Follow-up to our last meeting [on May 2nd] and further action plan...

[Abhas Abhinav]

Hello Everyone!

Firstly, I owe apologies to the entire group for not sending this email
earlier. I have been out of Bangalore for about a week and so could not
devote time to this activity.

Let met get straight to what we discussed and then propose an action
plan that we can have a discussion on.

Meeting took place on: 2nd May, 2004 - Sunday
Venue: Barista, MG Road, Bangalore
Participants: Arun, Rakesh, Senthil, Sajith, Avinash and Abhas
Meeting theme: Discuss and agree upon a broad agenda for Free Software
related activities in Bangalore and nearby areas

1. One of the first things things that everyone agreed to was that we
need to work on increasing the number of people involved with the group
here in Bangalore. That way it would be easy to start and then scale up
activities. Also it would ensure that the activities are not the mandate
of a few individuals or organisations but of a larger group of people
bound by a common goal to "promote the usage of free software and help
in its adoption".

2. The next thing that arose was the formal status of our group here and
under what name we should co-ordinate our activities. Arun suggested
that we form two sub-groups here in Bangalore.

One - which would deal exclusively with advocacy and lobbying related
activities. Another one - which would cater to technical support
activities of free software.

Based on the scope and scale of where we can take the activities, the
advocacy group could later be absorbed into FSF India as its Karnataka
chapter. The decision for this, of course, is only up to the FSF board
and would be based on how well we can grow these advocacy and lobbying
activities here. (So we need to work real hard on these!)

3. It was suggested that we make up a list/pool of time and computing
resources we are willing to contribute to this effort. Here is what
everyone came up with:

  Time Resources

  - Rakesh => full time for at least six (6) months
  - Sethil => Saturdays, Sundays
  - Avinash => mid-june onwards full time
  - Sajith => Saturday / Sunday
  - Suraj => Alternate weekends
  - Abhas => completely flexible and depending upon need

  Computing Resources

  - Abhas => We are ready to contribute as much of our office equipment 
    that could be needed for this effort. All our computers run Debian 
    GNU/Linux (mostly unstable and testing, one experimental)

  [I somehow missed noting down others' inputs here - please feel free 
   to add your contributions.]

  Monetary Resources 

  - Mainly for footing meeting bills - Avinash suggested that we equally
    pool money together that can be spent on these expenses

4. Then, briefly, the discussion shifted to the Demo @ Schools project.
We tried to analyse how we could undertake such an activity in
Bangalore. A couple of things we decided were:

- Inputs for such a project: Time, dedicated people, equipment
- Desirable output / results: Involvement of interested students over a 
  large period of time
- Risks: If driven by the idealism / energy of very few people, it can 
  quickly collapse. So we need to encourage this effort to be 
  multi-lateral from the start. The more people we have who feel the 
  same way and as passionately, better are the changes of getting 
  something done.
- Strategy: Low key with distributed responsibilities

Modus operandi: (in my view) Work closely with organisations (profit /
non-profit / academic) that are already into promoting IT education and
similar efforts in schools. I have personally interacted with three
organisations of this sort which have an all-India scope. 

Providing support to them and operating through them could not only be
more effective, but also easier and more sustainable.

5. We also discussed about the best ways of keeping this energy and
process alive. One idea that was suggested was that of a newsletter
highlighting free software related news and events with a local
perspective. This is something that we can send out to interested people
by email or using the Web.

A brief outline of its contents and scope are presented below. Please
comment and grow this outline.

Newsletter content: Drawn from happennings in FSF (US) / FSF (EU) / FSF
(IN) organisations and mailing lists

Proposed content could be as follows:

- Arun's work / travels/ interactions / projects with people
- Our meeting here in Bangalore (at least some highlights of activities
whenever we start them)
- Links to latest articles at FSF.ORG
- Some content from Fred (Goa) / Niyam (Delhi)
- Some content and guidelines / structure from the earlier Freedom
Matters initiative which had a similar scope and aim
- Case studies and Free Software adoption experiences

One or two of us can take up responsibility for starting to author /
collect content. Lets set a deadline for this and ensure we can get the
content out by them.

I can get a designer to do the online / HTML / PDF design for us.

6. Arun needs to mail us some copies of the FSF brochures if any are
still left behind. We will use those to distribute here for our
activities.

7. We need to register a sub-domain: bangalore.fsf.org.in. Arun will
register this sub-domain and point the DNS to the server here so that we
can manage it. 

Arun: The IP to delegate the DNS to is: 202.71.152.157

8. Arun recommended that we make use of NGOs as starting points for our
advocacy and awareness campaign.

9. We also discussed the possibility of coming up with an integrated CD
of all localised GNOME / KDE desktops available for Indian languages.
This will enable us to highlight localisation as one of the most
important features of Free Software when pressing for people to adopt
it.

10. Meeting timings & Place

Sajith suggested we meet on Saturdays. I don't remember what consensus
we arrived at, but lets have a poll on this and go by anything that we
all can agree upon.

------------------

That's it for now. I'm sorry if I made this all look very formal, but I
just haven't been able to write down the other aspects of our meeting on
the 2nd. I'm also setting up a Wiki so that we can starting adding
content and start growing these activities. Will also file these (and
earlier) minutes there as well - at least they will look better and
hence more readable. (didn't want to use HTML formatting in email!)

Comments awaited and appreciated.

Cheers and have a great week ahead!
Abhas.
-- 
Abhas Abhinav <abhas at deeproot.co.in>
CEO, DeepRoot Linux
http://www.deeproot.co.in / +91 (80) 2856 5624
Getting Linux to work for you. Faster. Better. Today. Every way.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://gnowledge.org/pipermail/fsug-bangalore/attachments/20040517/23b9271c/attachment.pgp