As announced on Facebook earlier this week, we had a LUGM meetup today at Pizza Perfect. Scheduled to start at 11h00 but I woke up late. I end up missing the bus. The next one came 30 mins later & was damn slow on the road. Could I complain? Nope! So, I’d better listen to the Bollywood playlist on Kindle.

Ajay & Jagveer called me and I assumed others reached Pizza Perfect while I was still on way. Indeed, when I reached there around 12h05, a small team already was enjoying lunch with no pizza on the table. Aww! For once, I joined in to have a burger lunch too. A perfect vegetarian burger.

We had lunch & discussed random topics till 13h00. Afterwards we looked at the LUGM agenda. We started with handling of membership applications. I had quite a bunch of application forms to hand over. Since the secretary couldn’t make it today and we needed to find a novel method to store member details, Ajay volunteered to do this. I also had to handover membership fees from a few new members to the treasurer, that is Ajay. That made us discuss the future of LUGM as a growing community in Mauritius. We exchanged a few words about MITIA (Mauritius IT Industry Association) and the upcoming ProIT 2014 Conference.

Don’t know if it was shooting against sunlight or the rainy weather that got me dark pictures.

Next we had a lengthy discussion about LUGM website revamp. Ajay proposed having a team assigned with different roles, such as webmaster, maintainer/developer, content writers & editors. Everyone pretty much agreed on this. Initially I didn’t want to be in the web team as I rather wanted to direct resources to the Magazine idea. As it happens though, magazines look like an old-fashioned artifact. I changed my mind and joined the web team. Nayar and Nitin volunteered as well. In fact, Nayar also volunteered to put some energy into reviving the LUGM forum as he has some experience writing plugins for MyBB.

While the discussion was still ON, Nitin & Luffy helped Jagveer load Kali Linux onto his laptop. The new recruit was happy.

Ajay tossed the topic on communication channels. The LUGM mailing list looks like an obsolete tool for communication. I agreed as most of the emails go unanswered or might get a response only weeks after. We discussed on the possibility of automatically posting announcements to various social network channels. As of today we have a Facebook group, a Google plus account and a Youtube channel. We intend to set up Twitter and Linkedin accounts and interconnect them.

We also discussed about revenue possibilities through the LUGM website. Ajay showed us the traffic stats of LUGM website. Our jaws dropped!! Nayar & I, simply couldn’t believe those stats. They’re some great revenue potential for the association and the website revamp could make all this happen naturally. Ronny joined the discussion through Skype and shared his views regarding the website revamp.

Lastly, I opened discussion about Ubuntu Mauritius. I explained how it came to my mind putting energy in the Ubuntu Mauritius group which exists since 2011. I’m spending much time working on Ubuntu and CAE Linux (based on Ubuntu 12.04) these days. It makes it easier for me advocating the same and answer questions that are directed towards the project. I could thus help other Ubuntu users & enthusiasts guiding them into bug reporting and doing advocacy on their end. Nayar already has a project that could end up being the first package under ubuntu-mu PPA.

Meetup ended around 15h30 on a happy note with quite a huge list of tasks ahead.