WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20140624

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Venue Info

Meeting to be held at IBM Squirrel Hill at 7:00pm, Tuesday, June 24, 2014.

Agenda

  • Approve minutes of May 20 board meeting
  • Discuss the upcoming GUM, where Git and/or other VCSs will be the topic
  • Discuss moving to the Linode $10 plan
  • Discuss the server migration, assuming a new VPS is deployed
  • Discuss plans for summer picnic
  • List your item here
  • List your item here

Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 7:07 PM with all board members present.

Reports of officers

The Chair talked with Charles Butler about his offer to present about Git and distributed version control. Charles said he would be willing to give the talk, which would essentially focus on an overview of distributed version control (with a focus on Git) as well as the stumbling blocks that it solves over centralized version control. It was mentioned that maybe Charles could send his presentation to the board in case it could use some slight tweaking to suit the audience better. One of the board members will reach out to Charles to see if that is possible.

The Vice chair tried to contact people with OpenStreetMap to see if some sort of mutual event could be done with them. He contacted 30-35 people who had done edits in past 6 months in the Pittsburgh area. He only heard back from one person who still lived in the area and expressed genuine interest in OpenStreetMap and WPLUG. That said, the Vice Chair tried contacting again the local person who was initially interested, but never heard from him again. The Vice Chair expressed that he would like to talk somebody higher up organizationally with OpenStreetMap, but that it isn't clear how to get into contact with a person like that, unfortunately.

The Treasurer reported that there is currently $223.51 in the bank. The refreshment account amount isn't any different than the amount reported at the previous meeting. The Treasurer also reported that September is the time for the renewal of the WPLUG server. Also mentioned was that the WPLUG summer picnic is in August, and that WPLUG needs to find a way to fund it. Last time it cost about80 dollars, plus a new grill will need to be purchased. Other than that, there was no new transactions this month, other than the 10 dollar donation that was received at the Blender event.

The Secretary had nothing to report.

The Director-at-Large had nothing to report.

New Business

The plan is to migrate the existing Linode from the older 20 dollar offering to the new 10 dollar offering. The people responsible for the migration would essentially be the board unless maybe Dave Ostroske or Terry Golightly would be interested. There was some discussion about the distribution of Linux to choose, and after some deliberation, it was decided that CentOS is the natural choice. This will require some work though to upgrade from the existing CentOS 5 installation. Essentially a new CentOS server will be deployed in parallel, and rebuilt to function like the current server. The new server should be deployed on August 1st, seeing as the current server is paid up until September 1st. Before the migration, it would also probably be a good idea to clean up the wiki, as there is some cruft there that could be removed. While not mandatory, it would also be nice to get the original OpenACS-powered version of wplug.org to become part of the wiki due to all of the historical information.

MOTION by the Chair to to move over to 10 dollar plan after current plan done. This instance would be at the Atlanta datacenter, and the OS of choice would be CentOS 7. As part of this migration, or preceding the migration the wiki will get cleaned up so as to be in presentable condition. This motion was seconded by the Chair and all of the other board members were in agreement.

The next general meeting is targeted for the 12th of July. The available locations are Wilkins School Community Center and IBM Squirrel Hill. It was decided that IBM is probably the best bet, and so the Treasurer will try to reserve the room from 11 AM to 4 PM on Saturday, July 12th. Assuming the room is approved, an Eventbrite will be created for the event. The Treasurer, Secretary, and Charles Butler should probably try to get together to see if Charles' presentation needs tweaked at all. The Chair will handle some of the marketing, but social networking should be utilized, such as Facebook and LinkedIn in addition to Twitter. The Chair will look into taking over management of the LinkedIn page, as currently only ex-board members have access, and would likely be pleased with being relieved of maintaining it.

The summer picnic is coming up soon, with the plan of it happening on August 9th. The past few years the picnic has happen at North Park and gone quite well. The pavilion rental was about 30 dollars last year, so likely will be the same this year. Ideally the goal is to get the Kolich shelter, which is right on the lake and is handicap accessible. The Lakeshore shelter that was used a previous year actually didn't have as nice of a view of the lake and wasn't handicap accessible. Perhaps a fee should be charged, with free food for people at the picnic if they help with the server migration. An option could be to have people pay a small fee via Eventbrite when they RSVP, and it would essentially act as a built-in call for donations. Another good option brought up by the chair is that the event could be used to get new members, where existing and new members eat free.

MOTION by the Treasurer to have him acquire the shelter, as well as be compensated by WPLUG for the costs of the shelter rental. The motion was seconded by the chair and all other board members were in agreement.

The meeting concluded at 9:04 PM.