[Consortium] Meeting at Karlsruhe

[Daniel James]

Hello all,

For the benefit of people who weren't able to attend, I'll summarise 
the result of the linuxaudio.org meeting at the International Linux 
Audio Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany last week.

The two main issues that were discussed were the legal status of the 
linuxaudio.org consortium, and website consolidation. 

On the first point, several people thought that the organisation could 
benefit by becoming a legal entity, such as a registered 
not-for-profit organisation. This possibility raises several 
questions. In which country would it be registered? How would the 
inevitable overhead caused by bureauracy be handled so that it did 
not disproportionately consume advocacy resources? Could official 
status actually restrict consortium activities?

It was pointed out that linux audio information is distributed among 
many different websites, some with ambiguous or misleading domain 
names, such as eca.cx or linuxdj.com (which is not really about 
DJ'ing). In addition, Dave Phillips is looking for help to automate 
content management on linux-sound.org and its mirrors, and for new 
site editors.

The consortium could help here by co-ordinating a reorganisation of 
sites around the most appropriate domain names, using sub-domains 
where appropriate. Then content management systems could be used to 
spread the work of maintaining sites among teams of editors. 
Naturally there would have to be legacy links in place to make sure 
that information was not lost. 

I'd be very interested to hear list members' opinons on these two 
issues, or any other matters that need to be raised.
 
Cheers!

Daniel James
Director
http://linuxaudio.org