Meeting-20131109

WPLUG will hold its next general user meeting on Saturday, November 9, 2013, at the Wilkins School Community Center. You don't have to be a WPLUG member to attend; everyone is welcome.

Since 10-15 minute "lightning talks" were so popular at our previous meeting, we're once again opening the floor to anyone who'd like to give a lightning talk on their favorite free or open source software.

We'll also hold be holding the 2014 WPLUG Board of Directors election during our business meeting.

Schedule for the Day

1:30pm - Doors open, set up
2:00pm - Business Meeting starts, elections
2:30pm - Lightening talks... You have something that you are working on? Or want to share something in the FOSS/Linux world that just interests interests you? Can you deliver it in 10 minutes or so? Well then, come on in and tell us about it.
3:30pm - Meeting ends, everyone out. Some of us may go to D's 6pack for beer and dogs.

Election

At this meeting, we will elect the WPLUG Board of Directors for 2013-2014.

As a reminder, only WPLUG members are allowed to vote. 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 2:00pm to be sure you get to cast yours.

The ballot for this election has been provided 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 13, 2012 nominations meeting and have agreed to be candidates are (in alphabetical order):

• Patrick Barron
• Vance Kochenderfer
• Joseph Prostko
• Stanley Slomberg
• Justin Smith

Meet the Candidates

There will be a special "meet the candidates" session in the WPLUG IRC channel (irc.freenode.net, channel #wplug) on Tuesday, October 29, 2012 from 7:30 - 8:00 p.m. We encourage all members to attend and ask questions of the candidates.

Candidate Statements

Vance Kochenderfer

I've been associated with WPLUG since about 2003 (has it really been that long?), including serving several terms on the Board. For the past couple years, I've reduced my involvement as other responsibilities encroached on my time. It was a pleasure to be nominated, and I very much want to see WPLUG attract a larger membership and thrive as an organization.

In my view, the main driver of this is to have quality meetings. We need to have topics and speakers that interest people, held in a convenient location with plenty of prior notice. I will be serving as the speaker chair for the 2014 Ohio LinuxFest, and will try to use the contacts I develop for that to spread the word about WPLUG and attract more speakers to talk about cool stuff.

Please note that I do not feel I have the time to properly serve as Chair or Secretary for this year. I am happy to serve in any other office.

Joseph Prostko

I have been a WPLUG member for several 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 several areas that could be improved or explored:

• Like Justin mentioned in his bio, 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.
• Just as Vance mentioned in his bio, I think getting better programming will attract more people to the group as well.
• Justin did a great job with this during the current term, but finding more useful members benefits would be great
• Explore having weeknight meetings, as there was a decent amount of feedback mentioning this could be desirable to at least some people

I look forward to the discussion on Tuesday night (10/29) on IRC, so will see you all there!

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

Justin Smith

• Favorite distribution: OpenSUSE
• Favorite software license: GNU GPL v3
• Free software or open source: Free software
• Type of computer user: Power user. I want absolute control over my electronics. I enjoy breaking DRM, overclocking hardware just for kicks, and using free software that lets me change anything I want. It should come as no surprise that I love KDE!

One of our board candidates last year said that he "hit the ground running" with open source software. Well, that's exactly what I had to do after last year's board election. Just think: I was inexperienced with Linux and new to WPLUG, but I was asked to serve as both vice chair and secretary due to an unexpected vacancy. How's that for a warm welcome?

I'm pleased to say that I've been the driving force behind many of WPLUG's accomplishments this year:

• I created the Commission to Reform WPLUG to help us brainstorm ideas
• I set up a private instance of Tiny Tiny RSS, a GPL-licensed newsreader, for WPLUG members after Google announced that it was shutting down Google Reader
• I created a new income stream by using WPLUG.org's spare CPU cycles for cryptocurrency mining. WPLUG now owns a small quantity of Litecoins.
• I convinced Daniel Mross, a local Bitcoin expert, to speak at WPLUG. He used the occasion to shoot footage for his upcoming documentary, Rise and Rise of Bitcoin.
• I successfully proposed creating a new WordPress Web site to replace the WPLUG.org wiki. I selected the theme that was eventually approved, and I've been designing the new site mostly on my own since then. You can access our staging site at http://www.wplug.org/nojump/wordpress to see how it's coming along.

So that's the good news. However, I'd be remiss in pointing out that most of the reform plan I proposed last year wasn't implemented. It was called "WAG," which stood for WordPress, Android, and Google+. I wanted to make Android an integral part of WPLUG's presentations, but few people know enough to present on it. I wanted to make Google+ our social media headquarters, but Google started forcing people to use Google+ and made its chat protocol proprietary. Instead of compromising, I backtracked. We now use Twitter.

On the whole, I think I've done well. If I've failed, it certainly hasn't been from lack of effort on my part; I've carried a disproportionate share of the workload this year, and that will change if I'm re-elected. Because of changes in my life, I can no longer fill multiple positions. What I can offer is a more modest plan for reform based on my experiences this year.

Finish the new WPLUG.org. A wiki is great if you have people to care for it. We don't. WordPress is a good platform for running a "catered" site where only a few people manage the information. I know that Pat and Joe are hard at work making a digital membership form that accepts Bitcoin and credit card payments. We have a lot to look forward to in the new WPLUG.org, but we need to get organized. We need deadlines, milestones, and regular progress.

Make WPLUG more casual. There's nothing wrong with formal presentations, but it's difficult to find people to give them every month. Let's lighten our workload and have more social events! How about a meetup at coffee shop where we just kick back and talk about a specific topic? I'll be it wouldn't be hard to find a knowledgeable guest to come to something like like that. We should limit formal presentations to every other month at most.

Simplify the rules. I still don't like our reliance on Robert's Rules. Why does a group like ours need 800+ pages of copyrighted regulations?

To paraphrase what Pat has often said, Robert's Rules wasn't even designed for organizations like ours. It expects groups to only meet for a limited time. Thanks to the Internet, a group like ours can be considered perpetually "in session." Why are we limited to proposing bylaws changes at in-person meetings when we could just as easily do it using a tool like Loomio? I'd like to explore ideas for replacing our rules with a simpler, original framework that we can release under an open license. Something like this is a multi-year project, but I'd like to get the ball rolling.

How about this for a start: you can propose a vote at any time by posting it on Loomio, and WPLUG members have 10 days to vote on it. If it gets the support it needs before 10 days, voting ends early. Nice and simple! We wouldn't even need to produce ballots.

Speaker/Presentation

Is there a particular free or open source program you just can't live without? Tell us about it! There's no need to prepare a speech or make slides; just show us your program in 10-15 minutes.

Justin Smith:

• MakeMKV, your one-click solution for ripping Blu-Ray and DVD movies on Linux
• Handbrake, a GPL-licensed video transcoder that can convert MakeMKV rips to different formats so you can watch them on different devices
• Super Audio CD (SACD) is a high-fidelity, 5.1 surround-sound audio disk format. Blu-Ray is to DVD what SACD is to CDs. Sony designed SACDs to be unrippable, but ironically, the one way they can be ripped is with a modified version of the Sony PlayStation 3! I'll demonstrate how to use sacd-ripper, a GPL-licensed homebrew application for the PS3 that rips SACDs to a USB drive.

Vance Kochenderfer:

• Forget vi or emacs, KWrite is my go-to text editor! It offers many advanced features, yet remains simple in appearance and has a gentle learning curve.

Pat Barron (time permitting):

• Yes, you really can write a (minimal) web server in shell scripts... One of the core philosophies of Unix-like systems involves building small tools that do simple jobs, do them well, and hooking them together in new and interesting ways to do more complex tasks. I'll talk a little about my experience in building a "toy" web server out of shell scripts and the basic tools provided with most Linux systems, and demo the system in action. It's not pretty, it's most decidedly not fast - but it can serve up simple static text and HTML content, maybe images (if I get time to add that in), can run simple CGI-like scripts, and set and retrieve cookies. If I'm feeling really adventurous, I may have HTTP Basic and/or Digest authentication, handling of Markdown content, and ETags, implemented before the meeting....

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