[Glug-nith-discuss] LUG-Delhi minutes

[Debarshi Ray]

Some of the things in the following minutes of a LUG meet published on
the ILUG Delhi mailing list seemed interesting to me. Thought you
might like to read it.

Bye,
Debarshi

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

Message: 5
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:25:22 +0530
From: Gora Mohanty <address@hidden>
Subject: [ilugd] Minutes of the last ILUG-Delhi meeting, on Jan. 28th
To: The Linux-Delhi mailing list <address@hidden>
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain

Hello,
Here are the minutes of the last meeting, which was held on Jan.
28th, at the JNU Bio-Informatics Centre. My apologies for the delay
in posting these:
0. There was a decent level of attendance, with a total of about 14
 people present.

1. The first item discussed was to clarify to all present the reason
 for the decision not to participate in Linux-Asia, 2007. This had
 little to do with the commercial aspects of LA2007, though some
 people did express their reservations in this regard. In the end,
 the main reason was that LA2007 organisers had not lived up to the
 promises that had been made to get ILUG-Delhi to participate. It was
 also decided not to accept the official free passes offered to ILUG-
 Delhi, as that could be seen as an endorsement of LA2007. Of course,
 LUG members are free to participate as individuals.

2. Interest was expressed in the recent postings on the list from Amit
 Kapre, proposing an open-source cooperative. We have been kicking a
 similar idea around for some time, but it has always foundered on the
 question of how do you ensure commitment from LUG members, and
 whether this was something that fit into the goals of ILUG-Delhi. It
 was decided not to propose an official participation from ILUG-Delhi,
 though several members expressed interest in following through with
 OSC on an individual basis.

3. Atul Jha presented his ideas about an e-zine, which have also been
 discussed on this mailing list. Here is an outline of his initial
 ideas about what the e-zine would contain:
   o Easy ways for newcomers to get into Linux. All information under
     this would be made available in one place.
   o Provide a common forum for all LUGs in India, especially
     targetting LUGs in smaller cities, which might not have an easy
     way to put up a site of their own.
   o Provide a list of internships, fellowships, etc., in the open-
     source world so as to allow students and newcomers a way to
     financially support themselves.
   o Some features of the first issue could be:
     - Developer corner.
     - An article from a hacker.
     - New products from Sourceforge, and other online repositories.
     - Smaller LUGs in India.
     - List of scholarships in FOSS areas.
     - FOSS project of the month: How to take part in it.
 A lively discussion on this ensued. Questions were asked about how to
 gather all this information, would other LUGs be interested, and whom
 the magazine was aimed at. It was felt that evangelical content, and
 attracting new users to the FOSS world should be important parts of
 the e-zine. The sustainability of the project was also brought into
 question, and it was felt that a detailed project plan, including a
 list of volunteers, was essential. Finally, it was agreed that this
 be taken up as a prototype ILUG-Delhi project, with a more formal
 sanction once it gets off the ground. The following action items are
 planned:
   o Raj Mathur: Provide domain ezine.linux-delhi.org (DONE).
   o Sudev Barar: Set up Drupal at this domain (DONE).
   o Anand Shanker, and Gora Mohanty were volunteered as editors. We
     now have admin. access to the site, and can add users, with
     Atul's agreement.
   o Atul Jha to come up with a project plan, with an initial draft
     circulated for comments. The project plan should include:
       - Broad areas covered, along the lines outlined above.
       - People participating in the project, their roles, and the
         amount of time committed, so as to ensure sustainability.
       - Target audience for the e-zine. How to circulate it, and
         make sure that there is interest in it.

4. Finally, Gora Mohanty made a presentation about easy ways to write
 code that could be used from multiple programming languages, and
 about how to write cross-platform GUIs. In this context, an example
 of the development and testing of a Hindi spellchecker, built around
 the open-source aspell engine, was presented. SWIG, Mono.NET, C#, and
 GTK were the open-source tools covered in the presentation. There
 was a fair amount of interest, including in the Hindi spellchecker,
 and it was suggested that this project be written up in the e-zine.
 I will make a copy of the presentation available online.

5. The next meeting will be held around mid-February, hopefully at NSIT,
 Dwarka, which apparently has a strong Linux user base. Please send me
 items for the agenda. I would strongly encourage technical talks, and
 will volunteer someone if I get no candidates.

Regards,
Gora


--
After the game the king and the pawn go into the same box.
               -- Italian proverb