Meeting-20141115

WPLUG will have a General User Meeting and presentation on Saturday, November 15, 2014 starting at 3:00pm at the Carnegie Squirrel Hill Library. Elections for the Board of Directors will be held.

Schedule for the Day

3:00pm - Business Meeting starts, elections
3:30pm - Featured presentation
4:45pm - Meeting ends, everyone out. We must completely vacate by the library closing time of 5:00pm.

Election

At this meeting, we will elect the WPLUG Board of Directors for 2014-2015.

Votes may be cast by mail or in person at the meeting. Your vote must be received before the polls close to be counted, so show up by 3:00pm to be sure you get to cast yours.

The ballot for this election will be e-mailed to the membership and can be downloaded from the wiki in ODT and PDF formats. Blank ballots will also be available at the meeting. Detailed instructions for voting are given at Election Instructions.

Those who were nominated at the October 18, 2014 nominations meeting and have agreed to be candidates are (in alphabetical order):

• Patrick Barron
• Vance Kochenderfer
• John Lewis
• Joseph Prostko
• Stanley Slomberg

Meet the Candidates

There will be a special "meet the candidates" session in the WPLUG IRC channel (irc.freenode.net, channel #wplug) on Thursday, November 13 from 8:00-9:00pm. We encourage all members to attend and ask questions of the candidates.

View the transcript of the session

Candidate Statements

Patrick Barron

My primary concern about WPLUG, at this point in it's evolution, is that I still don't think it's sure what it wants to be, and who it is looking to to be it's audience. I think we should make a concerted effort to determine what demographic we wish to serve - be it experienced Linux users, system administrators, software developers, novice users, or some defined combination of these - and press forward on that basis. My concern is that even when we provide an activity that engages someone's interest, they may not be confident that the next activity (or any future activity) will be relevant to their interests, since we don't necessarily have a "theme" (for lack of a better word). I believe we should determine a demographic we wish to serve, and proceed in a way where everyone in that demographic can have some confidence that each WPLUG event may potentially be of interest to them.

I would also very much like to see us be in the habit of planning events and activities well in advance. For example, if it is November (as it is right now...), we should not be starting the planning process for activities that we'd like to organize in December. Rather, we should be beginning the planning for activities we'd like to pursue in February or March. By the time November comes around, activities for December and January (and possibly even as far forward as February) should already be completely planned out, speakers booked, venue lined up, etc. This is particularly important if we need to secure a venue. If we're in November starting the planning for a December activity and assume that WSCC (or some other venue) will be available to us - and then we later discover that the venue we were counting on is not available, and we're then a couple of weeks out from an event that we're basically committed to, already booked a presenter for, etc., and find that we do not have a meeting venue. This is never a good situation, and we should strive to avoid it going forward.

Vance Kochenderfer

As noted last year, I still believe that our primary aim should be to have quality meetings. This includes relevant speakers and topics, held in a convenient location, with plenty of notice. Over the past year we experimented with some alternatives to the Wilkins School Community Center as a venue, with inconsistent results. I feel a stable home is valuable and we should re-commit to WSCC or locate a new default facility. Attracting speakers has also been a challenge, and we should consider having one person with only this responsibility and no others. Lining up and publicizing our speakers well in advance will, I feel, increase attendance and participation.

John Lewis

WPLUG TODO

• Repeal Roberts Rules of Order and replace with Open Space Technology
• Open Board Meetings to all paying members
• Book Hack Pittsburgh, PTI, and or Public Libraries for meetings
• Incorporate WPLUG

Joseph Prostko

I have been a WPLUG member for quite a few years, and a Linux user for many more years. This year I am running again for the WPLUG board of directors. I think there's a couple of areas that could be improved and need to be explored further:

• I think it is important to get rid as much undue complexity with WPLUG as possible. This will make things easier for those people running the group, as well as members and want-to-be members.
• Explore more ways to get members, such as additional member benefits. Other things to consider are ways to spark interest in having people come to our meetings, whether that is a different focus, new speakers, or offering more variety at meetings.

I look forward to the discussion on Thursday night (11/13) on IRC, so will see you all there!

For more about me, please check out my User page, located here: User:Jprostko

Stanley Slomberg

To be added.

Speaker/Presentation

Speaker: John Lewis

Topic: Rsnapshot

I am going to store copies of my Rsnapshot presentations on the Wiki if there is enough room.

Description to be added.

Meeting Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 3:15 PM with the Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and Director-at-Large present, as well as members Terry Golightly and John Lewis (2014-2015 board candidate).

The minutes from the October 2014 GUM were approved as written.

Reports of Officers

The Vice Chair reports that he plans on giving a donation to WPLUG for the power strips that were borrowed to be utilized at the Ohio LinuxFest.

The Treasurer reports that there's $216.00 still in the bank, with 90 dollars yet to be deposited.

The Secretary and Director-at-Large have nothing to report.

There were no reports by the committees.

Elections

The elections were then held, with Terry Golightly taking count of how many points each candidate received.

• Joe Prostko received 18 points.
• Pat Barron received 17 points.
• Vance Kochenderfer received 15 points.
• Stanley Slomberg received 14 points.
• John Lewis received 13 points.

All five candidates therefore constitute the 2014-2015 WPLUG board of directors.

The meeting was concluded at 3:41 PM.

(Approved on January 10, 2015 - VK)

Meeting Staff

If you would like to volunteer to assist with this meeting, please add your name to one or more of the categories below.

• Host: Your name here
• Co-Host: Your name here
• Setup: Your name here
• Clean Up: Your name here

Carpooling

• Your name/location here