[H-GEN] My nomination for President

[Russell Stuart]

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 23:21 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: 
> Apart from the obvious lack of the "Bludging" role in here, how about
> "special" events like organising talks or Software Freedom Day things
> or annual dinners at Montezumas or Open Day stalls or similar?
> 
> It might also possibly be worth considering the responsibility of
> republishing talk videos and/or slides (linking them from the website,
> getting them onto bittorrent and/or mirror.linux.org.au, etc).

All laudable ideas.  The bit about the talks is poignant to me because I
found Matts recent efforts with surprisingly useful - to the extent that
if I was organised enough I would have borrowed Humbug's camera for my
recent talk at Brispy.  In fact, I think it would be a good use of
Humbug's money if we somehow made it easy for all the open source groups
around the traps to video their talks and put it up in a central place,
so we can all share them.  Things like loaning out the equipment,
somehow making a site available to put the videos on.  There does seem
to be a lot of specialist open source groups in Brisbane - Ruby, MySql,
Python, Joomla are the ones I am aware of, and almost certainly more.
Perhaps this is one way we can get them all talking to each other.  This
is just saying what you said above with different words, so I guess my
point is I strongly agree with you.

However, talks, SFD and the like all require someone willing to step up
and do the work.  Just creating a position responsible for it not
enough.  The Talks Maintainer is a fine example.  We have had a talks
maintainer for years, yet Matt is the first Talks Maintainer I have seen
a put a large effort into it.  I don't feel I can control that - we we
just lucky to have Matt.

So I could not in good conscience say "We are going to create a new Exec
position of Talks Maintainer, and I am going to ensure it works".
Instead I have restricted myself to a fairly limited set of goals I am
confident I can achieve in one way or the other.  With one exception
these are simple things like getting get post box cleared, the keeping
financial statements in good order, reporting to the members and so on.
The one exception SysAdmin'ing.  That is definitely a bit of an
experiment.  The challenge is to let everybody who wants to have a
fiddle, while keeping it under control.  It will be interesting to see
how it turns out.