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 framework for examples of improvements that can make the site more readable and visually appealing.
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.
