Report from FSFE Munich local group meeting December 2014

On their regular schedule FSFE’s Munich local group had its last meeting in 2014. After some smaller past meetings, mostly due illness, this time the gathering was big again. Special guest was a guy from the Red Matrix who saw my profile there and joined us to meet similar minded people. I see this as the moment where those “use(r)less” “alternate” social networks start to collide with the physical lifestyle. πŸ™‚

Our agenda was quite big, but we managed to get through it in time.

First I had the pleasure to inform the group, that some person showed up at the Rhine/Main meetings and told them he learned about the FSFE from us during Corso Leopold. This was great news and all of us were happy to hear that.

Next we talked about the upcoming FSFE-GA-Seat elections. I asked every group member to think about candidating for a seat if they like to, shared some information on the work related to the seat and informed them about the upcoming change in the FSFE Council.

Recently there had been some talks with our host CCC. They might need to have an internal meeting on fridays in the farer future, so we would have to either change time or place of our meetings. We decided to stick with the time in any case and, if needed, would change to another venue.

After all this internal stuff we got to one of our current main tasks, preventing Munich from the change back to Windows. In past meetings we decided to create a website to tell the public the facts and correct the FUD that is spread by the Mayors in the press. After the situation calmed down a bit, the project also slowed down. But since it got too quiet now we decided to get the project up and running soon. The page will be kind of a LiMux-Watch-Blog. Some of our members try to organize a gathering to write the first content in the next week.

Since March and Document Freedom Day is around the corner we started to talk about the modifications for our Free Software handouts. We decided to make every serial with differently coloured paper, so people understand its 6 different flyers instead of 6 stacks of the same. Further a publication date will be added and the introductional text will get a make over. On last Corso Leopold we encountered some hardware failures within our booth material. So as soon as the snow melts (after it finally fells down πŸ˜‰ ), we will build a test booth and do some repair and maintenance work, exchange broken parts, etc. Finally we talked about having an own price for Document Freedom Day. Unfortunally no one had a proper idea at hand, but all of us will think about it.

Last but not least we took up a discussion we had at our November meeting about the quality of our work. We then came to the conclusion, that we have room for improvment regarding long-term planning and availability. On this meeting we started a tool discussion. We want to have some bug/task-tracking tools presented at the Januar meetings. Redmine, Trac and Owncloud have been named, if you have another suggestio please leave a comment.

After the official part had ended, a discussion about Red Matrix, critical mass and distributed social networks started.

Our next meeting will take place on January, 9th 2015 6:30pm at the muCCC. We further will have some christmas get together at the OpenSource-Treffen Christmas party happening on December, 19th 2014.