Hello All. We had an Officer's Meeting on 1/5/07 and talked about where the club is going and what we want to do this quarter. We had a very productive meeting with many ideas. Below is the fruits of the meeting and various other pieces club information. This is a long e-mail with a lot of information and I recommend you read it all.
<br><br>-- alex<br><br><br>Table of Contents<br>--------------------------<br>*Meeting Dates & Times<br>*Quarter Meeting Ideas<br>*Spring Quarter Workshops<br>*Winter Involvement Fair<br>*Website Usage and Update<br>*Office Computer Lab
<br>*Club Operation Funding<br>*Tuesday, January 9th Meeting<br><br><br>Meeting Dates and Times<br>--------------------------------------<br>We've decided that the Tuesday/Thursday alternating schedule hurt us more than it helped. It was confusing and hard to explain to others. ("We're the Open Source Club! We meet weekly, alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays. This week we meet on Thursday, so next week we meet on Tuesday!") It also was inconsistent how many days we had between meetings. (Tuesday -> Thursday = 8 / Thursday -> Tuesday = 4)
<br><br>We've decided that we will have a stable day and time each week. Our meetings will be on Tuesday at 7:00pm starting on Tuesday, January 9th at 7:00pm. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, but we believe it to be better for the club and most of the membership.
<br><br><br>Quarter Meeting Ideas<br>---------------------------------<br>This quarter, we are going to try and have a few more active meetings. For example, we could have meetings in DL280, where there are computers for all to use. Once we get the office lab up and running, we can also have some fun hacking events in it.
<br><br>We also came up with some ideas for meetings. Below is a list of what we came up with any anyone who has expressed interest in leading those meetings.<br><br>*The New GPL -- Farhad has expressed interest.<br>*Non-Code Contributions
<br>*Bug Reporting & Fixing<br>*CVS & SVN<br>*Kernel Modules<br>*Firefox/Thunderbird Extensions -- Jim will present.<br>*Gimp Scripts (Script-Fu)<br>*Gaim Plugins<br>*Installing and running Linux on the PS3 and other random hardware -- Farhad, Peter, and Tom are exploring this.
<br><br>If anyone has any other ideas or would like to lead a meeting on these or any other topics, e-mail me at <a href="mailto:lingo.13@osu.edu">lingo.13@osu.edu</a> or the list.<br><br><br><br>Spring Quarter Workshops<br>
---------------------------------------<br>We've come up with an idea of having Workshops next quarter like we had in Spring Quarter last year. This year we are exploring the idea of workshops on OpenOffice.org/media creation.
<br><br>So far, we have ideas for the following items for Workshops:<br><br>*OpenOffice.org Writer<br>*OpenOffice.org Calc<br>*OpenOffice.org Impress<br>*The GIMP<br>*Blender/3D Modeling (<a href="http://www.blender.org">
http://www.blender.org</a>)<br>*Music/Video creation.<br><br>If you have any ideas or comments, feel free to send them to the mailing list. We'll be discussing these in more depth later this quarter.<br><br><br>Winter Involvement Fair
<br>-----------------------------------<br>The Winter Involvement Fair is taking place on Wednesday, January 10th from 6:00 - 8:00pm in the Ohio Union Main Lounge. We should be attending the event, but have not heard back yet from SOURCE.
<br><br>We could use a few people to help us man the booth, so if you are interested, please e-mail me and let me know. It would be nice if the people at the booth aren't stuck there all night and can explore all the exciting clubs and organizations present at the fair.
<br><br><br>Website Usage and Update<br>----------------------------------------<br>The website has not been very useful. Again. So, I'm at work on it.<br><br>I've updated Drupal to the latest version and have cleared out all the spam comments and fake users. I've added a CAPTCHA system so that robots can no longer create accounts or post comments. I feel that this will help greatly, at least until the Robot Bill of Rights passes in 2046.
<br><br>I'm going to be making the website more useful soon by adding officer contact info and a reliable & accurate meeting schedule, among other things.<br><br><br>Office Computer Lab<br>-------------------------------
<br>We are working hard on getting the office's computer lab up and running. Due to CS&E SOC Lab policy, we can only have one active network port. Currently we are looking at getting the 24-port switch we have working or purchasing another solution. Once we get a working network up, we should be able to get two or three desktops up and running on it.
<br><br>Our other issue is memory -- we just don't have enough for the Pentium III's we are going to be using. If you would like to donate any PIII-compatible memory, let me know and we can work something out.<br>
<br><br>Club Operation Funding<br>-----------------------------------<br>We have received an operating funds from SOURCE. We are looking into using the funds to purchase things such as food for meetings and magazines and supplies for the office. While food is tasty, open source magazines are entertaining and educational.
<br><br><br>Tuesday, January 9th Meeting<br>---------------------------------------------<br>Our first meeting of the quarter will be on Tuesday, January 9th. It will be at 7:00pm in Dreese Labs 480. I will be leading this meeting with an introduction to Wordpress and a tutorial on how to get it up and running. Wordpress is an open source blog publishing platform, similar to the commercial Movable Type.
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