Infrastructure Update: all good!
After a couple outages of our Mastodon instance back in July, our infrastructure has been very stable, and I've been applying updates periodically as upstream services release them.
Infrastructure outage (2024-06-18)
Update (23:00): our Mastodon is back, on a new server, so more tech debt paid... It's missing some user avatars (those will be infilled over time, I think). Thanks for your patience!
Update (17:40): our VaultWarden is back, but on a brand new server (which is some technical debt paid off)! Our Mastodon, however, due to the huge volumes of data being wrangled, is still being migrated to a new server... We appreciate you patience!
Attention: Users of the NZOSS BigBlueButton
We have just recently (25 September) upgraded the version of BigBlueButton running on our instance, https://bbb2.nzoss.nz from version 2.5 to 2.7 - it's quite a large leap. One possible problem, though, for users logging in to access their rooms: your password might not be accepted. If that is the case, you can request a password recovery and set a new (or reset your old) password and you should be able to log in again as before.
NZ Government on Social Media
There has been a significant amount of commentary around 'Free Speech' and policies of various Social Media companies over the years with Twitter being the current centre of attention. As you know there are alternative Open Source social media platforms and in Twitters case the alternative is Mastodon. We have noticed a significant increase in the number of new users and consequent message traffic on the local Mastodon instances and one of the conversations asked 'Why doesn't the NZ Government have their own Mastodon Instance?'
Why not indeed!
NZOSS 2022 AGM Minutes
The 2022 AGM of the NZOSS was held on Wednesday 23rd March 2022 at 8.30 pm.
The meeting was held online using the NZOSS instance of Big Blue Button.
NZOSS 2022 AGM Agenda
The Agenda for the NZOSS 2022 AGM is as follows:
- Preamble - (Carl)
- President's Report - (Tim)
- Treasurer's Report - (Carl)
- NZOSS Council confirmation - (Carl)
- Other Business
No submissions or nominations from NZOSS members were received for consideration for this AGM.
2021 NZOSS Financial Report
We had another very quiet 2020/2021 financial year. In person meetings, conferences, events and travel were almost non-existent while dealing with the Covid pandemic. Consequently there were no requests for funding or support. Catalyst IT and Catalyst Cloud still support us very generously and the only other outgoings were for domain name registration and meetup account charges. Total income from subscriptions was $701 with total expenses of $117 with an end of year account balance of $4,126.
Notice of NZOSS Annual General Meeting 2022
Giving notice that the 2022 Annual General Meeting of the New Zealand Open Source Society will be held online at the following time, date and location.
Date: Wednesday 23rd March 2022
Time: 8.30 pm - 9.30 pm
Location: NZOSS BBB session https://bbb2.nzoss.nz/b/nzo-yic-gz4-hnq
The meeting is open to anyone however you must be a current NZOSS financial member to vote on any motion or resolution brought before the meeting.
Submission to government re Digital Strategy for Aotearoa
The aim to create a strong, digitally-enabled society is laudable. However, we believe that the proposals place too much trust in systems that will undermine the overarching aim: "Enabling all of Aotearoa New Zealand to flourish and prosper in a digital world".
Thanks Dave
In July, Dave Lane resigned from the Council of the New Zealand Open Source Society. Dave is a stalwart of free and open source software in New Zealand. Among many other achievements, Dave was the President of the society for 9 years.