Loomio

Minutes of FSCI Meetup conducted on 24th Nov 2019

A Akhil Public Seen by 55

Syam, Hari, Srud, Kannan, Abhinav, Denil, Randheer, Abhijith, Praveen, Akhil, Sooraj, Balu, Subin, Kiran, Ambady, Vishnu, Athul and Manoj were present. The discussion started at 11 am and concluded at 6pm.

We discussed all the topics in the agenda (https://www.loomio.org/d/1vleK392/fsci-november-meetup-2019) and added few points  to the discussion which came up during the meetup.

# Event Management Service - events.fsci.org.in

The meetup started with discussion on migration of events.fsci.org.in. Kiran was hosting and maintaining an OSEM instance for FSCI and because of economic constraints, he had to shut down the service. He has the data backed up. It was decided to migrate the OSEM instance to the server where grafana was hosted.

# Poddery Funding

It was decided to close current funding campaign and reboot it for the next year. 51% of the raised goal was achieved by current campaign which was used to pay back the expense generated when the service was run using personal funds from the admins. The financial statement will be posted later by Srud following the publishing of this minutes.It was decided to switch focus from poddery campaign to fsci campaign as there are more services hosted by FSCI which needs more promotion and funding.

Also the reasoning to focus more on promotion of free software services under FSCI as a whole, than just poddery funding campaign, is from the conclusion that community members themselves are capable to generate enough funds for the running of services under poddery for some time.

# Mastodon Instance

Because of the large inflow of members from India due to recognition of mastodon as an alternative to twitter, it was decided to find resources and to run a mastodon instance by FSCI. Further developments about mastodon instance will be posted on a later loomio post as it involves additional consultations and even legal issues needs to be discussed.

# Collaboration with other communities

It was decided to find opportunities to communicate with other communities in field of free software. Sooraj introduced Vikas, an industrial training facility, and other institutions which FSCI can try to approach for further collaboration.

# Privacy Yathra

Discussed about making source materials for campaign, website, brochure, and other write ups. It was decided to create a new social media handle for privacy yathra.

  • Content Writing for the website - Athul, Kannan

  • Website - Anupa, Kannan

  • Social Media Handle - Akhil, Ambady

Decisions were made

  • to conduct programs in collaboration with other communities and institutions for this drive.

  • to make a contract/oath for privacy that other communities and institutions can sign under. 

  • to get money for campaign from crowd funding.

A list for resource persons was created ( in brackets, location )

  • Akhil (Thrissur)

  • Srud (All)

  • Praveen (All)

  • Kannan (All)

  • Ambady (All)

  • Balu (Ernakulam, Thrissur and Kottayam)

  • Syam (Can spare time after February)

  • Sooraj (On three days notice)

  • Manoj (Thrissur, Kannur)

  • Athul (All)

  • Subin (Thirssur)

  • Vishnu (All)

  • Kiran (All)

  • Suman (Thiruvananthapuram)

  • Abhinav (Kannur, Kasargod, Palakkad and Thrissur)

  • Rakesh (Thiruvananthapuram)

  • Anupa (Thiruvananthapuram)

# Telegram Bridge

Subin, Balu, Denil and Akhil were assigned to update and maintain the telegram matrix bridge.

# Open Street Map (OSM) Programs

The discussion raised issues like Kerala Govt. mapping program doesn't officially recognize the community behind the existing projects.

It was noted that there was no initiative from government to include community as part of government's OSM mapping campaigns and also a lack of presence of a public guideline with an option to give comments for OSM contributions done by Govt. initiative.

Considering all this, it was decided to push govt. more to adhere to the Open Data Policy.

Also the decision was made to continue with mapping party model from mapping party conducted at Thrissur as part of Aaron Schwartz Day.

Various methods for contributing to OSM was discussed, including collaborating with transport vehicle drivers and organizations. An idea for an app to record GPX data and to contribute to OSM was introduced by Sooraj.

# ICFOSS

It was decided to request for minutes and a statement from ICFOSS on the decisions made from Community meetup conducted at ICFOSS at Thiruvananthapuram on November 2019.

The elevated hope in newly assigned director of ICFOSS was seen in the discussion, but the delay in a response from ICFOSS is causing a concern about the return of status quo. 

The main thread in discussions pointed to lack of recognition from ICFOSS about it's responsibility as a facilitator for Free Software Communities. It was found that the excuse for handling funds for non registered entities is not acceptable and we state that it's ICFOSS's responsibility to communicate with the community and find a funding model to solve this issue.

# Lib-G

Lib-G (liberation gender) is a empowerment program for women and gender minority coordinated by FSCI. 

In previous discussions on Lib-G event, a program on December was planned. But after discussions in the meetup it was decided to postpone to a day between January 10th and 20th as colleges have exams on December.

More details on the Lib-G will be continued on a different Loomio post.

# Saakhi

The need for having a free software platform for online taxi booking application and a disaster management application as part of Saakhi project was discussed by Sooraj. Such initiative will be helpful to connect Free Software Communities with other communities who needs technical assistance. 

Further Discussion on Saakhi will continue on another thread.

# Handover of running loomio instance (codema.fsci.org.in) and creating a new loomio instance for FSCI

An instance of loomio hosted at codema.fsci.org.in is currently used by Saakhi for discussions. The discussions of FSCI is being done in loomio.org ( ie this instance ) now instead of codema. It was decided that we'll hand over the existing instance to Saakhi. Saakhi will change the domain name and use it. 

We also decided to set up a new loomio instance and point codema.fsci.in to that. It is being done so that we can move the discussions here to there eventually. - ( To be done by Ambady, Shyam, Akhil )

PS:- The minutes are being posted seperately since it covers a lot of decisions made. Thanks to Kannan for noting down the minutes and preparing the digital draft.

SS

Subin Siby Wed 27 Nov 2019 2:47PM

I have a question about OSM. Suppose I'm travelling in a bus from one place to another. If I make a GPX recording and upload it to OSM GPS Traces with a specific tag, let's say "ksrtcbusroute", then from OSM can I retrieve all GPS traces with a particular tag ?

PP

Pirate Praveen Wed 27 Nov 2019 4:24PM

I think it'd be better to ask directly in OSM community.

AR

Abraham Raji Wed 27 Nov 2019 4:20PM

I believe a pixefed instance would be great. It is an apt replacement for Instagram which is currently owned by Facebook. A lot of young people use Instagram and hence might appeal to that audience.

PP

Pirate Praveen Wed 27 Nov 2019 4:22PM

As long as we have people willing to maintain a service, we can have it. So if someone feels strongly about running a service, they just have to volunteer. We will be happy to help with raising funds and finding right infra. We only lack volunteers to maintain services.