[Fsuk-manchester] Minutes of Manchester Free Software meeting (15/04/2008)

[Paul Waring]

Manchester Free Software Minutes
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 Lee
and we cannot easily add new email addresses, change hosting etc. Simon
has already set up an email alias on his site
(address@hidden) 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.

ACTION: Simon to email list with suggestions of domain names.

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.