FSFE Potteries / Meeting on 6/10/2020: Launch of FSFE Potteriess
This page has some brief notes and imagery surrounding a past meeting, you likely got here by clicking a link shown on a past calendar event.
This is just a little write up of what went on at the time the of the first meeting and when FSFE Potteries was born. Some of this is written from the perspective of a few things having already been actioned as the notes were written a little while after!
This was a very special meeting! So special it was the very first one to ever be held ever. A few of us, largely from the local LUG, and particularly those of us that attended OggCamp the year previously... decided that it might be a great idea to have proper FSFE presence right here in the Staffordshire area.
It was felt that this would be a great idea, as often in LUG meetings things start to focus on non-free projects (such as proprietary games) and it'd great to get back to our roots for what made the community great... Free Software itself.
Steven had been in contact Matthias Kirschner (the FSFE president) as the not-for-profit organisation he helps to run is already an FSFE supporter. It was agreed that the name could be 'FSFE Potteries' and as such, that is what we will be known as. Hopefully this properly conveys the specific Stoke-on-Trent built-up area that we're aiming to cover... unlike Staffordshire Linux User Group which doesn't really cover some parts like South Staffordshire at all.
We've asked some free FSFE promotional materials, including postcards, stickers, leaflets, and posters... directly from FSFE and they should be coming soon. You can see more about that here. But we've also bought some merchandise for possible future prizes... from here, but we're keeping it a mystery what we've bought so we don't spoil things!
After checking with FSFE... we're aware that we should be avoiding certain online platforms for the obvious issues that some of them have for being non-free. So we're concentrating on communication via open standards with things like e-mail (via a mailing list) and IRC for now. This does mean we need FSFE to create us a 'potteries' mailing list under http://lists.fsfe.org and hopefully this will be done soon.
We could also do with a place online for storing notes like this one, rather than just typing them out on a computer for no one to see! It was discovered that Steven has a FSFE account and so they should be able to keep an entry for us on the FSFE wiki, where all the other local groups can be found. Steven has already begun to start a page for us there, which can be seen here.
Lastly... as there isn't many of us yet... we've decided to share the same dates that the LUG and ORG Stoke (when they get set up, as they're also new) use... which is the odd-numbered weeks on a Tuesday. This way we're not all competing for the same audience, and the LUG is fine with this. Luckily the local hackspace has also recently moved their meetings to Wednesdays so this might also help.
We've had to do this meeting online due to the ongoing issue with COVID-19... but hopefully that won't stop us next year!
That's all for now, stay tuned for more meetings to come!