[Bradford] Notes of meeting with Bradford CVS

[John R Hudson]

Dear All

Sorry, been focusing on the Top Ten and forgot to post these notes of the 
meeting last week:

Notes of the meeting with Paul Colley and Gavin Massingham at Bradford CVS on 
Tuesday, 17 August 2010

1. Paul, as Publications Officer, had initially suggested the meeting because 
he wanted a wider variety of material from BradLug.

2. John gave a short update on the group, mentioning the diversity of its 
membership, the range of topics covered and the variety of ways in which 
members use FOSS.

3. Paul commented that he found that very encouraging as many IT related 
groups have a very narrow focus.

4. Gavin felt we should aim anything about FOSS at the smaller organisations, 
typically those that do not have an IT budget and may therefore benefit most 
obviously from free software. He noted that most voluntary organisations are 
small and that the money tends to be concentrated in a small number of very 
large organisations.

5. Following discussion of a number of options, it was suggested that we 
should consider:

5.1 a half day seminar on something like 'Saving money on software' which 
could perhaps be split into two thirds on suitable FOSS software and a third 
on issues raised by participants.

5.2 contributing a workshop to the community development day to be held at 
Cottingley Cornerstone on 5 November. A possible focus might be setting up 
secure Internet access in a community centre.

6. Each of these would be ways of testing levels of interest in FOSS.

7. Gavin has been contributing various pieces on IT/FOSS related topics and 
Paul would like to develop a mixture of basic how-to and why FOSS? pieces for 
the future.

8. Paul sees the Top Ten idea as offering a framework for a series of pieces 
in the future but would also like that to be interspersed with more 
'thoughtful' pieces.

9. They are particularly keen to identify a local voluntary organisation which 
uses FOSS largely or exclusively around which they could do a feature.

10. Another idea would be to support an organisation through the transition to 
FOSS and write that up.

John R Hudson
17 August 2010
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