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.
      • Social engagement, such as Planet GNOME, Planet Fellowship of FSFE or Planet Debian
      • 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"}