Fosdem BNL meeting minutes

Nico Rikken nico.rikken at fsfe.org
Sun Feb 1 00:37:13 CET 2015


Dear BNL-team,

Hereby I send you the minutes I took this afternoon at the BNL-meeting.

Kind regards,
Nico Rikken


==== Intro ====
Present: Sam, Mauritio, Felix, Maurice, Willem, Maël, Nico
Rheiner is organizing a secret fellowshipmeeting at A l'imaige
Nostre-Dame, in small alley after the stock-market.

==== Discussion ====
Mauritio introduces himself. He's been in Brussels sinds 2010 and is
originally Brazilian. His first EU-coordinatorsmeeting was two years ago
in Berlin, together with Emma, also from Belgium. They took on multiple
events, including supporting the Namur Linux User Group.Unfortunately
contact has been lost since then.
Mauritio is interested in cooperating with local projects in Brussesl
and around, like hackerspaces, user groups, Open Garage, and possibly
visiting universities in coordinance with the Edu-team. Also there are
options of approaching the parliament or FUG (?). In general Maurition
mentions he would like to go more outside.
Tom and Mauritio mention their time is limited.

Mauritio is excited about the Dutch progress, mentioned the eveing
earlier at the Fellowship Coordinators Meeting, as a reference process.
Maurice explains that to get things started in the Netherlands, the
focus was on getting out in the open, thereby meeting interesting people
which are also interested in doeng stuff. Having contacts, they targeted
various events, often making it a team-efforts. Suggestions of the type
of events can be high schools, universities, hackerspaces, user groups,
etc. That initial push has helped strengthen the team. Another example
is the Privacy Café, where as a way of synergy, Free Software was
mentioned as well. Avove all it's about doing
things //somewhere//, //together//, rather than just meeting as a team.
This approach gives a lot of positive energy to the team.
Mauritio emphasises he is also interested in hooking on to other events,
rather than oranizing their own evens. This approach would reduce the
required effort to organize.

Maël asks about the use of mailinglists, on which Maurice elaborates:
* BNL is a general mailinglist, for all Fellows.
* Netherlands was recently created for only the active Dutch members.
The same could be done for the Belgium list. A newly taken approach is
to CC many emails to the list so that people can be aware of the
individual efforts.

Maurice states that it is important to be doing something you like
doing, and ask others if they are interested in collaborating with you.

The Fellowship wiki pages i available to the outside, now featuring a
BNL-page. It also features a calendar, so people can be aware of what's
going on. By keeping this page up to date the outside world can be aware
of our activities.

Mauritio's place is available when there isn't another place, since he
has enough room to host small events.

Maël mentions he has limited time available, so he is more interested in
taking on small practical things. Maurice stresses the importance of
selecting the things you're interested in: because in case of an event
you would go anyway, so in this way you can combine two activities. Also
this makes it easy to do and as an added benefit gives you good energy.
It's the low-hanging fruit.

Maël mentions he doesn't speak Ducth. Fortunately Tom speeks Dutch and
Mauritio speaks English, so in all the Belgium team covers the relevant
languages.

Mauritio menstions that the beauty of the Belgium team is that there
aren't strict rules. Because of this you can do what you are interested
in. As a team they can start small, whilst even the smallest
contributions will help make other people more enthousiastic as well.

Willem mentions that after T-Dose he hasn't come around to folding and
spreading the tool-leaflets yet. He is quite busy.
Possible activities within the focus of the NL-team is on distributing
flyers, lobbying, and fundraising.

Maurice mentions as an example that at a meeting of the NL Linux User
Group, he put on a poster in the high school the event was held, and
monts later it is still hanging there.

The next Fellowship Coordinators Meeting will be held at the end of May
or at the beginning of Junse.

On request by Nico Maël elaborates on the FixMyDocuments.EU campaign.
Whist it is currently targeted towards the European Union, the reach of
the program can be extended towards other countries where similar
policies are present. If you are using the website or want to resuse it,
please help. Ideally the website should become crowdsource, like the
FixMyStreet website. Currently the listing of websites is served via
Google Documents, which can be improved, but was plain usable. At the
very least it contains proprietary javascript.

It is mentioned that the Wikimedia Foundation is using services from
Google internally.

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