Minutes of the last ILUG-Delhi meeting, Sun., 1/4

Hello,
  Here are the minutes of the last ILUG-Delhi meeting held at the JNU
Bio-Informatics Centre, at 2pm, on Sun., 1st April. (Please note the
apposite choice of date.):
A: Freedel 2007
===============
   1. It will be held on the 28th, and 29th of September,
      at the JNU Bio-Informatics Centre. Formal approval of this,
      including the issue of how financing for the event will be
      handled, will be worked on this week.
   2. A mailing list, freedel@..., has been created to
      discuss the event. As usual, you can join the list by sending a
      mail to freedel-request@..., with "Subscribe" (no
      quotes) in the Subject line. 
   3. Two sets of letters will go out this week, one to Linux User
      Groups and FOSS organisations, and the other to non-profit
      institutions like government departments, academic units, and
      NGOs.
   4. A call for papers will also go out this week.
   5. We need volunteers for handling publicity, making sure that the
      above letters go out, etc. Given the work that they did for their
      college festival, and the enthusiastic response (see below),
      locally this might best be best handled by Gaurav Mishra, and his
      team from RKGIT.

B: E-zine
=========
   1. Atul apparently has some six articles in hand, with 4-5 more in
      the pipeline, including articles from Frederick Noronha, and
      Rahul Sundaram of Redhat.
   2. There was a discussion on doing away with the current division of
      the e-zine over two sites, as it was felt that this would cause
      confusion. Atul now has complete administration rights over the
      Drupal installation at ezine.linux-delhi.or, and will work with
      Kenneth to automatically duplicate users from the Wiki site on
      this site.
   3. There was a lively discussion on what format the e-zine should
      have, with people arguing for a continuously updated site, with
      regular editorials, etc., but finally, Atul wanted to have a
      format where there were periodic single issues. The first issue
      should come out at the end of April.
   4. Issues with layout of text, formatting, and conversion to PDF
      were discussed.
   5. Various items need to be clarified, including guidelines for
      submission, review, and acceptance of articles. All authors will
      be asked to release their work under one form of the Creative
      Commons Licence. An editorial team also needs to be organised
      for the e-zine. A discussion should be initiated on this list to
      finalise all this.

C: Account of Jagriti, the RKGIT festival, held on 17th/18th Mar.
=================================================================
  1. Gaurav, and Honey, described their experience at the RKGIT
     festival, Jagriti, which included a technical component.
     Apparently, they expected some 700-800 users, but got some
     1300 registrations. 170 free CDs of Linux distributions were
     handed out, and 33 laptops had Ubuntu installed on them.
     Beryl, 3D effects, and other eye-candy was very effective
     in getting people interested.
  2. The publicity for the event was handled by a marketing team
     of some 30 people, who went around to various local colleges
     to popularise the event. It was felt that it would be useful
     to recruit these same people to do publicity for Freedel 2007.
     Gaurav to look into what is needed, and report back.
  3. Gaurav has also been volunteered for organising a Linux
     install-fest at Freedel 2007.
  4. Honey apparently has a very popular blog, and he will be posting
     a link to a write-up on the festival.

D: Technical talk
==================
  1. Soumyadeep Nandi of the JNU Bio-Informatics Centre presented an
     interesting talk on data mining, and classification, using open
     source tools. This will soon be made available online.

E: Action items.
================
  1. Formal approval for JNU BIC as a venue for Freedel:
     Andrew Lynn, due 5/4.    
  2. Set up twiki, with project management plugin:
     Raj Mathur: due 4/4.
  3. Finalise letter to LUGs, NGOs:
     Gora Mohanty, due 5/4.
  4. Call for proposals:
     Raj Mathur, due 5/4.
  5. Email addresses for LUGs:
     All to gather addresses. Gaurav Mishra to coordinate
     mailings: First set to be sent out 7/4.
  6. E-zine, first draft:
     Atul Jha, 15/4.
     E-zine, release of first issue:
     Atul Jha, 30/4.
     Also, Atul Jha to initiate discussion on e-zine guidelines,
     etc.

Regards,
Gora

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