1. Meeting overview and key information
Present
- Joel Addison (President)
- Sae Ra Germaine (Vice-President)
- Neill Cox (Secretary)
- Andrew Pam (Council)
- Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
- Jennifer Cox (Council)
- Jonathan Woithe (Council)
Apologies
Not Present
Meeting opened at 19:35 AEST by Joel and quorum was achieved.
Minutes taken by Neill
2. Log of correspondence
- Lodge Linux Australia Activity Statement January..March 2023
- Insurance Doc for WordCamp Sydney
- Everything Open 2025
- Fwd: Public liability certificate expire
- Github PR request created for hardware grant clarifications
- DrupalAsia Budget Review Request
- Fwd: Re: [Linux-aus] LCA2022 SwagBadge
- Re: Fwd: [EO2025 Venue]
- Re: Linux Australia Inc, Client ID 417289 ATTN : Madhura
- Re: Uni Adelaide contact
- ATO CFP, Board election results, Open Source AI 0.07
- Image License Inquiry for Reuters News & Media Inc – Reference Number: 7536-1819-1990 – council will look into this, but our expectation this has no validity
- NZ payment on ANZ to approve [Approved by Sae Ra]
- Tasks for Linux Australia Incorporated
- Draft AGM minutes
- Re: DrupalSouth Invoices for Payment [Done by Russell]
- Re: Payment please and a question about WISE [Russel has responded]
- Linux Australia and WordCamp Central Memorandum of Understanding 2024 revised [Russel has responded – item is complete]
3. Items for discussion
- Drupal sub committee update
Drupal South
Quiet month post Drupal South. Good feedback, but limited responses (40/250) to the post event survey. Should have the final budget for Sydney within the next week .Only one invoice outstanding.
Setting up a new subcommittee for 2025 in Melbourne. Have a potential venue and have done an initial inspection. Should be cheaper than Sydney, but still expensive.
Had a BoF session at Sydney with potential sponsors. WIll have more discussion with them. That will help with finalising the 2025 budget.
Keen to broaden speaker choice. Some feedback that delegates would like a broader range of topics.
Only 3% of speakers identified as being from a diverse/underrepresented group. How do we encourage more diversity?
LA response:
Joel: We have encountered the same problem. Starts with having diverse backgrounds on the session selection committee who can reach out to people from their communities. EO/LCA has not attempted to have a completely blind selection process for a couple of reasons (one we seek to get maintainers, two because we probably can’t fully de-identify.
Sae Ra: We hold a “how to submit a paper” session. We encourage users as well as maintainers to submit papers. THis has helped somewhat. Useful to explain both the process and what is being looked for. Reassuring potential submitters that we’re not harsh critics and are willing to help. Sae Ra is willing to run a session for the Drupal conference, or supply slides.
Committee
Elections coming up, must be held by October. Will aim to hold elections in July. Have one new person helping the committee and another express interest.
Drupal Asia
Ready to go! The Drupal Association is keen to get started. The web page is ready. Hotel is booked. Agency dinner on the first night – networking session. Good opportunity for cross country/culture discussion.
Sponsorship package is ready to go. Based on the existing Drupal Cons. Major sponsors from Europe/North America are keen to be involved. Budget looks good.
Mike will be going to DrupalCon in Portland and announcing DrupalCon Asia, subject to approval from the LA Council.
LA Council will need to hold a formal vote, but the expectation is that it will be approved. Need to sort out insurance as well, some questions to be resolved about whether there is a single venue or not. Good news on the tax from – we do not need to pay GST unless turnover is over $1,000,000.
Still need Jim to push a transaction through Wise. Mike will follow up. We do need two people to operate the bank account because it requires two to sign.
Singapore Tourist Bureau – did not go ahead because of conflicting requirements.
ACTION: That Linux Australia establishes DrupalCon Singapore 2024 as an event subcommittee, in line with the provided budget and plan.
Mover: Joel Addison
Seconder: Jonathan
Passed unanimously
- KiwiPyCon
No update
- Admin team update
Another pass on the mailman migration. The problem is that we are on mailman 1.18. Mailman 2 needs python2.7. Not supported by modern distros. Need to use mailman 3 instead. This is causing some issues converting the archives. One possibility is Debian 10 (but is leaving support on 30 Jun) or Alma Linux which is supported until 2027 . Ubuntu may be another possibility with the recent announcement of 12 years of LTS support.
We’ve had an NVME fail in one of the servers. There is a budget for disk replacement. So that process is about to start.
Next year there will be a face to face meeting for the admin team.
Steve is also about to look into some possible problems with backup destinations.
Sae Ra asks – can we just dump the old archives to flat files rather than trying to convert them? This is possible, but probably not the preferred option.
The plan is to move to mailman 3, but preferably a little later when the admin team has more time available.
The admin@ email address is to be deprecated (unless APNIC requires it). Use admin-team@ instead.
- Joomla sub committee update
Reconnect with Joomla event was held in Brisbane. 19 delegates, which was one below the budget, but unexpected sponsorship meant that a profit was made.
Planning for an event in Melbourne next year has started, expected to have higher numbers.
FInal report is nearly ready. Some issues with banking access for the Joomla treasurer.
A discussion about becoming a Linux Australia subcommittee happened at the event. In principle agreement to continue, but need to simplify the constitution. Rather than copying the Linux Australia constitution Nathan is looking at producing something tailor to Joomla.
If the Joomla subcommittee charges for membership Linux Australia will probably need to charge a fee to cover the costs of processing payments. Probably similar to the fee collected from conferences. The council will discuss this and then talk to the Joomla subcommittee.
Linux Australia agrees to waive the fee for this year’s conference.
- PyCon AU sub committee update
No Update
- Flounder sub committee update
Andrew reports that Flounder is planning to hold an Everything Open retrospective on Saturday.
- LUV sub committee update
Is there any possibility to assist local user groups run hybrid meetings? Do we have any equipment?
We do have some equipment, but we need to look at its suitability. For small meetings would zoom or similar be sufficient?
Someone has approached LA about VHS recordings of old LUV meetings. They would like to get in touch with the current LUV committee to work out what could happen with these, eg. being put on the LA mirror.
- WordPress sub committee update (from Wil, via email to council at 19:41 UT+1000)
Apologies but I [Wil] won’t be able to make 8pm tonight. On the way back from a WordPress meetup.
Here’s a quick update on WordCamp Sydney.
- Site launched
- over 350 people on the email list
- call for sponsors is out
- one secured sponsorship for Sat Evening Social Event, four others interested
- contacting our list of previous and potential sponsors
- Jo and Jordan have still to do LA finance training. Have asked them to hurry up as we’ll soon need access to Xero and Stripe
- hope to announce ticket sales as soon as we have stripe access
That’s all.
Thanks for your support!
Wil.
- Everything Open 2024
Done!
Overall it went pretty well. A few hiccups with AV and streaming, which is unsurprising given it was a new approach.
Kathy’s Report:
EO succeeded because of the work that had been done on many previous conferences.
A number of challenging externalities. Economic issues affected sponsorship and also the remote location was also very expensive. The desire to go into the regions is admirable, but it makes it hard for delegates to attend.
Advice to the council is that we should look for good project management and team leadership skills in the future.
Did we do the right thing in charging for streaming? Did we provide $79 worth of value? Kathy believes that we did, even though it wasn’t perfect. We should charge for it in future because streaming does impose a cost on the conference.
For comms next year – cost of tickets are incredibly low relative to the value provided. Not suggesting that we raise the prices, but we need to communicate the cost to provide it (if we didn’t have volunteer labour) and emphasise the value received.
Recommend that the conference needs a full time communications person. Adelaide should be starting communications now. Comms and media can also help with session selection.
Perhaps we should look to provide some project management training to the lead organisers.
Induction training. Shadowing?
Pipeline – our grass root communities have dissipated post COVID. How do we address this? Encourage local tech meetups? Build relationships with Universities.
- Sorting out NZ banking
Neill and Jenny need to get this done as soon as possible.
4. Items for noting
5. Other business
- Australian Institute of Management (AIM) courses as part of grants?
6. In camera
- One item was discussed in camera
7. Action items
7.1 Completed Items
7.2 Carried Forward
- Respond to DjangoGirls request – Neill Cox
Meeting closed at 21:17
Next meeting is scheduled for 2024-05-08 – 7:30pm AEST / 7:00pm ACST
