Council Meeting December 6, 2023 – Minutes

1. Meeting overview and key information

Present

• Joel Addison (President)
• Wil Brown (Vice-President)
• Sae Ra Germaine  (Council)
• Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
• Jonathan Woithe (Council)

• Neill Cox (Secretary)

Apologies

• None received

Not present

• Marcus Herstik (Council)

Meeting opened at 20:07 AEST by Joel and quorum was achieved.

Minutes taken by Neill.

2. Log of correspondence

• 2023-11-23 Xero reconciliations
• 2023-11-27 Action needed for your Wise Business account – Russell has responded
  Note: This also required supplying birth dates for various council members.
• 2023-11-24 Linux Australia’s 2022/2023 audit
• 2023-11-24 Activity Statement from ATO Portal for the auditor – From Russell. The required activity statement has now been provided.
• 2023-11-29 Grant Application from Russell Coker for RISC-V, smart-watch, and tablet computing development
• 2023-11-29 Report for Linux Australia grant: Pinephone development
• 2023-11-30 Report for Linux Australia grant: Girls Canberra #1  
• 2023-11-30 Grant Application from Lyndsey Jackson for Hack The Triangle Digital Skills Holiday Workshops
• 2023-11-30 Audit documents
• 2023-12-01 Grant Application from David M Williams for RISC-V hardware
• 2023-12-01  Grant program update

3. Items for discussion

• Kiwi PyCon 2024
  • Application will be forthcoming for Kiwi PyCon 2024 to run under the auspices of Linux Australia

4. Items for noting

• Jonathan now has all the grant reports and will forward them to the appropriate person for inclusion in the LA Annual Report.

5. Other business

• Drupal subcommittee update
  • Canberra Community day
    • good feedback, went well. Had a waiting list. 112 registrations when the target was 80. 86 people actually attended on the day. Post event survey has had limited responses but they were positive.
    • Budget not finalised yet, but looks like break even or perhaps a small profit.
    • Helped that it was held the day after the GovCMS event. Approx 60% government employees and 40% Drupal agencies. Those government attendees indicated that they would attend if it was held in Canberra again, but less likely to travel.
  • Sydney: planning going well about half of the sponsorships are sold. Seems people may be struggling
    • 85/88 talk  submissions which is typical for the larger Australian conferences. Track chairs are happy with quality.
    • Will be unable to bring someone over from the Drupal Association for a keynote. But may be able to do a panel. Still looking for a few more keynote speakers.
  • The Drupal subcommittee is also looking for other conferences to attend to promote Drupal South. 
  • The Drupal South Subcommittee will try and speak at Everything Open. Possibly as a cross promotional effort.
  • Budgets for past events (Wellington and Canberra) will probably not be finalised until January.

• Admin team update
  • Mainly working with Sae Ra on the test upgrade of the website. Have hit a few issues. Will need to reach out to AgileWare. Will probably require building a new VM once the actual software stack can be determined.

• The admin team are also talking to FastMail to iron out the final details. In particular what LA offers to FastMail for their support. Possibly a pair of tickets to LA events per year. Subject to final approval by LA council.
• Slack billing needs to be looked into, they appear to have a slightly odd billing cycle. Will probably be looking for a replacement for Slack or applying for a not-for-profit licence.

• Joomla subcommittee update

Successfully running hybrid meetings

About time to have a face to face so the Joomla subcommittee is planning a mini Joomla day for 24 February. It will be a single day event. 

• Welcome on Friday night. 
• Program on Saturday. 
• Pizza/Code sprint on Sunday

It’s been three years since the last face to face event!

The goal is to keep the ticket price low. 

• Self fund drinks. 
• Not going to look for sponsors.
• Bring your own T-shirt from previous conferences
• Networking focussed event.
• Rough budgets on 20/40/60 attendees. 
• Will also aim to hold Joomla committee elections.
• Venue will be OPN 365’s office space.

• PyCon AU subcommittee update

The PyCon AU team are unable to attend in person. Richard Jones has supplied this update:

Little has happened since the last update. Our focus has been on trying to secure a chair for the next conference, which is ongoing (but far from hopeless, we’re currently talking to a number of people).

• Flounder subcommittee update

Recent meeting about SEL4, expect to have some more meetings on the topic in the future

Also have recently had meetings about Linux phones 

Meetings tend to have about four attendees. Attendees vary with the topic.

Promoted via the Flounder website, matrix and email

Perhaps LA can help promote on other social media platforms (but it would be help if the council was reminded)

Ideal meeting size would be around 10 people. They tend to be focussed on technical work. If more attendees were present the focus could be shifted to more of a lecture style.

• LUV  subcommittee update

• WordPress subcommittee update
  • Organising team formed: 12 members
  • WordCamp Central orientation meeting
  • WordCamp Sydney 2024 approved – in planning stage
  • Website holding page https://sydney.wordcamp.org/2024/ 
  • Next steps: Organising team onboarding, Venue lockin and dates, Apply to LA to form subcommittee

• Everything Open 2024

Call for sessions has closed 101 quality submissions

No free keynotes, some paid keynotes but they are a bit pricey

Several sponsors have signed up . Happy at this point, but need a few more by January.

Not ready to open ticket sales yet, but will hopefully be ready to in January.