[H-ADMIN] [H-ANNOUNCE] 14/11/2009 Exec meeting minutes

[matt]

Hi Clinton,
Apart from the issues that I raised in my email on the 6th I must admit
the minutes are getting better. So good job. However there still is a
bit more cleaning up to do (much like my old rented apartment). 

1. I would change the title from "Email addresses on home page" to
"Email List Discussion". The main reason is that it makes clear what we
were talking about.

Also while I did supply the notes for it (thanks for including them and
giving me credit) the question "I think I agreed to do this but I'm not
sure. either way I'm quite happy to do it." was a question that I was
asking of the rest of the exec (my fault I didn't include the question
mark). It could now be changed to "Matthew agrees to do it" as no one
has said that I haven't and I've already done it.

2. The "Sysadmin Team Report" could be filled with the second section of
the report by Stephen Thomas. On the same note the next two headings
"Talks Liaison" and "Event Coordinator" just put down "Nothing to
report" as I didn't have anything to report. Should've, would've,
could've.

3. "Uncompleted Actions" could be moved between the reports and "Other
Agenda Items" as these are things that need to be addressed at the
meeting. I think the way that James has it set up in the
/Exec/MinutesTemplate works the best as it makes clear what needs to be
done and what has been done. However if you don't want to do it James'
way then at least make it clear what items still need to be worked on. 

4. What were the "Uncompleted Actions" and what was the results? You
seem to have the items there but they are peppered throughout the
minutes. Most of them within the President's report.

Example: Get Scott Wilson's PO Box Key - It was believed that Scott
Wilson had the PO Box Key. After some questioning of the Exec and Scott
we believed it has gone missing. Action: Get another PO Box Key cut.
Person Responsible: //Clinton can you you remember? Since I can't. If
not then maybe Mark or Russell can as they were there main people
involved.  

5. Put a colon just after the word motion.
Example: "MOTION raised by Russell to accept the report, passed
unanimously." would be changed to "MOTION: raised by Russell to accept
the report, passed unanimously." just like what you do with the ACTIONs.

Yes a bit anal but it does make it clear that follows is the agenda
item. 

The end (Well for now ;-))

Matt.


On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 20:22 +1000, Clinton Roy wrote:
> [ Humbug *Announce* list.  This list is moderated, please send useful  ]
> [ replies to the originator of this message, or the general/chat lists ]
> 
> Posted for posterity. Please send any corrections to secretary at humbug.org.au.
> 
> Executive Meeting 14/11/2009
> 
> Contents
> 
>    1. Opening
>    2. Regular Agenda
>          1. Accepting Previous Minutes
>          2. Executive Reports
>                1. Secretary's Report
>                2. Treasurer's Report
>                3. Vice President's Report
>                      1. Meetings
>                      2. Meetings Rosters
>                      3. Room Bookings
>                      4. Membership Numbers
>                      5. Contacts
>                4. Librarian's Report
>                      1. Excalibur (linode)
>                5. President's Report
>          3. Non Executive Reports
>                1. Sysadmin Team
>                2. Talks Liaison
>                3. Events Organiser
>    3. Other Agenda Items
>          1. Email addresses on home page
>          2. Minutes is there a better way of doing them?
>          3. Should we contact OSDC to see if we could help/sponsor them
>          4. Organising who is opening / closing meetings
>          5. Excalibur Move
>          6. Mandriva world wide install
>    4. Next Meeting
>    5. Closing
>    6. Uncompleted Actions
> 
> Opening
> 
> Meeting is opened at half past two by Russell.
> 
> Present:
> 
>     * Russell Stuart (President)
>     * Matthew Franklin (Vice President)
>     * Mark Ellem (Treasurer)
>     * Clinton Roy (Secretary)
>     * Stephen Thomas (Librarian)
>     * Greg Black (Sysadmin Team)
>     * Simon Ellis
>     * David Formosa
> 
> Apologies: None
> 
> Regular Agenda
> 
> Accepting Previous Minutes
> 
>     * MOTION, moved by Russell: to accept the last exec meeting minutes.
>     * David Formosa complains that his name was misspelt as Quoll,
> Clinton promises to fix it.
>     * ACTION: Clinton to correct references from Quoll to David Formosa.
>     * three in favour, two against accepting previous minutes
>     * Generally the complaints about the previous minutes are about
> layout and readability. It is decided that the motion
>           o deals with the contents of the minutes and is passed.
>     * The secretary, once again, asks for corrections to be sent to him.
> 
> Executive Reports
> 
> Secretary's Report
> 
> The secretary received three emails since the last exec meeting. These
> were people asking for details of the meetings and what went on, and
> requests for help. The meeting details requests were dealt with
> promptly. The specific requests for help eventually got forwarded onto
> the general list.
> 
> Two pieces of snail mail were received in the GPO box:
> 
>     * an admin mail from Australia Post, this was forwarded to the admin list
>     * a bank statement that was forwarded to the treasurer.
> 
> MOTION raised by Russell to accept the report, on the proviso that it
> was written up properly. Passed unanimously.
> 
> Treasurer's Report
> 
> Since the last executive meeting, there has been a total of $135.05
> deposited into the bank account. 5 cents of this total was a donation
> from Raymond Smith. There is currently $55 of float in the cashbox at
> the time of writing. These amounts tally with the 7 new members who
> joined since the last executive meeting. There has been no expenses
> since last executive meeting.
> 
> The assets have not been added up as yet. ACTION: I will ensure
> Stephen Thomas and I work out a convenient time/date to do this.
> 
> COMPLETED by the treasurer: The Humbug bank account details are now on
> the web site should someone wish to directly deposit their membership
> fee.
> 
> Simon asks how many people subscribe to Humbug general. Stephen does a
> quick database query and responds that are are 206 addresses
> subscribed.
> 
> MOTION raised by Russell to accept the report, passed unanimously.
> 
> Vice President's Report
> 
> Since the last exec meeting I was asked by the President if I would be
> willing to give a membership report. I accepted. So this has now
> become a part of my report.
> 
> Meetings
> 
> So far this AGM our meeting have had on average about 15 people
> attending. Apart from the one time I showed up 15min late these have
> started on time and have gone on till midnight. So far we have not had
> any major troubles or problems. The network connection in Prentice
> room 212 has been resolved.
> 
> Meetings Rosters
> 
> I have tried since the last Exec meeting to get volunteers to help out
> with opening and closing the meeting. So far I have none but I feel
> that this is due mostly to a lack of effort on my part rather than a
> lack of willingness of members. Stephen Thomas did offer to send me
> the volunteers from last year but as I already had them and I wanted
> to start afresh so I said no.
> 
> Room Bookings
> 
> As instructed by the UQ's room bookings department I resubmitted a
> request for room bookings next year (they had asked me to get back to
> them in November). So far no response. If I do not hear back from then
> by early next week I'll chase them up.
> 
> Membership Numbers
> 
> We have currently 31 members of which 7 are new members. Since the
> last exec meeting there 7 people have joined up of which 4 have been
> new members.
> 
> Contacts
> 
> I was contacted by two people in regards to Humbug.
> 
> The first was from a couple that attended Humbug. They asked what I
> felt about how Humbug could become more Ubuntu centric. I informed
> them that while Humbug as a group was OS agnostic there was nothing to
> prevent them from giving Ubuntu talks and setting up a Ubuntu special
> interest group. So far I've had no response back from them.
> 
> The 2nd was in regards to a possible attendence. I gave details of the
> meeting and what we do.
> 
> MOTION raised by Russell to accept the report, passed unanimously.
> 
> Librarian's Report
> 
>     * No changes to previous HUMBUG equipment, however Daniel
> Mashonkin has been nice enough to donate 4 desktop machines. They will
> most likely be used for testing / demo machines -- missing a few parts
> but I'll see what I can do about sourcing them:
>          1. Compaq Serial # H930 CKG6 0050, CPU Pentium 3 (Katmai)
>                 o 450 MHz, 128M of ram, 20G HD, CD Rom
>          2. Compaq Serial # H140 FHGZ 003H, CPU Pentium 3 (Katmai)
>                 o 450 MHZ, 0 Ram, 20G HD, No CD Rom
>          3. Compaq Serial # H033 DBR5 0019, CPU Pentium 3 (Copermine)
>                 o 666 MHZ, 128M Ram, No HD,
>          4. Compaq Serial # H950 CKG6 0031, CPU Pentium 3 (Copermine)
>                 o 450 MHZ, 128M Ram, 6G HD,
> 
> Excalibur (linode)
> 
>     * - Backups available (these must have been sighted).
>           o 2009-10-14
>       - Date a backup was tested by a complete restore
>           o from backup only.
>                 + 2009-10-14
>       - Percentage of disk space used.
>           o Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda 7.9G
> 3.6G 4.2G 47% /
>       - List of packages that aren't up-to-date security wise.
>           o N/A
>       - Any major configuration changes since the last exec meeting.
>           o trac has been installed with standard packages instance
> under /srv/trac/sysadmin
>       - Changes to schedule of people with access to the box.
>           o none since last meeting*
> 
>     * During late October we had 6 hours of downtime (taking our uptime
> 
>       down to 99.1% if we happened to be a business :) ), this was due
> to an unexpected linode outage involving their hypervisors breaking,
> no data was lost though. In an effort to be able to run our
> environment in as many situations as possible, I'm working with
> Russell on a set of scripts that should let the 'production excalibur'
> run entirely from a chroot too.
> 
> MOTION raised by Russell to accept the report, accepted unanimously.
> 
> President's Report
> 
> Item 1 - opening the private lists
> 
> This proved a very contentious issue - I confess to not realising just
> how contentious it was. Just opening up the current lists as I had
> original proposed was strongly opposed by most of the committee. I was
> equally determined that I wanted to do something to make the
> operations of the committee more transparent, so what followed were,
> shall I say, fairly robust discussions that went on for a while. In
> the end a compromised was reached that everybody seemed to be happy
> with.
> 
> The existing lists have been be kept as they are, but new public
> equivalents have been created. They are:
> 
>     *
> 
>       admin at lists.humbug.org.au - The public version of
> exec at humbug.org.au - http://lists.humbug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/admin
> 
>       sasig at lists.humbug.org.au - The public version of
> sysadim at lists.humbug.org.au -
> http://lists.humbug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/sasig
> 
> Needless to say you are all welcome to join those lists if you want
> to. You can also also inspect the archives at the above URL's at any
> time.
> 
> I also said I would close inactive lists. Total posts over the last 12
> months to various lists are:
> 
>     * blipvert - 0 chat - 18 csig - 0 dsig - 10 general - a lot talks - 1
> 
> My feeling is all bar general should be closed. Anybody else want to
> put their 2c in?
> 
> Item 2 - reassignment of committee roles
> 
> The idea here was to align the job descriptions of the elected
> committee with the tasks that the actually have to be done. For
> example no particular committee member was officially responsible for
> booking rooms. Now there is one. Hopefully this means if say the rooms
> aren't booked you will know who to blame at the next AGM and vote
> accordingly.
> 
> There was some discussion about whether the jobs should be allocated
> the way I planned. In the end it seemed best to ask each individual
> committee member if they are happy to take on the tasks I put in my
> nomination. They are now all happy to do so.
> 
> This is a bit of an experiment, of course. It remains to be seen
> whether if it works out. At this stage I want to give it a year -
> possibly more if we decide to reshuffle things. However, once it
> settles down I am hoping we can change the constitution accordingly.
> 
> Item 3 - committee reporting
> 
> I undertook to ask all committee members to give reports at each
> committee meeting. To my surprise all committee members endeavoured to
> do just that - despite the fact they hadn't actually formally agreed
> to take on their jobs yet. You will find their reports in the minutes.
> 
> The only person who didn't do that was me. You may recall I undertook
> to give a brief report on how all tasks and reports were done. Since
> no tasks or reports had been allocated at that point, this was rather
> superfluous.
> 
> Item 4 - Meeting times
> 
> I had some grand plans here - but no doubt you have all seen Matthews
> posts to general on the subject. My idea was to ensure the night owls
> could stay as long as they wanted while not forcing those normally
> responsible for locking up - the committee, to be night owls
> themselves. Right now Matthew is doing just that using the old system,
> so there is no need for any changes.
> 
> Now we come to the pointy end of the report. This is where I say what
> we promised to do at the last exec meeting, but hasn't happened. The
> list is:
> 
> Outstanding items for the Treasurer - Mark Ellem:
> 
> - treasurer to put details of how to deposit into the humbug account
> on the website.
> 
> - Get Scott's old key.
> 
> Actions for the Librarian, Stephen Thomas:
> 
> - Steven to put previous list of deputies on the wiki.
> 
> Actions for the President, Russell Stuart:
> 
> - Endeavour to get Excalibur moved to a new home.
> 
> In relation to this last item - it is in progress. We actually have a
> new temporary home we can call our own, but the environment it
> different to the one we are using now. It requires some work to make
> the existing VM run on it.
> 
> MOTION raised by Matt to accept the report, accepted unanimously.
> 
> Non Executive Reports
> 
> Sysadmin Team
> 
> Talks Liaison
> 
> Events Organiser
> 
> Other Agenda Items
> 
> Email addresses on home page
> 
> The notes for this agenda item were provided by Matthew.
> 
> Discussion: Russell wants discussion on closing emails. He thinks that
> currently we have too many email lists feels that we could quite
> easily close a few. He gave suggestions on this explaining that there
> was very little traffic on blipvert, csig and talks. He also explained
> that most of the traffic on dsig was him. There was a general
> agreement on this.
> 
> Matthew indicated that the only item on the talks list was his and
> said he felt it was a useless list. Since this was not going to be a
> motion today we very roughly covered the topic. Simon asked how many
> people subscribe to humbug general. Stephen did a quick count and
> found 206 addresses.
> 
> After a bit more discussion (Probably more than Russell would have
> liked) it was agreed that information about how to use the email lists
> should be posted on the web.
> 
> ACTION: Post help information to the wiki to help people use the lists
> more effectively. (I think I agreed to do this but I'm not sure.
> either way I'm quite happy to do it.)
> 
> ACTION: Have a discussion on general and at the meetings about closing
> some of the lists.
> 
> Minutes is there a better way of doing them?
> 
> Discussions on the layout of the minutes resume. Clinton agrees to
> pretty them up somewhat, and to push towards using a copy-and-paste
> template for future minutes.
> 
> Should we contact OSDC to see if we could help/sponsor them
> 
> Mark raises the possibility of Humbug helping out OSDC.
> 
> MOTION rasied by Mark, that the Treasurer approach OSDC's chief
> wrangler, Stephen Thorne, with an offer to provide money, people, time
> or whatever other resources Humbug can provide. Passed unanimously.
> 
> ACTION: Matthew to mention OSDC on the Humbug web page as a form of
> cheap advertising for OSDC.
> 
> Organising who is opening / closing meetings
> 
> Russell suggests that a simple round robin schedule is written up, and
> any problems can be sorted further down the track. No objections.
> 
> ACTION: Matthew agrees to write up the schedule.
> 
> Matthew agrees to take over keeping the list of financial members up
> to date, to even out the exec workload.
> 
> Excalibur Move
> 
> Russell talks about moving excalibur from linode to Netbox Blue.
> Mentions that there is currently an option to temporarily transfer the
> excalibur image to a spare OSDC machine until the Netbox Blue box is
> ready. A fair bit of back and forwards ensued over whether this was a
> good idea.
> 
> MOTION, raised by Clinton, to delegate the decision of whether or not
> to transfer excalibur to the OSDC box or wait for the Netbox Blue box
> to the sysadmin team. The motion was passed unanimously.
> 
> Mandriva world wide install
> 
> Simon brings up the point that the 12th of December meeting coincides
> with the Mandriva world wide install fest.
> 
> Next Meeting
> 
> A rough consensus was reached that the next exec meeting would be held
> in the first meeting of the new year, the ninth of January.
> 
> Closing
> 
> The meeting was closed by Russell at a quarter past three.
> 
> Uncompleted Actions
>