Minutes of Linux Australia – Annual General Meeting 2024

Saturday 20th  January 2024, 14:30pm (AEDT)

Video conference via Zoom.

Attendance record is available upon request

Meeting started at 14:35pm AEDT.

 

Apologies:

• Lyndsey Jackson
• Jennifer Cox

 

1. President’s welcome

MR JOEL ADDISON, President

Acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet

 

2. Approval of the minutes from the previous Annual General Meeting 2023

MOTION by JOEL ADDISON that the minutes of the Annual General Meeting 2023 of Linux Australia be accepted as complete and accurate.

Seconded by Neill Cox

Motion Passed with 82% Yay 18% abstains, no nays

 

3. To receive the REPORTS of activities of the preceding year from OFFICE BEARERS

MR JOEL ADDISON – President

The full reports is attached to the annual report, so only a few highlights here:

• Quite happy to see much more of the community come back in 2023 to run events
  • Drupal South was a standout with a number of events run, and sell out
  • Good to see PyConAu return as well after a year off
  • Thank you to the team that ran Everything Open in Melbourne – it was quite a successful event
  • The WordPress and Joomla communities are also starting up face to face events as well. WordPress have had several meetups and are looking to form a subcommittee to run more events. Joomla have been meeting online and are also looking towards face to face events.
• The main focus for the coming year is reviewing everything we’re doing and making sure we are setting ourselves up for the future. We’ve had a few years of keeping everything running while things moved online or stopped. Now it’s time to move on from that and look towards the future.
  • Time to get people more engaged and build up the community again.
  • We have a number of conferences coming up but we need to make sure we have a pipeline
  • We also need to look at some of out long term programs to make sure they are still working
  • The grants program in particular should be reviewed
  • Investigate how we can better engage the membership and get them involved in more than just our conferences
• Thanks to everyone on the committee for the last 12 months, especially to Wil who has just finished two years as vice president. It has been good to have him bring a different perspective to the council.

Questions:

• One question on grant applications: What type of grant applications were you hoping for which didn’t happen?
  • We had two categories of grant applications this year, one for community building and the other for the more traditional grants for projects
  • The community building grants did not get as much take up as expected. So we need to work on that.and improve our connections to all the groups in our community.
  • For the standard grants we need to have a discussion about how we track success of the grants. We are keen to support people purchasing hardware or working on software, but we need to do a better job of showing the benefit to the community,

 

MR NEILL COX  – Secretary

 

Attending from a remote location and don’t have the secretary’s report available. The summary is that a lot of support was provided by other committee members. It has been a privilege to be part of the council and the goal for the coming year is to actually better fulfil the role.

 

MR RUSSELL STUART – Treasurer – Includes presentation of the Auditor’s Report

 

Full report attached to the Annual Report.

 

We had budgeted expenditure of $80,000 but in the end only spent $19,000.

 

A very conservative outcome.

 

We moved most of our spare cash into a term deposit. Locked in for two years, but at the end of that period we will see a considerable return.

Conferences have not yet recovered from Covid, and it looks they won’t for a while yet which will cause our income to drop

One outstanding expenditure was the NZ Python User Group who got themselves into a difficult situation which has been reported separately by Sae Ra. We agreed to sponsor them to the amount of $55,000. The chances are that they will repay this but, in the short term this will allow them to run Kiwi PyCon. As a result we are forecasting a loss for this financial year.

P&L for conferences are detailed in the report, but we have carried across a large deposit from PyConAU which dates back to 2021. The expense was recorded by the auditors in the year we incurred it. In actual fact we had an asset, and this year when the conference ran the auditor showed a significant profit because we did not have to pay for the venue.

 

Drupal South carried across a number of expenses and some profit from the previous year.

In summary we expect to make a loss this year due to our sponsorship of NZPug which we will probably recover, but

Questions

From the AGM chat by Hamilton: what about using project based accounting?.

Response: that this is actually what we do, but some projects cross financial years

 

From Kathy “Is this a sponsorship agreement, an auspice agreement or both”

Response: Both. For NZPug it is a sponsorship agreement spanning 5 years. Linux Australia will also auspice KiwiPyCon.

 

Russell also commends Everything Open 2024 which he is also treasurer of. He highly recommends that everyone goes to that conference in Gladstone

4. Motions:

• MOTION by Russell Stuart that the Auditor’s Report is a true statement of financial accounts.
  • Seconded by Joel Addison
    • 91% Yae
    • 0% Nays
    • 9% Abstain
• MOTION by Joel Addison that the President’s report is correct.
  • Seconded by Russell Stuart
    • 95% Yae
    • 0% Nays
    • 5% Abstain
• MOTION by Neill Cox that the Secretary’s report is correct.
  • Seconded by Sae Ra Germaine
    • 95% Yae
    • 0% Nays
    • 5% Abstain
• MOTION by Russell Stuart that the Treasurer’s report is correct.
  • Seconded by Wil Brown
    • 86% Yae
    • 0% Nays
    • 14% Abstain
• MOTION by Joel Addison that the actions of Council during 2023 are endorsed by the membership.
  • Seconded by Neill Cox
    • 91% Yae
    • 0% Nays
    • 9% Abstain

5. Questions from the membership

• Morgan Serong questioned the use of non-Open Source software by Linux Australia.
  • Joel responded with Linux Australia has always used a range of technologies and the choice of the technology is based on requirements. Whilst we prefer to use all open source tools this may not necessarily be possible due to the lack of functionality. However a review will be conducted.
  • Secondly Morgan feels that we are not doing well by our disabled community, in particular not running Everything Open as a hybrid conference so we can’t support people who can’t physically attend the conference. Margan says we need to do better. If we can’t support live remote talks we should still accept the proposal and allow it to be presented as a pre-recorded talk. This would allow the speaker to be recognised as having a talk worthy of acceptance.
    Morgan wrote to the secretary but received no reply.

Morgan also suggests that we consider starting a journal that people could submit papers to. Do people think that anybody would be interested in submitting papers to such a journal?

 

Response from Joel: We have looked at alternatives for zoom and other proprietary software, but we have not yet had time to find viable alternatives. We will look at this in this term. In reference to Everything Open, we have always tried to provide recordings, and hope to have a streaming service available for this year, but have not been able to finalise arrangements with the venue. We have accepted remote and pre-recorded talks.

 

Finally, we will need to have some discussion about the possibility of publishing a journal. We may not have sufficient academic expertise to publish a journal.

 

Final question from Morgan “Are we really paying for people to fly from the northern hemisphere to speak at the conference?”

Response from Joel: Yes, to encourage speakers who would not be able to attend otherwise. We do try to avoid that

 

Follow up question from Morgan: “Do we have a policy about climate?”

Response from Joel: No, we do not.

• Kathy Reid requested an indication of if the financing of NZPUG is to be considered to be a Sponsorship agreement or Auspicing or both.
  • Russell Stuart responded with  that NZPUG is sponsored by Linux Australia and that KiwiPyCon is now running under the auspices of Linux Australia

6. DECLARATION of Election and WELCOME of incoming Council by the Returning Officer

Returning Officer Julien Goodwin gives his report. The election was held via CiviCRM once again, and had no issues based on review of results. One strong note is that the CiviCRM election module user interface doesn’t implement removal of candidates already voted into named roles. The raw numbers are still correct though.

Results

• President: Joel Addison
• Vice President: Sae Ra Germaine
• Secretary: Neill Cox
• Treasurer: Russell Stuart
• Ordinary Council Members (alphabetical order):
  • Jennifer Cox
  • Andrew Pam
  • Jonathan Woithe

 

Questions

• Question from Katie McLaughlin : “With 68 voting members, what percentage of membership was that? I don’t think it was mentioned if we met quorum”

Response from Julien: W It’s quite a low percentage, quorum is only five members. This is addressed in the report.

• Question from Hamilton “Does CiviCRM have duplicate roles in results?”
  Response from Julien: The software does not remove candidates if they are eliminated after voting is started (because they were elected to a higher position). The data is there to confirm the results, but particularly for the OCM positions CiviCRM does not eliminate candidates. This a known issue
  Response from Joel: We do intend to address this in the current council..
• Question about confirming nominations in the system from Hamilton Walker: Have we made any changes in response to Hamilton’s difficulties in nominating last year.
  Joel responded that no changes have been made to the system.

 

7. Other Business

• Morgan moved the following motion:
  • I move that Linux Australia adopt as a priority that it uses FOSS software for all purposes. I further move that we offer grants to people to improve existing OS software to add functionality to support Linux Australia’s needs.
    • 25% Yae
    • 45% Nays
    • 30% Abstain

Suggestion from Josh that perhaps the motion failed because of confusion about the wording of the motion. Suggests that a new motion be raised if anyone feels strongly enough.

 

Kathy: in response to Morgan’s question. Kathy opposed the motion on the basis that our resources are already spread too thin. She did agree that raising the issue was worthwhile. Not opposed to the goal of using universally available open source solutions, but concerned that we do not have enough volunteers to do the work.

Andrew: We should have asked for people to speak before and after the motion before it was raised. Good that we are having the discussion now, but we should in future do it before the motion is raised.

Morgan: Understands Kathy’s point about lack of volunteers, but he still feels that using Free and Open Source Software is at the heart of what this organisation is about and should be a key priority.

Joel: Regardless of the outcome of the motion we will definitely be looking for open source alternatives and will report back to the members by the middle of the year on our progress,

 

Email: Over the last few months we have been migrating email to new systems which has caused some instability. Hopefully these issues have been addressed.

Emailing council@, and individual positions (e.g. secretary@). Email lists Please let the council know if you run into any problems.

 

Russel Coker: Asks if we could have a wiki for these things.

Joel: We used to have one, but we don’t have the resources to run one.

 

Andrew: Important to assume good will and avoid getting over excited about disagreements. Discussions about resources and priorities will always need to be had, but import ant to remember that we are all doing our best and assume good will and not allow perceived disagreement to taken to heart.

 

Russell Coker: The suggestion of a wiki is to use it as a place to address the reasons for using proprietary software and allow people to apply for grants or ways to allow use of open source alternatives instead. Russell would be happy to run it, but we would need more than one person.

 

Re: Why are we using Zoom?

Response from Joes: Because in the past open source alternatives did not scale to the size of the meetings we need to run.

 

Joel: In conclusion – Everything Open will be in April, please look at attending.

 

Meeting closed at 15:46 AEDT

 

AGM Minutes Confirmed by 2024 Linux Australia Council

 

Joel Addison President	Sae Ra Germaine Vice-President	Neill Cox Secretary
Russell Stuart Treasurer	Andrew Pam Ordinary Council Member	Jennifer Cox Ordinary Council Member
Jonathan Woithe Ordinary Council Member