Committee Meeting, 2014-07-03

Original meeting notes

Attending

  • Adam B.
  • Ben F.

Apologies

  • Ben S.
  • Andrew S.

Meet-up Agenda

Action Item Status

  • Update on tasks from previous meetings
    • Ben S: Still to talk to large LibrePlanet group and contact admins about using their wiki (assumed to be on hold)
    • Ben F.: Successfully contacted Jon Lawrence of EFA and scheduled a meeting
  • Confirm details of upcoming meeting (Thu 2014-07-17)
  • Andrew S. investigation of alternative dinner venues
  • Ben F. now has access card entry for VPAC training room, hooray!

Infrastructure

  • Mailing list hosting
    • Members have received bounces from posts to the list
    • Ben F.: look into set Mail-Followup-To set to the general discussion forum?
    • Currently hosted from Ben S.'s host, not for administration by others
    • Ben F. to investigate hosting mailing lists from own server
      • improve expected up-time, administration by multiple FSM committee members

Meeting Structure for 2014-07-17, 18:00–20:00

Gnews: (duration: 0:45)

Adam B.: send Gnews notes to (acting) Secretary prior to meeting

Meet a member: (duration: 0:15)

  • Les K. to continue on from the month before? When is Les back?
  • Adam B.: ping Les K. to see if he's able and willing. (e-mail sent 2014-07-03)
    • Unable to this month, but seems will be back for next time.
    • Brian May agreed to speak, but mentioned he has to leave no later than 8pm.
    • Chris Samuel provided the following, to be considered CC-BY:

My first taste of Free Software was around 1990-92 when I was a the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and I was helping out at the Computer Unit there. I was asked to build the latest version of X11 (then X11R5) for the MIPS based DECstations in the graphics lab. That was my first taste of free software.
Next on the list was getting GCC (1.x from memory) going too, which took many hours to compiler a full bootstrap.

I got into Linux around 1993 when I needed something at work better than KA9Q for getting onto the systems and I had friends who were already using it (and one contributing to the kernel). I got my own PC to run Linux on that same year and never looked back. I've gone from using a friends distro to the MCC Interim distribution through Slackware to Red Hat to Mandrake to Mandriva to Gentoo and finally (for now) to Kubuntu.

In early 1994 I went to work at a research lab in the UK for a group doing portable compiler development. They had about a dozen different UNIX variants on almost as many hardware platforms and so having a consistent set of tools was vital. So we would build bash, zsh, the AMD automounter, GCC, GNU Make, GNU fileutils, GNU tar, Perl, etc, etc, etc on each of them. Well, apart from SCO Unix where we couldn't use the AMD automounter as they hadn't gotten around to implementing symbolic links then.

So I came into free software from perhaps a different angle from others in the group, that of portability of toolsets, something that was vital back then and which was possible because everyone could contribute back to the pool and those changes could be passed on to others.

Main Feature (approx. 0:45)

Links:

  • http://tppaustralia.org/what-is-the-tppa/ (with short video)

  • http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

  • Jon Lawrence of EFA

    • Described Jon's role as being dicussion lead, no fixed presentation expected.
  • Do we need another topic? Perhaps as a backup in case Jon suddenly can't make it (which we seem to have happen a lot with guest speakers)? Suggestions?
    • Have the discussion anyway; the preference is that Jon L. leads it, but we can have the discussion in his absence.
    • Adam B. to become up-to-date on latest TPP developments, as back-up discussion lead.
    • Ben F.: find and link Economix graphic-novel explanation of TPP's effects on trade, especially Australia - done, and posted to the list (and added above)

Other

Dinner

  • Classic Curry (or other suggestion)

Goals, Ideas and Suggestions

  • Publicise committee meetings so the group knows that they happen, and when
  • Let general discussion forum know where to find committee meeting notes after they're published
    • Hope to get more involvement and suggestions for what our elected committee should do :-)

Future meeting topics

  • Adam B.: Password management: freedom and privacy
  • (someone): Mobile apps to help with freedom and privacy (e.g. emergency distress call, track a stolen phone, detect MitM, etc.)

Other