Meeting Details

• Date: Thursday, March 20, 2008

• Location: The Howard County Library's Central Branch in Columbia, MD.

• Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Meeting Minutes

Brochure: 'New Life For Your Old PC With Ubuntu Linux'

• The general idea is to create a tri-fold pamphlet to use as a handout.
• Chuck created a template to kickoff the idea with. Everyone had some basic comments to make. Add this, take away that, needs images, etc. The existing text is a quick general ideas type of thing. A glimpse of where and how to lay out the pamphlet. Please take a look at the PDF and post your comments to the forum.
• Brochure 'fallout'
  • Once we get them printed and distributed we'll take the responses (via custom email addys for each theme) and create a class for the most popular one. Then follow up with an install fest if enough interest is generated.

Communication: The topic of email vs forums was discussed.

• The final conclusion we came to is people are going to communicate in the way they feel comfortable doing. Forrms will always have threads for specific events and projects as it is an effective way to say 'comment on it here' and keep track of longer topics. Discussions will obviously happen on the mailing list for some but relevant comments will be copied to or point to from the forum.

Hardy Release Party

• Voting closes on April 1st (no joke) and then we will determine where to have it within a few days of that. The early running has it happening on Friday the 25th. Please comment in the forum if you have a preference as to what restaurant you want to have it at.

Usability Studies

• Celeste Lyn Paul is a KDE usability expert. A recent post of hers inspired the idea that utilizing the LoCo teams to proctor usability studies would be a great project.

• Discussions have already begun on what needs to be done and how it can be implemented. Teaching the team members to take notes and observe will be the first hurdle to overcome. Ultimately coming up with an easy to follow plan that we can distribute to other LoCos to do a national/global usability day would be an awesome outcome.

Install Fests

• On the back burner for now. Will revisit the idea in the future as desired.

Charity Work

• We determined that the best use of our efforts are as a cog in someone else's machine. For example notifying organizations that we are available to assist their projects where we can fit in.

• A charity like I Hack Charities may get some machines donated to them that needs an OS (Ubuntu) installed on them before being passed onto a charity that can use those machines. With our install fest experience we have the ability to do mass installs in an efficient manner. In addition we can do a tutorial for the group receiving the machines. We cannot be a drop point for donated computers and equipment due to a lack of storage unless it is taken with a target to give to within a short period of time.

General ideas for projects

• Hand out CDs at various events and locations. Target the audience if possible.

• Possibly a LAN party with OpenArena.

Logo

• Sherwin mentioned that he was pretty good with graphics and wanted to contribute to the brochure. Chuck also 'volunteered' him to develop some logos for the Maryland Team.

Some random software that was discussed:

• Talked about Dan's Guardian running on a desktop - no proxy server
• Talked about smaller PC's ala eeePC
• Gnome-do - Like Quicksilver - You can type out your application and it will launch it for you