[Auugps] AUUGPS

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

OK, I've finally got round to looking at the mail that's gone past.
I'm still confused.  My hope was to maintain AUUG in its present
dormant form.  This looks like "close down, change the name, create a
new association".  I don't understand why.

Change of association:

  Why do we want to change the name?  I'm a firm believer in lazy
  evaluation, and this sounds like both burning bridges and more work
  than necessary.  I'd like to remind you, Stephen, that when I asked
  you a few months back you didn't want to get involved because of the
  work :-)  Now I'm the one who doesn't like the look of the amount of
  the work.

  Lawrie comes closest to answering my questions about changing to
  ACT.  I should point out that AUUG has done no annual return for at
  least 10 years, and nobody has chased us about it, so the cost of
  the return doesn't enter into it.  Changing the association may
  waken sleeping dogs, however.

  The public officer is just a name.  They have Luce Napoletano down
  as public officer.  The last time he had anything to do with AUUG
  was in 2002, and at the time I mentioned to him that he was the
  public officer, and he didn't know.  Since then we agreed to change
  the public officer to David Purdue, but Consumer Affairs VIC tell me
  it's still Luce (who, by the way, has changed his name to Chandon).

  If, however, we want a new public officer, I now live in VIC and I'm
  quite prepared to do what little work it is.

  Christopher mentions finding the existing public officer to lodge
  outstanding returns.  I can assure you that Luce will be no help
  here at all.  If we need to provide this documentation, we'll be
  involved in a lot of work, far more than just accepting the status
  quo.  It will involve all AUUG treasurers and secretaries (myself
  included) back at least to 1998.  Do we really want that pain?  Even
  when we were healthy enough (2000-2002), we couldn't face the work
  that would be.

Membership fees:

  Christopher mentions the membership fees as the only reason to kill
  off the old AUUG.  It a little silly to insist on membership fees if
  that's going to kill the association (but then, that's what we've
  been doing for years).  I don't understand why Karl and Lawrie want
  any fee at all.  Consumer Affairs VIC have confirmed that none is
  needed.

Committee:

  As a number of people have observed: there *is* no board (committee
  is the official word).  Consumer Affairs VIC tell me that we should
  get some financial members together, anywhere (I'd suggest Canberra
  :-) and elect a new committee.  No money is involved in this matter.

Financial assets:

  Peter Jeremy suggested the Lions chair for the Lions fund.  That's
  the obvious choice.  I was going to suggest the same for all assets.
  I don't think the new AUUG should have cash on hand.

Incorporation for domain name:

  There's a distinction between a legal entity and an incorporated
  body.  A number of the Linux groups round the country have had
  .org.au. domain names without being incorporated.  Either the
  requirements have changed, or we're misinterpreting what they mean
  by "legal entity".

Change of hosting:

  We're currently hosted for free by Internode.  It works well.  The
  reason that we changed from TransACT was because of access issues:
  we can give access to anybody we want, whereas that wasn't (and, I
  suspect, still isn't) possible with TransACT.  I don't know what the
  other Ozlabs people would think about having people given access to
  any elected member to the relatively lax security environment on
  ozlabs.org.  So: it's not broke, why are we trying to fix it?

This looks like a lot of objections, but they're not hard and fast: if
the majority still agree that they're the way to go, I'll go along
with them.  And as I said, I'm prepared to serve on the committee if
people want me.

Greg
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