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.