[ubuntu-za] Meeting minutes from today's IRC meeting

[Morgan Collett]

We had an IRC meeting in #ubuntu-za today, as announced previously on
the list. These meetings will continue on a monthly basis, the next
one being planned for 2 September at 20:30.

Here are the minutes, also posted at
http://wiki.ubuntu-za.org/MeetingMinutes/2009-08-05:

Monthly Team Reports

Jonathan Carter has created some empty pages on the wiki as a place
holder for our monthly reports to the global Ubuntu community
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports). We will populate them with
mentioning our monthly meetings and some of the points we have
discussed.

Collaborating with local LUGs

Stefano Rivera told us that CLUG needs some fresh direction and
wondered how CLUG could help Ubuntu-ZA. The next CLUG meeting on 11
August will be a panel discussion on this subject:
http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-chat/2009-August/026031.html

In general, we want to collaborate with LUGs since they have local
meetings and can get involved more directly in events like Software
Freedom Day, which is coming up in September.

Where there isn't an existing LUG but there are several interested
people in the Ubuntu-ZA community, we can support them starting a
local LUG.

Activities and projects

David Robert Lewis mentioned interest in township outreach such as
donating old computers with Ubuntu.

We recently had a C programming event run by Charl Wentzel which went
very well judging by the feedback. Hopefully this will lead to further
events like this.

If you want to take on a project or special interest, test the waters,
announce it and then do it... if there is interest we will support
you. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to take on things that
others suggest if they aren't willing to put in the effort - but we
can connect people who have a mutual interest.

Directing new IRC users to #ubuntu-za by default

When you open a newly-installed IRC client in Ubuntu such as xchat,
you are connected to #ubuntu by default. This has resulted in a
channel that is practically unusable since there are so many
participants trying to talk at once.

There is a global proposal to handle this by region instead and set
the default to the appropriate channel, such as #ubuntu-za.

We discussed implications of this, such as many new Ubuntu users
joining #ubuntu-za looking for support.

In general we support it as it will grow our community, but we
discussed some factors in the implementation. Jonathan Hitchcock will
contribute our feedback to the global discussion which is happening on
the loco-contacts mailing list.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 2 September at 20:30, to allow
for people who couldn't attend this one due to work.