trisquel installfest! Hopefully Trisquel 6.5 will be out by then? Could be combined with Q/A sessions, software demos and gaming, as well going out as a group somewhere to lunch.
      • Talks are a fairly small amount of work to organise.
      • Maybe we can just help LUV with the organisation. eg. we could organise food and tidying up (apparently Lev etc. stayed late to do this last time).
    • Depending on our goals, we may be unable to take on organisation outright, but we are interested in helping.
    • We need to register before July 21 to receive a shipment of promotional material on time.
    • Ben Sturmfels to further discuss with Lev to better determine what extent LUV would play, and what ideas they might be happy to support.
  • Last but not least: Snacks
    • Ben F and Ben M have generously volunteered to be in charge of organising something for our next meet-up.