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

[Clinton Roy]

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

-- 
Clinton Roy
CSIRO - Robotics Platform Engineer
Autonomous Systems Lab

humbug.org.au  - Brisbane Unix Group
azure.humbug.org.au/~croy/blog - Blog
flickr.com/photos/croy/ - Photos