[H-ADMIN] Meeting Room for Humbug

[Russell Stuart]

Peter,

I am the president of Humbug [0].  We have been meeting at UQ every
fortnight for the past 20 years.  Up till now, we have done this via
Central Room Bookings, but this semester they adopted a new policy
forbidding non-affiliated UQ organisations from booking rooms, and we
can't afford to pay for one. [1]  Unfortunately the UQ compsci students
that formed Humbug decided they did not want to be under the auspices of
the Student Union, and that seems impossible to change now.

I was hoping EAIT would be able to provide us meeting room they control
directly.  It would be ideally a flat area with desks that that seated
around 40, with after hours access. We meet 2PM to Midnight every
fortnight.

I understand Peter Robinson has already forwarded you the spiel I gave
to him, but here is a slightly longer version :

Most of Humbug's current financial members were UQ students, but none
are now (although some graduated last year).  We are however ardent open
source followers and I think it's fair to say Humbug is Open Source's
umbrella organisation in Queensland.  We aren't incorporated (we're too
poor for that), but when we need a legal entity to shield behind (such
as when running conferences) we operate under Linux Australia's
auspices.

We ran Linux Conference Australia 2011, Pycon 2014 and Pycon 2015 that
way.  All these would not have been possible without enthusiastic
volunteers from the UQ student body.  Volunteers attend for free of
course, but in order to promote this we also sponsor students from the
three Brisbane Unis.  At least one UQ student (Jackson Gatenby) gave a
presentation at Pycon 2015.  We hope to run some Barcamps [3] this year,
and another LCA in the years following.

In the spirit of Open Source Humbug is run transparently.  Our mailing
lists are publicly archived [4] Our meeting schedule is posted on our
home page.  We have a constitution [5].  As required by the
constitution, we have regular minuted executive meetings [6] and AGM's
[7], and our internal procedures are documented in full on our web site.
Everyone is free to attend our regular meetings at no cost, but to vote
at financial meetings you must pay the $25/yr membership fee.


[0] http://www.humbug.org.au
[1] http://lists.humbug.org.au/pipermail/admin/2015-December/000984.html
[2] https://linux.org.au/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp
[4] http://lists.humbug.org.au/
[5] http://www.humbug.org.au/Constitution
[6] http://www.humbug.org.au/Exec/Minutes
[7] http://www.humbug.org.au/AGM


-- 
Regards,
Russell Stuart
President, Humbug, http://www.humbug.org.au
+61 438 805 133