[SLUG] 2006-2006 President's Report

[Grant Parnell <gripz@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

2005-2006 President's report
============================

Thankfully SLUG still exists and as far as I know hasn't got any 
significant debts so whatever's happened in the past year can't have been 
all that bad. In fact the worst that's happened is the SLUG server being 
offline for a few extended outages due to hardware issues which thankfully 
have now been sorted recently by removing hardware from the equation - ie 
it's now on a virtual server.

Having said that the membership itself has been on the decline in recent 
years and prior to tonight we had about 50 financial members. This has had 
some impact on the events SLUG has been able to hold because we don't have 
that financial buffer to fork out in advance for cost of putting on 
events. To spite this there have been many exceptions where individuals 
have decided to get up and run an event themselves and the committee whole 
heartedly encourages this.

Some significant events
-----------------------

DebSig - I only just started going to some of these in the past year. I 
had felt that since I didn't use Debian it would be of little interest, 
however, as Craige pointed out it's not really about Debian (or Ubuntu) 
specifically anymore and is a great laid-back alternative to the main 
monthly meeting. It's in a pub, less organised, more chatty and that's all 
good.

When it comes to the main monthly meetings I have attended most of them 
since I've been going to SLUG and some rock and some suck - that's the way 
it goes due to a variety of factors. Some months I wish I could be in 2 
places at once during the second half of the meeting.

Peter Miller deserves special mention for organising 2 CodeCon events that 
I wished I could attend and I've heard nothing but good things about them.

Ashley Maher organised a CodeFest and had an installfest. Unfortunately 
the Installfest didn't get the numbers for success at UOW but the point is 
he tried! The CodeFest hosted at ACS Sydney on the other hand went well, 
but then all you need is power and desks, food and coders ;-)

Mid May 2005 Sarah Kahn managed to get us a booth at the Education Expo at 
Rose Hill and we had quite an enthusiastic turn-out of helpers from SLUG 
to occupy the booth, demo linux, chat to the general public and actively 
go round to other organisations present and promote Linux. Everyone 
involved deserves a big round of applause.

Later in May we asked SLUGgers to submit a message saying why they should 
be sponsored to go to an OSS workshop with Sebastian Rahts. Jamie Honan 
was the lucky individual we sent along to find out what it was all about. 
We later gave Jamie the chance to give a report at a SLUG meeting.

Many SLUGgers were keen to help out with Software Freedom Day in Sydney 
and we took the Open Source message to the streets handing out CD's and 
brochures about what we'd miss without Software Freedom. This was followed 
up by a mini-installfest at UTS afterwards.

Just for interest's sake I've manage to dig up and summerise the main 
monthly meetings we've held the past year.

Monthly Meeting Topics
----------------------
Apr 05 - I attended
	LCA2005 wrap-up
	OpenSkills network
May 05 - I attended
	Ubuntu Down Under report
	The R environment for statistical computing
Jun 05 - I attended
	Linux Distro package manager comparisons
	Setting up an OpenLDAP environment using Linux
Jul 05 - I attended
	Linux at the Lorien Novalis School
	Apache 2.0 / mod_perl wrap-up + redundant webservers
Aug 05 - Don't think I made it
	XFce lightweight desktop
	OpenLDAP security with OpenSSL and Cyrus-SASL
Sep 05 - I attended
	Desktop Introduction for newbies
	Virtual Machines for fun & profit (aka Your own personal mainframe)
Oct 05 - I attended
	SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux)
	Working remotely - tricks tips and hazzards
Nov 05 - I attended
	Linux Australia live webcast
	Careers for Geeks
Dec 05 - I organised and attended
	Zig Zag railway trip (Dec 4th)
	Scared Scriptless (Dec 9th)
Jan 06 - I was at LCA
	Grid Computing - processing physics data worldwide
	ROOT Toolkit - graphical analysis toolkit for physics data
Feb 06 - I attended
	Training Greenpeace in (how to use) OpenOffice
	Merlin - Open source POS software used by Kennard Hire


--
---<GRiP>---
Electronic Hobbyist, Former Arcadia BBS nut, Occasional nudist,
Linux Guru, SLUG President, AUUG and Linux Australia member, Sydney
Flashmobber, Tenpin Bowler, BMX rider, Walker, Raver & rave music
lover, Big kid that refuses to grow up. I'd make a good family pet,
take me home today!
        Some people actually read these things it seems.