[ILUG] ILUG AGM Announcement

[Niall Walsh]

Niall O Broin wrote:

> This is a reminder that the Annual General Meeting of the Irish Linux 
> Users Group takes place next Saturday, October 16th, starting at 
> 14:00. The Irish Computer Society has kindly allowed us to use the 
> seminar room in their premises in Mount Street ( 
> http://www.ics.ie/main/contact.htm ). Besides carrying out the normal 
> business of an AGM which consists of officers reports, discussion and 
> voting on any proposals made, and election of a new committee, there 
> will be several interesting technical presentations.
>
> If you have any thing you wish the ILUG to do specifically, please 
> submit proposals in advance to committee at linux.ie so that we can have 
> them on the agenda for the AGM.
>
Here are some potential items for discussion at the AGM.

Website Issues

1.    Copyright.
Discuss the issue of "copyright" as it applies to documents on the site 
(could/should we not use a Creative Commons or similar license?)

2.    Authors
Contacting all authors of material on the site to establish whether they 
still wish to be regarded as the primary author/maintainer of documents 
they are credited with and encouraging them to update them (if required) 
if they do

3.    Archive
"Archiving" all content which has dated to the point of no longer being 
appropriate (except for people with old systems)

4.    Validity/Todo
Adding a system to validate documents, so the site can auto create a 
list of the documents which have gone the longest without being checked 
for validity and the documents which are  no longer valid and need work 
(a todo of sorts) .   Ensure visitors will know when they are reading 
documents which are out-of-date.

5.   Tips
Discuss the "tips" section of the site's purpose to determine if it 
should remain as is, be converted to a forum style system or perhaps 
dropped as it doesn't appear to be used and may be giving a bad 
impression of our community?

6   CMS
Discuss whether it is more appropriate to have our own custom content 
management system or whether we would be better moving to externally 
developed tools (e.g. wiki, forum)

Face 2 Face

Initiate a "project" for regular F2F events.   Decide that the nth 
weekend of every month (for example) will see an ILUG event somewhere in 
the country, be it some talks, a lan party/installfest, a party, a 
demonstration or whatever else anyone will organise, but have a stated 
objective of running regular events.

Legality of Free Software in Ireland

Discuss a "project" to liaise with all other interested parties to 
gather/create/provide information on legal issues impacting Free 
Software users and developers in Ireland, including covering proposed 
changes to the law and recent legal decisions.  Specifically I would be 
thinking of things like software patents and the access control 
provisions of the 2002 Copyright act.   I do not propose that ILUG alone 
attempts to cover this area, but we should attempt to group with 
OpenIreland, FSF Europe, BUGI and any other relevant and interested 
party to both minimise duplicated efforts and to provide a united 
front?   To provide a simple example of the relevance of this, is it 
legal for ILUG to put up a page describing how to enable DVD playing 
under Linux including mirroring (and/or linking to) the required code 
(such as libdvdcss).

Linux.ie Infrastructure

Document the linux.ie infrastructure (hardware and software) and utilise 
each new stable release of debian as an opportunity to make changes 
which will remain in place (baring disaster) until the next release.  
This means that we can have a cycle for our bickering over changes to 
the infrastructure so we can generally concentrate on getting on with 
things rather then constantly going back over the same debates about 
technicalities.

> ILUG is YOUR organisation, so this AGM is for YOU. If you want to 
> fundamentally influence where ILUG goes over the next year, the AGM is 
> where you need to be next Saturday.


I hope to see YOU there, whoever YOU are!

Niall Walsh