Group: Manchester/2008-04-15/Minutes

Minutes of Meeting on 2008-03-18

17:30, Tuesday 15th April 2008

Attendance: Simon, Andy, Lucy, Paul, Tim

Apologies: Dave

Minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes of the previous meeting on 18th March 2008 were approved.

Announcements

• Richard Stallman is coming to give a talk at the University of Manchester on the 1st May (see further discussion under any other business).

Chairperson

It was agreed that Simon should continue as temporary chairperson until the next meeting, by which time a permanent chairperson will have been elected. We also agreed to review the position after a period of six months.

ACTION: Simon to send a message to the mailing list about nominations and voting for a permanent chairperson.

Decision making

It was agreed that restricting decision making to these meetings was not sufficiently flexible, and therefore decisions should be taken over the mailing list where possible in order to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to get involved. It was also agreed that we would seek consensus wherever possible, but in the case of contentious issues it would be the responsibility of the chairperson to ensure that a vote is held with a reasonable amount of time so as not to allow a discussion to drag on indefinitely.

We agreed that the simplest way to resolve matters where a vote is required would be to present the mailing list with the available options and vote using a simple majority with the most popular option being carried forward. Anyone subscribed to the mailing list at the time of the vote being taken would be eligible to cast a vote.

Speakers

Suggestions for speakers are all over the place at the moment - Andy is currently trying to keep these centralised in the wiki. Andy also reported that he has had encouraging reponses from one or two people at the BBC, who may be able to give a talk about Dirac. Steve McIntyre (Debian Project Leader) was also suggested as a potential future speaker. It was agreed that personal contacts were more likely to elicit a response. Expenses for speakers were also discussed briefly - at the moment we have no funds to offer to pay expenses but it would be useful if we could do this in the future.

ACTION: Andy to follow up his existing contacts with the aim of gaining speakers for future talks.

Venues

MDDA may not be available as of June, though this is not yet confirmed. It would be useful if we could find an alternative venue to use should MDDA no longer be available.

ACTION: Paul to ask Dave about other venues which we might want to consider.

Any other business

1. Website

Several people pointed out that it would be useful to update the website in order to include information on MDDA access and more general information. In particular, a 'how to get involved' page was suggested in order to let people know how to sign up to the mailing list, advertise these meetings etc. Alternative hosting for the site was also discussed, as it is currently difficult to edit things in the way they are currently set up. Andy offered to do some work on the site if necessary.

2. Domain name

Our current domain name, manchester.fsuk.org, is registered by Matt Leeand we cannot easily add new email addresses, change hosting etc. Simon has already set up an email alias on his site (fsuk-manchester@bleah.co.uk) but this is not ideal. It was decided that we needed a generic domain name instead of a Manchester-specific one, as this would allow us to offer support to new free software groups which might start up in the UK. Two suggestions were made for a new domain for the group, ukfsg.org and fsug.org.uk, which will be passed on to the mailing list.

3. Videos

Andy is still chasing Alex Hudson for the slides for his talk but has not heard back yet. John Leach has offered to give his slides to us today.

4. RMS talk

It was agreed that having a Manchester Free Software presence at this event would be useful, particularly if we could hand out flyers promoting the group.

ACTION: Andy to speak to Dave Love about flyers.

Next meeting

It was agreed that the following items will form the agenda for the next meeting:

• Announce chairperson
• Speakers and venue
• Site and domain name decision

After some discussion, it was agreed that the next meeting would be held at 17:30 on Tuesday 20th May 2008, venue to be confirmed.

ACTION: Paul to email the list requesting further agenda items to be supplied at least one week before the next meeting.