WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20140218

Venue Info

Meeting to be held via teleconference at 7:00pm, Tuesday, February 18, 2014.

Agenda

• Approve minutes of January 21 board meeting
• How our social event on Saturday went
• Finalize the date/time/venue for our event in March
• Finalize the format for our event in March
• WPLUG Web site update (an idea Justin had)
• Update on WPLUG meeting at Pittsburgh Filmmakers (Justin will ask permission on Monday)
• Approve the extra expense in renewing WPLUG's PO box since the Post Office raised rates
• Discussion on having Justin's contact at Pittsburgh Filmmakers produce a promotional video for WPLUG
• List your item here
• List your item here

Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 7:38 PM. Chairman Justin Smith, Vice Chair Vance Kochenderfer, Treasurer Pat Barron, and Director-at-Large Stanley Slomberg were present. Secretary Joe Prostko was absent (excused) for part of the meeting.

REPORT OF OFFICERS

Justin was unable to speak to his boss about the prospect of WPLUG meeting at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, so he recommends holding the March meetup at the Wilkins School Community Center, our usual meeting location. A co-worker who owes Justin a favor gave him some marketing tips that will be discussed during the New Business portion of the meeting. The WPLUG Twitter account, which Justin manages, is up to 46 followers.

Vance has nothing to report.

Joe is absent.

Pat reports that WPLUG has a balance of $323.51. Transactions since then:

• $100 paid to USPS for renewal of the WPLUG P.O. box
• $30 to be paid to the Wilkins School.
• $60 in membership dues to be deposited

WPLUG has $55 cash in refreshment fund.

Stanley has nothing to report.

NEW BUSINESS

The board discussed the necessity of posting meeting minutes in a timely manner and keeping up with current event listings on the wiki. The secretary will be reminded to keep track of this.

Regarding the WPLUG social event at Games 'n At over the weekend: Vance was disappointed that more people didn't show up from SNAPGH and Cocoaheads. Vance suggested setting up Eventbrite pages for future events so that we know how many people to expect. The board strongly agreed.

The board debated the merits of using Meetup.com to promote a group. It was eventually agreed that small groups like WPLUG would have difficult attracting enough new members to break even with the cost of having a Meetup page.

Joe arrived.

Since SNAPGH has shown some interest in working with WPLUG to co-host events, Vance suggested going ahead with our Juju presentation on March 8th and having SNAPGH host a Juju workshop in April. WPLUG tends to attract a more general audience, making it ideal for presentations, while SNAPGH attracts a more knowledgeable crowd that would be interested in taking part in a workshop. The board agreed to Vance's proposal.

Justin talked about an interesting conversation he had with a co-worker who produces marketing videos for non-profit organizations. Essentially, the idea was that WPLUG might do well to have a simple, static landing page with a link to go to the more technical (and informative) WPLUG wiki. LibreOffice does something like this: they've got a static landing page and a CMS for their main site. Justin suggested abandoning plans to move WPLUG.org to WordPress and adopting this strategy instead since it's simpler to maintain and a wiki is more in line with the open source "spirit" than a catered CMS. The board was generally receptive to Justin's proposal; Pat suggested making a mockup.

Justin's co-worker has generously offered to make a promotional video for WPLUG. Justin led the board in a discussion of what WPLUG would like to get out of the video - and what message the group would like to send out in general. It was decided to focus more on professional users since Linux can make the most significant difference in businesses. Someone deciding to use LibreOffice is nice, for instance, but a company standardizing on LibreOffice to cut licensing and compliance costs presents a far more inviting reason to attend WPLUG and learn about open source since the benefits could be much greater.

The board suggested making a series of short videos could showcase different ways open source has made a difference in local businesses.

Pat moved to authorize the expenditure of $100 to renew WPLUG's P.O. box. The measure was unanimously approved.

MEETING END

The meeting adjourned at 8:56 PM.