WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20130618

Note: This meeting was held over a conference call.

MEETING START

The meeting was called to order at 7:45 p.m. Chair Pat Parron, Vice Chair/Secretary Justin Smith, and Director-at-Large Joe Prostko were in attendance. Treasurer Terry Golightly was absent.

REPORT OF OFFICERS

• Chair Pat, who is also a member of the Pittsburgh Area Computing Club (PACC), reports that the PACC invitation he sent to WPLUG's main mailing list did not increase turnout at the most recent meeting.

• Vice Chair/Secretary Justin has successfully arranged for Daniel, founder of the Pittsburgh Bitcoin Users Meetup group], to give an introductory presentation on Bitcoin during WPLUG's July GUM. If Daniel can't attend, he will help Justin make alternate arrangements with someone else. Justin saw a demonstration in the latest episode of the Linux Action Show that may be good presentation material for WPLUG's July GUM: how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a portable Tor proxy. Two WPLUG members will lose their benefits in July if they do not renew.

• Director-at-Large Joe reports that Steve from the Pittsburgh GNU/Linux meetup group wants to connect with other free software enthusiasts. The board will invite Steve and the GNU/Linux group to attend a WPLUG event. The Central PA Open Source conference is in October this year.

NEW BUSINESS

The annual WPLUG picnic will be held in August at North Park. Pat urged the board to begin preparations immediately; Justin and Joe assented. The motion to reserve a suitable location was unanimously approved.

Justin was disappointed with the quality of June's GUM. He suggested that WPLUG needs fewer meetings and more social events, both to give the board more time to make each GUM "special" and to give WPLUG more of a chance to reach out to new people. (WPLUG needs new members since many of its existing ones are choosing not to renew.) Pat and Joe assented. The motion to plan more social events was unanimously approved.

Pat pointed out that Justin's ideas are in-line with former WPLUG chair Beth Lynn Eicher's plans nearly 3 years ago.

Pat recommended that the board plan activities 2 events in advance. Justin and Joe agreed.

WPLUG's P.O. box will expire in August. There is no reason to rent the P.O. box for a longer period of time because the Post Office doesn't offer discounts. The motion to renew it for another 6 months was unanimously approved; Pat will instruct Terry how to do this.

WPLUG's account with Linode, its VPS provider, will expire in August. There is a discount on renewing for 2 years; WPLUG renewed for 1 year in 2012 after former WPLUG Vice Chair Michael Loomis recommended to wait and see if something better came along. So far, nothing has. The motion to renew service with Linode was unanimously approved.

WPLUG uses very little of its available processing power on Linode. Therefore, Justin proposed using the unused cycles to mine Litecoin. Mining software is free, and WPLUG would not incur any additional expense from increased electricity usage. Unlike Bitcoin, CPU mining is still somewhat effective for Litecoin. The motion to investigate Litecoin mining on Linode was unanimously approved.

Justin proposed using Coinbase to accept Bitcoin payments for membership dues and donations. Coinbase allows sellers to price products in US dollars; buyers will be charged an equivalent amount of BTC based on Bitcoin's current market value. Therefore, Coinbase insulates sellers from Bitcoin's price fluctuations. The motion to begin using Coinbase was unanimously approved.

Justin also proposed endorsing Coinbase as WPLUG's "official" online payment method because Bitcoin is more in line with WPLUG's values than credit card services. Joe and Pat disagreed. A compromise was unanimously approved: WPLUG will list the fees WPLUG incurs for each of its online payment methods and note that Bitcoin is open source, but it will not actually endorse one payment method over another.

The motion to set up Bitcoin payments by July's GUM was unanimously approved.

All members of the board acknowledge the need to hold a "hackathon" to build WPLUG's new Wordpress Web site since WPLUG's current manpower is insufficient for such a task. It will be discussed in the near future at the next Commission to Reform WPLUG meeting.

MEETING END

The meeting was adjourned at 9:01 PM.