WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20140715

From WPLUG
Revision as of 15:17, 18 August 2014 by Jprostko (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search

Venue Info

Meeting to be held at Pittsburgh Filmmakers at 7:30pm, Tuesday, July 15, 2014.

Agenda

  • Approve minutes of June 24 board meeting
  • Discuss the summer picnic
  • Discuss the server migration
  • List your item here
  • List your item here

Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 7:56 PM with all board members present.

Reports of officers

The chair discussed that Drupal Camp had contacted Pittsburgh Filmmakers about their location being a possible future venue. Brett (from Peerless Design Inc.?) made the initial contact with Filmmakers. The chair thought this could work, and perhaps in exchange for being able to use the space, the Drupal Camp people can give out Drupal lessons to Filmmakers students. Also, as part of the deal, it would be great if the Drupal Camp people could give WPLUG a mention.

The Vice Chair has nothing to report.

The Secretary has nothing to report.

The Treasurer mentioned that nothing changed money-wise since the business meeting this previous Saturday.

The Director-at-Large has nothing to report.

New Business

Discussion started with the upcoming WPLUG open source picnic. It was decided that perhaps the picnic should be delayed a bit more than originally planned, just to be sure that the shelter rental can be done easily. Also, it may be possible to do a joint picnic with SNAPGH, as they have one upcoming as well. It would also be nice to get some of the Drupal Camp people involved, if possible.

The next item of discussion was the upcoming wplug.org server migration. It was decided to just stay with Linode, even though there was some discussion previously about perhaps going with DigitalOcean instead. The plan is to deploy CentOS 7 and try to make an environment that is pretty much the same as the old server. Things to keep in mind are the use of systemd and firewalld by default on CentOS 7. The idea is to pick a time, and get a team together and get this all taken care over the course of one or two days.

For the upcoming GUM, one idea was to have a meeting where the topic is legal issues, particularly relating to open source licenses. The Vice Chair mentioned perhaps having a woman who spoke with Hack Pittsburgh come and speak at a WPLUG general meeting. She is an IP lawyer, and is quite knowledgeable. The plan is to contact her to see if she'd be willing to speak at an upcoming GUM, whether it is the next one in September, or another one in the near future. If she agrees to talk, it would be good to reach out to traditional media to spread the word. Businesses in particular might be interested in this talk. Perhaps even a piece in a newspaper like the Pittsburgh Business Times could be done, for example. If she isn't available, perhaps a Skype or Hangout could be done with someone with the Free Software Foundation.

As a fallback plan for September, some topics could be OpenAFS, Android, or security and privacy. Other ideas are having lightning talks, or perhaps a movie at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin would be a great movie to show, for example. It is probably a good idea to always have a fallback plan, just in case a speaker cancels without much warning, for instance.

The Vice Chair will contact people about having the legal talk set for now for the September talk. It was discussed that maybe more than one speaker could present that day, but based on past experience, it may not be a good idea, as time to present is limited on a GUM day. The focus of the talk will likely be something about how to choose a software license, and what are the ramifications of that choice.

Finally, the Chair brought up what WPLUG will be doing at the Ohio Linuxfest this year. Last year a couple of members from WPLUG initiated a Birds of Feathers discussion about the future of Linux Users Groups. Birds of Feathers may be going away this year though in favor of lightning talks. It would be good if WPLUG did something during this window, whether it is a Birds of Feathers discussion or else a lightning talk or two. This can be discussed more at an upcoming board meeting.

The meeting concluded at 9:19 PM.