[Consortium] Meeting at Karlsruhe

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