Weekly MOSS meeting minutes

[Vishah]

My previous 2 attempts at including this in " MOSS Activity/Events/
Meetings Calendar " topic was unsuccessful -somehow :S.

Summary of the MOSS weekly meeting on 21 November 2009

Among the issues discussed were:

-Why Software Freedom Day Event didn't materialize


1) Members pointed out that we didn't have enough members committed to
hold such a grand scale event that was planned.
2) The Community model, that everyone has a say, everyone should
contribute, that all are leaders, which is one of our fundamental
beliefs, and the reason for our successes was lacking in this event
planning, Everybody was depending one one or two to lead. And at the
last moment everyone had reservations.
3) All the focus was on logistics. Everything else including
presentation materials, sideshows, documentation etc. had less focus.

-Plans for a MOSS annual event.

1)Noted was not to think of a grand event.
2)Everyone present at the meeting except one member who had a busy
schedule, which we can understand, agreed they would each pick one
FLOSS solution and submit a draft of a presentation document by coming
Thursday. Expectations is that by coming Thursday we will have 6
initial presentation documents for 6 different FLOSS solutions in the
mailing list. From there on the members are invited to add to, modify
and improvise these documents.
3)To hold this event sometime in December.The Consensus was to hold
the event sometime late December?.

*Please add if I have missed anything.

[Yusuf Abdulla Shunan]

thank vishah, for the new comers feel free to go through the previous
ideas and the software that we planned to showcase in the Free
Software Day from the below link...

http://groups.google.com/group/mlugmv/browse_thread/thread/cc1f5336136964d9

Salam
Yusuf Abdulla Shunan

[Yusuf Abdulla Shunan]

Hi All,

As per the last MOSS meeting find below a link for an introduction and
FAQ of Zimbra Collaborative Suite...

http://mlugmv.googlegroups.com/web/Zimbra.pdf?gda=r_j00zwAAADJOJlB2Bu_QboPAO6XwY30WFYjtsG4hygGP3--KsqO0uGyeEMH4d-V9kFoQptoYtr9Wm-ajmzVoAFUlE7c_fAt

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words, so there are more
screenshots than words :)

As always comments and suggestions are welcome...

Salam
Yusuf Abdulla Shunan

[Yusuf Abdulla Shunan]

Hi All,

Similar to the Zimbra paper, find below the link for the SugarCRM
paper...

http://mlugmv.googlegroups.com/web/SugarCRM.pdf

Comments and suggestions are welcome...

Salam
Yusuf Abdulla Shunan

[Vishah]

Summary of the MOSS weekly meeting on 28 December 2009

Among the issues discussed were

1) How to get Free software enthusiasts to join MOSS and to be active
members. Various reasons for their hesitancies were pointed out.One
thing that everyone agreed is the mailing list doesn't and couldn't
show a full picture of the MOSS . The mindset of the members in how to
achieve FLOSS goals through MOSS has been molded over countless
meetings where discussions covered on all matters and difficulties we
face in this endeavor. Sometimes there is no perfect solution that
will appease all. What MOSS strives and so far has been following is
to follow the majority consensus of members. It was pointed out,
criticism is welcome as long as it is called for and fruitful. the
perception that any movement needs a lone leader where brainless
drones blindly follow, doesn't apply to MOSS. .If experienced and
knowledgeable IT professionals have different ideas or approaches,
they are very much welcome to join MOSS. Their viewpoint will surely
count. This discussion led to

2) the discussion on MLUG and MOSS. the differences between
OpenSource and Free as in Freedom software, for the benefit of two new
members who joined the meeting. MLUG being part of MOSS, two being not
distinctively separate was pointed out. the scope of MLUG being less
than MOSS. MLUG , a community/ group where members share ideas, help
each other. a place where people who share the same software freedom
ideals meet-up and propagate FLOSS in an individual capacity. MOSS is
an NGO that was a wider scope opening up various official channels to
propagate FLOSS to government, businesses, schools, individuals etc.
Achieving the goals by any means necessary as long as it doesn't go
against MOSS philosophy.

3)More ideas were discussed on MOSS day and Logistical tasks were
assigned to three members.

4)To get students and wider public to appreciate OpenSource, some
incentive should be there. For them to come and hear about the
benefits also there should be an intensive. Knowledge can be a bait.
Ideas were shared and arrangements were made on giving Network
Security Seminars to students of colleges. How to include FLOSS
knowledge in it, and how to get members into MOSS through those
seminars was another topic of discussion.

5) If organizations were to migrate to FLOSS solutions, there should
be people to give support. Guidance for IT startups in FLOSS solutions
and help these startup companies in development, marketing etc is a
must. A large part of the meeting was devoted to discussions on the
means of doing this and was decided to have a session to specially
work on this.

* Pardon my memory and add if I have missed anything..Thank you

[Vishah]

MOSS weekly meeting tonight at 8:30. venue:Mandhu College(Old MES
building).

[Yusuf Abdulla Shunan]

Hi all,

First I would like to thank Mandhu College (Mr. Ibra) for providing a
rather permanent venue for all our meetings. As a part of tonight's
agenda I would like to propose the following.

1. Finalization of the Incubator Proposal, so make sure you all go
through the working draft that was shared among the working group.

2. A lawyer from Maldive Police Services, Mr. Ushamath, will be
joining us tonight. He plays an important role in the implementation
of the IP Law in Maldives, will update us on the progress and would
like to know more of what FLOSS can give to the society, as an
alternative.

3. MOSS Open Day activities and responsibilities!

4. MOSS Press Conference!

So, see you all at Mandhu College (Old MES)

Salam
Yusuf Abdulla Shunan

[Yasiph]

Oh man! I'm so sorry I missed this one...

keep us posted. thanks.
Yasiph

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[Inash Zubair]

Sorry people I couldn't make it tonight. But hopefully I shall let you know earlier tomorrow (13 Dec) if we could have one tomorrow night or the following night. Cheers.

--
Inash Zubair

[Vishah]

Summary of the MOSS weekly meeting on 8 December 2009

Incubator Project
We agreed on the responsibilities of incubator project as outlines in
the draft proposal. Additional ideas and suggestions were discussed
along with various people to meet and steps to take. In addition it
was decided to share the incubator draft proposal via the mailing
list.

Open Day
The ideas of preparing for the open day was dragging us, as most of us
were perfectionists. So it was decided to go ahead with the event at
any cost with whatever resources we have. In addition it was agreed to
give short presentation to schools, colleges, institutes on an ad-hoc
basis.

[V Shah]

In regard presentation to schools and colleges, we have already contacted Villa College and Mandhu College. They are very welcoming to the idea. So as soon as the semester breaks are over, we can go ahead with it.

[Vishah]

Summary of the MOSS weekly meeting on 13 December 2009

1)MOSS repository:Members agreed that having a local repositories to
cater for the local needs, like language packs, Maldives oriented
customisations and software etc. were important.The packages can later
be upstreamed to repos of other distros, whenever they deem them
stable enough.Members discussed to create both deb and rpm
repositories which should include source packages as well. Once the
hosting is finalised, and repositories upped, we have to elect a
package maintainer, and a way that everyone in the community submit
content to the repo.It was pointed that one solution is to have an
email address reserved for the purpose of use by the maintainer to
which people can submit content, either as raw source code, or pre-
packaged as per developers preference.

2)FLOSS Magazine:A new idea in the meeting was to create a monthy
online magazine which will include information on FLOSS solutions,
research and installation guides, Free software philosophy,
Introduction The people behind FLOSS and more. Moreover the main
target, members present at the meeting agreed,should be the focus on
Maldivian needs. Interviews with companies who have successfully
deployed FLOSS solutions, Their success stories, The problems they
faced in deployment and other issues can be covered here. We can also
borrow inspiration from other articles and present the ideas here in a
manner that goes with Maldivian needs.

3)In the meeting with mr.Ibrahim Ismail(Ibra), he opened the
opportunity to merge MOSS day events into Open Day events planned by
Mandhu college.This way we will be able to get more people to attend
than if we were to have an event solely dedicated to FLOSS.

4)The progress on approaching educational institutes were discussed.

*Please add if I have missed anything.

[Yusuf Abdulla Shunan]

5) We also discussed the idea of approaching the MAB (Maldives
Accreditation Board) [http://www.employment.gov.mv/mab/mab.asp] to
improve the IT education framework, specially what is included in the
Certificate I, II, Advance Certificate, Diploma and Advance Diploma as
we see them need to be improved based on the fact that IT Industry is
way too dynamic that it can be based on 4 year old frameworks. In
addition the introduction and injection of FLOSS in the curriculum.

[Yusuf Abdulla Shunan]

hi all,

as per the meeting, find attached the first draft of the incubator
proposal... comments and suggestions welcome...

salam
yusuf abdulla shunan

[Inash Zubair]

Hello all.

Here are the minutes for the weekly meeting held on December 19, 2009 21:00 at Mandhu Learning Centre. You can skip below to find some other points highlighted as general ideas relevant to other aspects of MOSS and it's biddings. Before we delve into the minutes, I'd like to highlight that we had the pleasure of being joined by Ismail Faiz (PH) who is one of the first members of MLUG (Maldives Linux Users Group).

So here are the minutes.

---

First we kicked off with an idea that have been hanging around for sometime which is about conducting random presentations at institutes, organizations, academia and government offices. The presentations will be targeted towards potential IT users and consumers focused towards introducing the FOSS concept, culture and it's traits.

Some of the core members have met with Ibrahim Ismail (Ibra) regarding certain FOSS topics and IT in general and there have been ideas about creating a computer lab and infrastructure for academical IT for teaching as well as research and development, and possibly provided all the resources, MOSS might come in the scene to manage and conduct research on shared topics from Mandhu Learning Centre as well as MOSS.

We then went on to discuss about the recent repository hosting proposed by Vishah and at a point it seemed that we needed to host mirrors for Ubuntu and Fedora. But we're not going to go there yet instead, we'll have a small repository to host local packages which fits our community like font packages, etc. We also discussed about certain infrastructure that may need to be laid down to continually maintain the repository in terms of development, issue reporting, upgrading and maintainers, but probably we can save the conversation for another day.

It seems that a few strings are needed to fully translate the Google search pages to dhivehi. The topic was brought up by Huxain and it was decided that this could be prioritized under the localization project and completed soon. So then we can all have a dhivehi Google search home page (but who cares!?). We need to activate the translation group for this a little (mentioned at the bottom).

To complete the full support for dhivehi in ubuntu, it seems that we need to produce and complete a language support pack. Since the dhivehi language pack is available now, what's required in compliment with it is the support pack. The support pack is responsible for properly adjusting special characters and stuff and make it stick to right-to-left languages such as dhivehi. Vishah, Huxain and Inash (myself :o) will be working to complete this task.

Regarding the incubation project of NCIT, Shunan explained how it went. Although the terms of reference of the project was designed to fail (in my perspective) and especially targeted towards a commercial contractor who might work 2 years for charity (which is unlikely to ever happen), a small core group decided that we will propose. Despite of the terms of reference, our proposal was weighed more on a FOSS based proposition and creating a path for the incubatees to come out more strongly as FOSS based commercial firms. The proposal is available on the mailing list but it was not submitted since time ran out from finalizing the proposal.

Although we failed to submit the proposal on our terms, I believe that it isn't a total failure since we were able to brainstorm together, come up with a hypothesis of how actually the project might come out and thought of ways of how it might have turned out if the whole project was based on FOSS and targeted towards FOSS development.

Civicom has been running on Ubuntu since it was migrated about 6 months back. We had little complications here and there but all in all it was a successful project. We've yet to wrap up the project by intervening into a troubleshooting session and a q&a session with the ministry and prepare a final report for the community and for the ministry on our findings and final thoughts.

We then talked about the magazine idea which was proposed late November by Jaau. It went on to be a heated discussion from about the features of the magazine to the content and the types of advertisements which can be included in it. We also discussed about the general framework for the magazine and how we'll go about keeping it sustained towards educating our target audience at the same time enabling us to generate and income by selling slots for advertisements. We've yet to hold a magazine meeting and deciding on some principal aspects of it and develop a minimal content as soon as possible to be able to release a first issue due in early January. And it should be in English, at least initially.

We've also decided to fire up the localization project a little bit to work on the major components of Gnome translation. To take things up to a favorable state, we'll be joining the IRC channel #moss on freenode daily at 11pm and at least spend an hour collaborating on the project.

---

That's it for the minutes. PH highlighted that we create a small policy for the weekly meeting to keep things short and sweet. Because weekly meetings are targeted towards the general members and the public, we wouldn't want to discuss any unnecessary topics and argue about our points of view there. We want to reach out as much and as quick as possible by keeping it within 1 hour and not making everyone else bored with brainstorming talks.

It was highlighted that we create small work groups/committees to distribute different tasks to. The pool of members will be given the choice to volunteer to take over certain projects and tasks.

That's all folks. Sorry for the bloody long email. I just couldn't keep them any shorter. Written as is and have not revised. Sorry for any errors. Cheers.

--
Inash Zubair

[V Shah]

Thanks for the minutes.

--

[Ismail Faiz]

Inn & team,

Thanks for the minutes. It was a pleasure to join you folks. Look forward for more.

Faiz

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 1:59 AM, Inash Zubair <inash....@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Vishah]

Hussain forwarded the following agenda for tonights meeting.

Time: 900PM
Venue: Mandhu college

5 mins - read last minutes
10 minutes - magazine
15 minutes - website
20 minutes - work teams
10 minutes - open discussion and for agenda ideas for next meeting.

Order in disorder.

[Inash Zubair]

Hello all,

Here's the minutes for 26th's weekly meeting.

---

MOSS Weekly Meeting Minutes
26 December, 2009 09:30 PM
Venue: Mandhu Learning Centre
Attendeess: Ihsan, Mode (Almode), Shiya (Soul), Huxain, Naattey, Vishah, Inash, Sobah.

Agenda:
- Review previous weeks minutes.
- Magazine.
- Website.
- Work teams.
- Open discussion and ideas for next meeting.

So we've had yet another productive weekly meeting but with a little twist. We added a little sugar from last meeting about little meeting policies. We strictly abode with the 1 hour time frame and moderated the topics to bare minimums as suggested by Faiz (PH) last week. In fact we were able to jot down more things that can be done in less time.

We were also joined today by an honorary member coming from the initial MLUG community, Hussain Nashid (Naattey), who's in town for a short break from studies, doing his masters in Australia. And hopefully the next couple of meetings, we'll be joined by special members like this one.

We started off with discussing about the progress and the logistics for the Magazine. It was decided that the title for the magazine will be just MOSS (as proposed by PH) along with a slogan/tag line that goes like "Monthly FLOSS Magazine" or something of that sort. But that's a good one to begin with, we could just as well agree on that for the while.

Sobah, suggested that we could brainstorm topics during a magazine meeting and throw the topic categories on the mailing list. So that it would be easier for people to choose a category to write their articles on, although it's not compulsory to stick with the proposed topics/categories (undecided).

We decided that the deadlines for article submission will be the end of a month and the first week of the following month will be spent on compiling the issue and publishing it.

If for some reason, articles are tied for publication, the ones that will get through will be decided through an editorial vote. Ihsan suggested that the online versions of the articles should be available on the website as well (undecided).

The members who volunteered for the editorial board are: Inash, Vishah, Shiya (Soul), Huxain and the magazine design team is Shunan and Ihsan.

Website features proposed (this is my domain, ha ha ha):
- Fix: password reset feature.
- Membership fee collection process.
- Blog feature: syndicate from member blogs.
- Syndicate mailing list updates on the home page.
- A unified syndication of the website (MOSS world like).

It was mostly a magazine meeting. That's it folks.

(Order in disorder :o).

--
Inash Zubair

[Abdul Hameed]

Thanks, Inn.

Sorry i am not in male. me in Hulhule on a training programme. Catch you all when i m back in male (on 31st December).

c ya all.

[Ismail Faiz]

Inn,

Thanks for the meeting minutes. Glad to hear the meetings are improving.

How many magazine articles do you have now? Is there a way to get a sneak peak at them?

I have been reading the meeting minutes for sometime, and I feel that this is a great source of information to get to know what MOSS is doing. And I thought, can we not also have a summary of the meeting on the MOSS magazine? This could be the summary or the highlights for that month. Maybe this might also attract new attendees to the meeting? ( I hope so).

Hope to join you guys for the next meeting.

Faiz - PH

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[Inash Zubair]

Hi PH,

We now have 7 articles at the moment, which is good for a start provided there are more practical tutorials. Having the minutes on the magazine is a good idea too. We'll be able to include 1 for each week, a total of 4 weeks a month.

--
Inash Zubair

[Inash Zubair]

Hi,

Minutes of the last weekly meeting will available on the website at http://moss.org.mv/Minutes.

Cheers.


--
Inash Zubair

[Inash Zubair]

Hi,

Minutes of the last weekly meeting (23 January, 2010) will be available on the website at http://moss.org.mv/Minutes.

Cheers.


--
Inash Zubair

[Inash Zubair]

Minutes updated on the website: http://www.moss.org.mv/Minutes

Cheers.

---
Inash Zubair