Hello,
Here are the minutes of the last meeting, which was held on Jan.
28th, at the JNU Bio-Informatics Centre. My apologies for the delay
in posting these:
0. There was a decent level of attendance, with a total of about 14
people present.
1. The first item discussed was to clarify to all present the reason
for the decision not to participate in Linux-Asia, 2007. This had
little to do with the commercial aspects of LA2007, though some
people did express their reservations in this regard. In the end,
the main reason was that LA2007 organisers had not lived up to the
promises that had been made to get ILUG-Delhi to participate. It was
also decided not to accept the official free passes offered to ILUG-
Delhi, as that could be seen as an endorsement of LA2007. Of course,
LUG members are free to participate as individuals.
2. Interest was expressed in the recent postings on the list from Amit
Kapre, proposing an open-source cooperative. We have been kicking a
similar idea around for some time, but it has always foundered on the
question of how do you ensure commitment from LUG members, and
whether this was something that fit into the goals of ILUG-Delhi. It
was decided not to propose an official participation from ILUG-Delhi,
though several members expressed interest in following through with
OSC on an individual basis.
3. Atul Jha presented his ideas about an e-zine, which have also been
discussed on this mailing list. Here is an outline of his initial
ideas about what the e-zine would contain:
o Easy ways for newcomers to get into Linux. All information under
this would be made available in one place.
o Provide a common forum for all LUGs in India, especially
targetting LUGs in smaller cities, which might not have an easy
way to put up a site of their own.
o Provide a list of internships, fellowships, etc., in the open-
source world so as to allow students and newcomers a way to
financially support themselves.
o Some features of the first issue could be:
- Developer corner.
- An article from a hacker.
- New products from Sourceforge, and other online repositories.
- Smaller LUGs in India.
- List of scholarships in FOSS areas.
- FOSS project of the month: How to take part in it.
A lively discussion on this ensued. Questions were asked about how to
gather all this information, would other LUGs be interested, and whom
the magazine was aimed at. It was felt that evangelical content, and
attracting new users to the FOSS world should be important parts of
the e-zine. The sustainability of the project was also brought into
question, and it was felt that a detailed project plan, including a
list of volunteers, was essential. Finally, it was agreed that this
be taken up as a prototype ILUG-Delhi project, with a more formal
sanction once it gets off the ground. The following action items are
planned:
o Raj Mathur: Provide domain ezine.linux-delhi.org (DONE).
o Sudev Barar: Set up Drupal at this domain (DONE).
o Anand Shanker, and Gora Mohanty were volunteered as editors. We
now have admin. access to the site, and can add users, with
Atul's agreement.
o Atul Jha to come up with a project plan, with an initial draft
circulated for comments. The project plan should include:
- Broad areas covered, along the lines outlined above.
- People participating in the project, their roles, and the
amount of time committed, so as to ensure sustainability.
- Target audience for the e-zine. How to circulate it, and
make sure that there is interest in it.
4. Finally, Gora Mohanty made a presentation about easy ways to write
code that could be used from multiple programming languages, and
about how to write cross-platform GUIs. In this context, an example
of the development and testing of a Hindi spellchecker, built around
the open-source aspell engine, was presented. SWIG, Mono.NET, C#, and
GTK were the open-source tools covered in the presentation. There
was a fair amount of interest, including in the Hindi spellchecker,
and it was suggested that this project be written up in the e-zine.
I will make a copy of the presentation available online.
5. The next meeting will be held around mid-February, hopefully at NSIT,
Dwarka, which apparently has a strong Linux user base. Please send me
items for the agenda. I would strongly encourage technical talks, and
will volunteer someone if I get no candidates.
Regards,
Gora
_______________________________________________
ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org
http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi
http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
