[HLUG] Wednesday's meeting - Notes/Decisions Made

[Julian Robbins]

Hello

I just thought I would post some notes for the sake of LUG members who
weren't able to make our meeting on Wednesday.

I presented the details I had from speaking to both the Kindle Centre and
St John's Ambulance (both in Hereford) re meeting rooms for occasional use
for our presentation/workshop meetings that we are planning to have.

We had a long (for us) and detailed chat looking at both of the venues
above, how much they cost, their equipment, availability of refreshments,
parking, access, payment to the centre,  wifi etc etc.

Both looked reasonable without much to choose between them

The Kindle centre<http://www.kindlecentre.org.uk/nfHome.asp?Section=Room+2&ButtonPressed=Sadmin133117>is
£12 per hour for their room (2) accomodating 12-15 people. Parking is
one small issue here - you get 2 free hours in the main ASDA carpark, but
no more. Availability was raised. Kindle may have slightly better
availability, but either way we may have to move our regular Wednesday to
another day to get the room we want.

St John Ambulance meeting
room<http://www.sja.org.uk/sja/counties/west-midlands/venue-hire/hereford.aspx>
is
available for £14 per hour similar size, but there was a sense that we may
have more flexibility with them, and their car park is free for however
long we wish to have the meetings for. We may also be given our own key
after a couple of bookings, which implies a certain degree of
trust. Availability at St John's is really restricted to Tuesdays only, but
as this is for only occasional meetings it was felt this wasn't a bad idea,
and may help some members who can't attend meetings on Wednesdays to come
along too.

Pete also raised again the aspect of free meeting rooms, and although this
is something we would love to have, we just haven't come up with any
suitable suggestions yet after quite a long time in trying to find
anything, so it was decided that it was better to press ahead with a paid
for venue to start with so we can arrange our first Presentation/Workshop
style meeting and get some activity started instead of discussion

We agreed that the first meeting will be a talk about OpenStreetMap
in approximately a month's time (making it June's meeting effectively) at
St John Ambulance, in Hereford.

Ben Proctor has kindly volunteered for this. I'm sure it will be a great
talk and we will all learn something new ! I may well go check out the
facilities beforehand. Further details when this is all confirmed.

Just to confirm we will still be having most meetings at the Courtyard -
any new venue will be only every 2-3 months for when we need a quieter room
for presentations/workshops etc which we can call our own.

Tim had the idea that we should setup a poll/questionnaire to capture the
views on what sort of talks/presentations members would like, this will be
setup in due course too, time permitting.

I will be in touch with St John Ambulance soon.

So we got through quite a bit on Wednesday - let's push this forward now ;-)

Julian
Herefordshire LUGMaster