Re: [activities] Notice of Extraordinary General Meeting - Friday March 25 2011

[John Ferlito <johnf@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy,

I'm wearing my President of Linux Australia hat while writing this email.
Although my other hats don't necessarily disagree :).

Linux Australia for the past few months has been putting together a policy to
enable us to support sub-committees in the manner that James has put forward.
This policy has just been sent to the community for review.
http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2011-March/018702.html

So the SLUG community is aware of the process: assuming that all the SLUG
motions carry at the AGM. SLUG will then inform the LA council of its
intentions to become a sub-committee of Linux Australia. The Linux Australia
council will then put this to its membership for review and some time there
after the council will make a decision.

The motions below are in line for what we are thinking for sub-committees
except for one.

On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 07:32:09PM +1100, James Polley wrote:
> 3) As the property and funds donated to Linux Australia in this way
> were originally donated to SLUG with intent to be used to support the
> open source community in the Sydney area, that we request that Linux
> Australia continue use the property and funds to support the open
> source community in the Sydney area.

I would recommend voting against this motion. Simply because at the end of the
day it is not really administratively workable nor does it really make sense
for Linux Australia to hold aside a set of funds just for use in Sydney.

Instead I would proffer that Linux Australia aims to support all members of its
community. In particular each sub-committee provides a budget to LA for
approval and the grants programme is available for out of budget requests.

The grants programme tends to be underutilised year after year simply because
we do not receive a sufficient number of grants each year. If the SLUG
committee or members of the SLUG community were to put in a grant request which
met the requirements and was of benefit to the community then this would most
likely be approved. It is also likely that SLUG would be able to gain access to
greater funds through the grants process over the course of a year than is
currently in its bank accounts. 

In terms of any current assets SLUG has e.g. video cameras, we would have no
issues with these remaining in possession of SLUG. Although if SLUG has no
further use for them (due to Google providing this already) then it might be
appropriate to donate them to another part of LA that could make better use of
them.

Cheers,
John
President, Linux Australia

--
John
Blog                             http://www.inodes.org
LCA2012                          http://lcaunderthestars.org.au