In an attempt to be more open and engaged with our community about
what's going on, I'm going to write up minutes from the leadership
meetings. If you have any questions, thoughts, or want to get engaged
more please send me an email. If you have suggestions on format or flow,
those are welcome as well, as this is the first attempt to do this.
====================================================
Minutes from MHVLUG Leadership Meeting - 3Q 2017
====================================================
Attendees
=========
* Sean Dague (president)
* Matt Johnson (program director)
* Jack Chastain (historian)
15th Anniversary Branding
=========================
After 15 years as MHVLUG, it's probably time to consider a new
brand. We're doing a lot less with Linux and more with open
technology. Many folks have brought this in the past, I'll admit to
only finally letting it sink in more recently. The current thinking
is to do a brand change to "HV Open" (mirroring HV Tech in some ways)
to coincide with the 15th anniversary meeting in March 2018. Mostly
this gives time to get collateral sorted, like a new logo, and new
website (probably a slimmed down wordpress instead of
drupal).
The key feature of the website today is listing events, and syncing
with meetup, that will need to be written as a wordpress plugin.
We also need to figure out a better photo management system for our
digital assets, as digging back through them all for doing social
media posts has been a pain. Meetup itself might be the right answer
for this, we're going to do some experiments there.
2018 Officers
=============
Matt and Jack are fine staying on another year in their current
roles. Sean has largely structured the president role for the
marathon, and assumes he'll be in it until someone else wants it. We
all felt like we're missing important perspectives after Nitya needed
to move on (both on publicity and agenda), and would love to get more
folks, with a wider diversity. We discussed a few folks we'd like to
reach out to.
Consider this an open invitation to anyone that is interested in
getting engaged and helping.
Engaging more with local colleges
===================================
Vassar
------
Back in the late spring, Matt and Sean met with Vassar CS Faculty and
Staff about getting more engaged with the overall Vassar
community. We had an open follow up to get in contact with students
from the CS majors committee to see if there were ways we could
collaborate.
Sean took the todo to reach out. (Post meeting, we've got an email
thread going with Vassar folks, just sorting out timing for a face to
face meeting. With this being the first week of classes at Vassar, and
next week being a travel week for Sean, it will probably be 2 weeks
out).
Marist
------
Matt took the todo to follow up with his Marist contacts to see about
where we could collaborate more there.
Upcoming Talks
==============
Current confirmed schedule
* Blockchain - confirmed and read to go
* Data mangling with R - Oct (this is the reschedule from a conflict
in the spring, so we've had this one in process for a while)
* Matt reached out to Eileen, she's got a talk on contributing to Open
Source.
* Dec - Sean will do it, proposed 4 possible topics to Matt. The
leading contenders are a deep dive through IoT by looking at the
process of building his weather station. There is an off chance that
a project involving serverless and machine learning will be complete
enough at that point that it might replace it. We'll lock down the
topic 2 months out.
* Jan - Matt is teaching a Unity class, will prep a talk based on it.
Scheduling
----------
Confirmed rooms at Vassar through June 2018. We're going to shift Jan
from 3rd -> 10th, to avoid holidays, and the chance that Vassar didn't
turn the heat back on in the building yet (as they do some facilities
shut downs over the holidays often).
Reaching out for additional speakers
------------------------------------
Some other ideas batted around, will be sending out contact points.
Also proposed the idea that perhaps we take 3 interesting topics we'd
like to see speakers talk on, and post that to see if anyone is
interested as a taker. Some kind of media / streaming talk would be
cool. Sean participated in some OBS streaming at OpenWest, and the
fact that you can build a multi camera live streaming environment for
a couple hundred bucks is kind of amazing.
Also hoping that we might get some additional speakers engaged by our
college engagement strategy.
End Meeting
===========
Plenty of good beer was had. Also random discussions on home energy
systems and geothermal.
-Sean
--
Sean Dague
http://dague.net
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
https://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College *
Oct 4 - Data Wrangling With R
