WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20130416

The meeting was called to order at 7:42 PM. Chair Pat Barron, Vice Chair/Secretary Justin Smith, and Director-at-Large Joe Prostko were present. Treasurer Terry Golightly was absent.

The reading of the previous month's minutes was dispensed.

REPORT OF OFFICERS

Chair Pat Barron reached out to PGH Ruby leadership and asked them if they'd be interested in speaking with the WPLUG Board of Directors informally about organizational matters, including how they've managed to be so successful. We agreed in principle to do that.

New business cards from Moo.com have arrived. Pat has volunteered to pay for them out of pocket.

Vice chair/secretary Justin contacted several local organizations about attending Saturday's Pittsburgh Geek Bowl. The response has not been encouraging. Justin wrote personal letters to PGH Ruby and Hack Pittsburgh to explain in more specifics terms why their attendance would be welcome.

Pat notified Justin that the PGH Ruby letter was somewhat well-received, and the letter to Hack Pittsburgh received a tepid, non-committal response.

Justin also spoke briefly about his Project Glass proposal.

In Treasurer Terry Golightly's place, Pat reports that the WPLUG bank account has $631.84 as of March 31st. To Pat's knowledge, there are no outstanding expenses.

Director-at-Large Joe has nothing to report.

NEW BUSINESS

WPLUG member Vance Kochenderfer supports upgrading PHP, which is necessary for WPLUG to install a content management system for its new Web site and a Tiny Tiny RSS server for its members. He's currently looking to make sure that such an upgrade wouldn't break anything. He didn't THINK it would break the wiki, but he wants to make sure.

The board discussed the relative merits of accounting software that could be used to manage WPLUG's expenses. Among the options considered were: Quickbooks, GnuCash, and Tonido Money. Pat stated that WPLUG's accounting software should make it easy to transfer materials from one board to the next. Justin feels strongly that using software with a Web interface would be easiest.

Since WordPress and Joomla are fairly close in terms of features, the board considered which CMS would be most expedient to use in building a new WPLUG Web site. Since hte WordPress themes under consideration offer more templates and superior documentation compared to their Joomla counterparts, the board decided to use WordPress.

Justin suggested using the FeedWordpress plugin to add a blog aggregation section to the new WPLUG Web site, similar to __.

Pat proposed ratifying the expenditure of $68 to renew the WPLUG P.O. Box. The total cost breakdown: $48 to renew, $20 penalty for letting it expire. The measure was approved, 3-0.

Pat proposed spending 5 cents more per month to upgrade WPLUG's Linode server to 8 cores and a gig of RAM. The measure was approved 3-0.

Justin asked Pat to install SpamAssassin and/or Bogofilter to reduce the volume of spam that WPLUG's official email addresses receive.

Pat will set up a Stripe account so that WPLUG can accept online payments.

Pat reports that nobody he's spoken with has any interest in giving presentations for a GUM. Justin suggested throwing presentations out and doing something different, like a workshop.

Justin proposed doing an activity with a Google Glass tie-in since he'll be receiving his Glass within the next month or so. Glass can transmit first-person video, and this could be very beneficial to demonstrating certain activities. Pat suggested an event involving Arduino. Unfortunately, the board is not aware of anyone in WPLUG who has experience with Arduino.

Justin recommended an event with the Raspberry Pi instead. Since he ordered one over the weekend to use as a media server, he could lead a workshop. Raspberry Pis are widely available now that demand has declined to a reasonable level.

Pat volunteered to buy a Raspberry Pi and donate it to WPLUG.

If Pat follows through with that, Justin asked whether it would be feasible to set up a WPLUG Raspberry Pi as a regularly-reset test server for WPLUG members to play around with. Setting up a test server may also be possible through Linode. The board will investigate this further.

MEETING END

The meeting was adjourned at 8:46 p.m.