[wplug-board] Draft Minutes for Board Meeting, May 10, 2006

[David Ostroske]

Here are the draft minutes for the May Board meeting. Better late than never.

WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA LINUX USERS GROUP
Scheduled Board Meeting, May 10th, 2006, 7:00pm
8220 Wean Hall, Carnegie Mellon University

CALL TO ORDER
The meeting was called to order at 7:23pm.

4 of the 5 Directors were present at the meeting:
*Beth Lynn Eicher, Vice-Chair
*Bill Moran, Chair
*Chris Teodorski, Director-At-Large
*David Ostroske, Secretary

Patrick Wagstrom, Treasurer, had said that he was unable to attend.

MINUTES
The minutes for the April 12th, 2006 meeting were adopted as
posted. The official minutes are here:
http://www.wplug.org/pipermail/wplug-board/2006-May/000744.html

REPORTS
* Secretary
Dave reported: We have 72 members as of the morning of 5/10/2006.

* Treasurer
Beth and Patrick met briefly during the day of the meeting.

Beth reported the following:
$344.56 has been added to our account from the pre-1999 funding
discovered last month.
We have $19 in the Refreshment Fund.
Beth hasn't filled out the paperwork for the cooler yet. She will do so.
Beth will bring in the receipt for the donuts from the 3/29 event.

* Board
Beth reported that we are in need of better storage containers for the
WPLUG supplies. These supplies are currently in Beth's office due to
work in the Carnegie Mellon machine room where we have stored our
supplies in the past.

* Internet Committee
Bill had nothing to report. Because of the need to prepare for
VMWare's presentation, work on the new server was delayed.

Beth created the wplug-internet mailing list for the committee, and
subscribed the people who she knew were on the committee. Dave will
send Beth the list of committee members.

* Vice Chair
Beth had talked with Jennifer Landefeld, who said that she has made
debits to the WPLUG account in the early past, and that there may
still be others. Jennifer will get back to us on how much she's
withholding on behalf of WPLUG.

* Program Committee
We agreed to a schedule for the GUM on May 17th.

Beth reported that we required venues for the following events:
1 for the GUM in June, probably to be held on the 10th.
2 for meetings in July, probably the 8th for the GUM and the 15th for
the InstallFest.
1 for the August GUM.
And 1 for September 16th, the nominations meeting.

September 23rd is the weekend of the Perl Mongers' workshop, and
September 30th is Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus, OH. The board agreed to
declare this a WPLUG Special Event.

Bill suggested that someone from the Program Committee should ask on
the lists for topics for the June GUM.

* Newsletter Committee
Vance: Nothing new to report.

Beth gave Vance control of the "top" (The Open Pitt) mailing list.

* ErieLUG Revival Committee
Chris: Nothing to report.

We floated the idea of a WPLUG field trip to Erie on June 17.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
* PR Committee
Bill will request volunteers at the next GUM and on the mailing list.

Dave will put PR Committee requests on the May 17th meeting agenda.

We needed to assign duties to the PR Committee. We came up with these ideas:
*Promote T-shirts. Interested parties can order shirts and other goods
from Cafe Press.
*Newsletter and pamphlet distribution. Vance can help with these efforts.
*Procure signage for events.
*Establish partnerships with the Pittsburgh tech community.

* LugRadio
LugRadio is a fortnightly Linux podcast recorded in Britain. They do
an annual live event, and they had expressed interest in doing
something in the U.S. in the past. Chris wrote them an email promoting
WPLUG, saying that we could host such an event for them, and they read
his letter on their April 24th, 2006 podcast.
http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/49
(Comments are about 53 minutes into the show. WARNING: some profanity
in the podcast.)

If we can fund an event, then they're willing to come over. We need to
research this.

Bill moved that we make a feasability study to have this event, in
summer 2007. He will also get details on science fiction conventions
that he is familiar with (e.g. Parsec, Confluence, etc.) and determine
average costs, attendance, manpower needs, etc.)

Chris will let the LUGRadio people know that we're serious and will
tell them more about us. Chris also asked if there would be
conflicting events next summer, and will take that into account.

Beth will put together a report on the Ohio LinuxFest costs, and show
what can be done on a shoestring budget. She will also discuss, with
Perl Mongers, how to promote Pittsburgh as a place to have a meeting
in the United States. In addition, she will ask where they are on the
YAPC '07 application.

Dave suggested talking on the -plan list to get some steam going for a
LugRadio Live USA event. We agreed, though, that we will wait until
after the feasability study is done first. And then, we could make
have such an event a membership meeting topic.

* Membership maintenance issues
Beth will make Dave the wplug-members list's maintainer. Dave will
ping her to discuss this.

Among other list duties, Dave will check that all members are, in
fact, subscribed to the -members list.

We agreed on a policy for handling new membership requests. We will
start all memberships on the date that the new member registers on the
website. Also, we will not take any money from potential new members
unless they register first.

Dave sais that we still need to mirror the membership database. Bill
will get the flat file for the database from Mark Dalrymple.

* Services on Penguin
Bill will ask the -internet and -plan lists about services to put on
the new server. The wiki will be chosen by the Internet Committee.
Beth suggested putting webmail application on the server.

* Openness on mailing list
The board discussed how they will handle discussing topics amongst
themselves. We agreed to the following rule: We will only post
off-topic if we give reasons for doing so, or if our discussion topic
is vague enough that a misunderstanding would cause trouble.

ADJOURNMENT
We adjourned at 9:17pm.

-- 
David Ostroske <eksortso at gmail.com>