= Thursday 20 June 2013 =
||<style="border:none; vertical-align: top;"> '''When:''' ||<style="border:none;"> 18:00 ||
||<style="border:none; vertical-align: top;"> '''Where:''' ||<style="border:none;"> VPAC Head Office Training Room<<BR>> Level 1<<BR>>Building 91<<BR>>110 Victoria Street<<BR>>Dinner followed at [[http://classiccurry.com/city_menu.html|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.
* The Fetch ([[http://thefetch.com/]]?)
* What's On in Melbourne
* [[http://www.rrr.org.au/|Triple R]]
* 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.
* [[http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/|Website]], [[http://wiki.freesoftware.asn.au/|wiki]], [[http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aust-free-software|mailing lists]] maintenance
* [[http://h-node.org/|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 [[http://h-node.org/|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 [[https://trisquel.info/|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 [[http://h-node.org/wiki/page/en/Discover-your-hardware|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 [[http://www.x.org/wiki/intel|intel]], [[http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/|nouveau]] and [[http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon|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 [[https://www.fsf.org/|FSF]]'s [[https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html|Guidelines for Free System Distributions]].
* [[https://www.thinkpenguin.com/|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 [[https://trisquel.info/|Trisquel]] site and eager to help work out compatibility issues and the like.
* [[https://github.com/vpac/rsa|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.
* [[http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/|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.
* [[https://trisquel.info/|Trisquel]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installfest#Installfests|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.
* Dinner at Classic Curry
* Topics included:
* [[http://bitcoin.org/|Bitcoin]]
* Debian and [[http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/fsf-collab-discuss|failed FSF compliance discussions]]
* Proposed changes for the Debian release cycle, where testing is always in a releasable state.
* Programming in [[http://ocaml.org/|OCaml]]
* [[http://owncloud.org/|ownCloud]] (is our new president secretly using Dropbox???)
* [[https://identi.ca/|Identi.ca]] to be replaced with [[http://pump.io/|Pump.io]] ([[https://identi.ca/doc/pumpio|sometime this week]]!), with the [[http://status.net/|StatusNet]] fork [[https://www.gnu.org/software/social/|GNU Social]] to take over leading the !StatusNet code-base.
* New [[http://www.mediagoblin.org/|MediaGoblin]] release (and probably with lots of baby photos floating around the web to help show it off!)
* Is OpenID dying?
