1. Meeting overview and key information Joel Addison (President) Sae Ra Germaine (Vice-President) Russell Stuart (Treasurer) Neill Cox (Secretary) Andrew Pam (Council) Jennifer Cox (Council) Jonathan Woithe (Council)       Meeting opened at 20:07 AEDT by Joel  and quorum was achieved. Minutes taken by Neill.   2. Log of correspondence Not sure what happened here, but…………….. – some confusion caused by the mailing list migration Fwd: Re: Advice on a letter of demand – advised to respond to the letter accusing LA of copyright violation Thank you for advancing Open Source in 2024 – generic thank you from OSI Unsubscribe please. Thank you – a couple of emails from people asking to be unsubscribed from the announce mailing list. Neill has not yet actioned them(but will) IMPORTANT: Year-End Payment on Redbubble – notification of a change to the way Redbubble handles end of year payments Disruptions to the rail system – business impacts –  request for comments from the NSW Small Business Commissioner about rail disruptions Should Linux Australia have a BlueSky account? – we do now have one thanks to Kathy Reid Posted on socials re Elections – links for sharing – Kathy Reid shared notifications about the elections on various social media platforms Media & Comms Subcommittee report – submitted by Kathy Reid Linux Australia’s 2023/2024 audit – has been completed Did Victor Ogunjobi get an LA grant of some description? – we believe he was given assistance to attend Pycon AU 2023, by the Pycon AU subcommittee Everything open conference query – Erich Heinzle has volunteered to give a talk at EO2025. Sae Ra has responded. A number of emails were received due to the backlog of membership applications being (mostly) cleared. MakerSpace Adelaide grant follow-up – Jonathan sent an email about the grant application. No conclusion has been reached yet. Enquiry from Amay Mankad via the Linux Australia Website Contact Form – Jonathan has responded to an enquiry about volunteer positions for people keen to learn about Linux Hosted open source video conferencing options – Andrew has provided a list of possible video conferencing platforms that use Open Source Software Letter to Linux Australia Inc. 11.12.24 –  proposed response to copyright infringement claim. Amazon Web Services Billing Statement Available – invoice from AWS for $7.68 Do we need the lugcomms list? – Russell Coker suggests there is not enough traffic to justify the mailing list Re: Is it time to shut down the Health Hack Brisbane LA Subcommittee? – Russell has asked the Health Hack subcommittee whether they still need a bank account. BAS Time – Request from Russell for subcommittee treasurers to clean up some transactions in Xero in preparation for submission of the next BAS On list motion, 2024-2025 Budget, Treasurers Annual report for Sae Ra – motion to accept the 2025 budget Voting now open posts up on the socials – Kathy Reid has announced that voting is open on various social  media platforms (with the notable exception of Facebook because she has no account on that platform) Notice of Linux Australia 2025 Council Elections and AGM – Josh Hesketh has asked for the AGM to be added to the EO2025 schedule. That request has been passed to the organising committee Membership Confirmation for LA Council Elections – request to confirm membership from Dallas Ramsden. Neill will respond – we can’t approve memberships during the caretaker period Enquiry from Nathan Daniels via the Linux Australia Website Contact Form – wants to know if any QGIS talks are on the EO2025 schedule. Jonathan has responded. Re: Email Spoofing – request for a bug bounty for pointing out a problem with DMARC for the linux.org.au domain – Neill will confer with the admin team and then respond. Noting that we do not offer bug bounties. Fwd: Interested in a free booth at DDD Melbourne? – Kathy passed this on to council. Sae Ra will respond, some LUV volunteers may help. Could we get a Voting Open reminder email? Kathy very politely points out that no email was sent announcing voting is now open. Neill has now sent two, the second one correcting a mistake in the first. Voting is Open for the Linux Australia Council – announcement sent to the list. 3. Items for discussion Application for membership of LA from overseas – do we accept them The secretary has discretion to approve or disapprove membership.   This question is moot while the council is in caretaker mode, but the next council will need to deal with this.   The only benefits of membership are the ability to vote in elections and to apply for grants.   Subcommittee members who need access to bank accounts need to be a member of Linux Australia. This may require approving membership of overseas applicants (e.g. Drupal Con Asia)   For now we will accept membership applications form Australia and New Zealand and from other places if there is a clear involvement in an event or Linux Australia, or a reference from another member.   We expect that the policy will guide the secretary but they will still exercise their discretion.   The budget for next year has been based on last year. Significant changes: there will be no grants program next year (as there are no profits to fund it) the admin team are planning a face to face meeting. we have funded  an Employee Assistance Program subscription   Motion: That the budget as proposed in the annual report is accepted Moved by: Russell Seconded by: Sae Ra Motion passed Russell has received legal advice that we should respond to the letter of demand.   He proposes that we respond by saying that the European Space Agency holds the copyright on the image we used, not Reuters. Motion: That we respond to Clayton Utz pointing out the copyright holder is the European Space Agency not Reuters. Moved by: Russell Seconded by: Joel Motion passed   Proposed new constitution, as required by the ATO Russell has prepared a set of suggested changes to the constitution. He will raise a pull request against the current constitution. Russell will also prepare some explanatory text to be placed on the LA website to explain the changes. This will be based on the commit messages in the pull request. Instructions on how to add comments/suggest changes on GitHub will also be provided. Joel thanked the current committee for their work over the last year. The council thanked Joel for all his work as well.   No items were discussed in camera   Meeting closed at 20:55 AEDT Next meeting will be scheduled by the new council. The post 2025-01-08 Council Meeting Minutes appeared first on Linux Australia.