[H-GEN] Presidents Report

[Russell Stuart]

Here is my Presidents for the period ending 2010-02-05.

Committee reports submitted:
  President:      done & accepted by the exec.
  Vice President: done & accepted by the exec.
  Secretary:      done & accepted by the exec.
  Treasurer:      done & accepted by the exec.
  Librarian:      done & accepted by the exec.

Outstanding items from the last minutes: none.

Four other significant things have happened in this period.

1.  We won hosting of LCA 2011.  Congratulations to the team, 
    and Shaun in particular who ended up doing the bulk of the 
    work that went into winning the bid.  The team will now be 
    meeting regularly to get things organised, starting Sunday
    2011-02-07.  I expect they will keep us posted as things 
    happen.  In the mean time, be sure to have a look at the
    teams "brochure website", http://followtheflow.org

2.  Room bookings for this year were finalised by Matt.  In
    recent years this has proved to be a saga, and this year
    was no exception.  On a personal level, Matt's doggedness 
    in following this through was a pleasure to see.  The 
    principle difficulty is negotiating our way through the
    bureaucracies at UQ and LA.  It always takes a surprising
    amount of time, and unfortunately we aren't allowed to
    start the process until those same bureaucracies give us 
    the starting gun.

    The club should be aware our getting free rooms from UQ
    currently depends almost entirely on the representations made 
    on our behalf by Nick Tate, Director of UQ ITS.  I personally
    don't know Nick, and thus can't speak for his motivations in
    doing this.  However I do know he is a very active member of
    our industry, and in particular is Chairman of ACS Queensland 
    at Australian Computer Society, and an Adjunct Professor of
    ITEE at UQ.  It says a lot about the ACS that a chairman of
    one of its chapters see fit to lend a helping hand to an 
    open source group.

    So far it has proved a struggle to find ways to acknowledge
    UQ's and Nick's kindness towards us, but hopefully the Exec
    can work something out in the next few months.  All ideas are
    welcome.

3.  As you will see in the Librarian's next report, Excalibur has 
    moved to a new, albeit temporary home on its journey to moving 
    to hosting provided by Netbox Blue.  Also of note is the 
    SysAdmin group has implemented a new way of reporting and 
    tracking SysAdmin issues.  It is uses trac (http://www.trac.org).
    A short description of how to raise SysAdmin issues now appears 
    at http://www.humbug.org.au/SysAdmin The primary driver behind
    this change was Raymond Smith.  It seems to be working very 
    well, and I would like to publicly thank him for his efforts.

4.  The primary contact points for the club has changed to
    admin at lists.humbug.org.au.  Private matters should, as before,
    be addressed to secretary at humbug.org.au.

--
Regards
Russell Stuart
Humbug President