[iRail] Report Meeting 7/12/2010

[Pieter Colpaert]

Dear iRail enthusiasts,

Yesterday we have had our first general meeting as an NPO (=vzw/asbl).
This implies we had to do some common procedures which will be described
hereafter:

0. ATTENDEES

(in random order)
Joris Timmerman
Yeri Tiete
Pieter Colpaert
Mathias Baert
Arnaud Vanhoeke
Louis Dedecker
Christophe Versieux

1. THE STATUTES

 Every meeting should be documented by someone whom's verbosity is more
than average and whom's ability to interpret each and every grunt or
glance exceeds normality. In our community however we've noticed a lot
of verbosity and a lot of interpretation capabilities. Therefor, for the
next three years, we've elected the best one in our circle: me.

 Organisations need someone who take care of the finances. This means we
need some with a good eye for precision, someone who is strict and
honest. As I cannot do everything myself, we have elected Christophe
Versieux to do this for the next three years. His first task will be to
open a bankaccount in our name.

 Yeri Tiete will be our president for the first three years of our
organisation. His first task is to put down the statutes on the grifie
(I have no idea how to translate that properly).

 I, Pieter Colpaert, will be your vice-president. This means, if Yeri
accidentally gets hurt in a terrible accident, I will be able to take
over the president-seat for the next general assembly.

 If you've missed the PDF which contains the statutes as we agreed upon
the 7th of December, you can find it here:
http://lists.rootspirit.com/pipermail/irail/2010-December/000314.html


2. THE COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

 New members will sign a contract which is adapted from the FLA of FSFe.
It allows us to defend you in name of the iRail vzw/asbl and it helps us
keeping the iRail code healthy. You, however, still have full control
over the code and you will get a vote in the NPO (vzw/asbl).

3. THE PLAYBOOK

 No, this is not a Barney Stinson production, it's the new blackberry
platform! Joris Timmerman (joridor), one of our founding members, showed
us around what his work in progress was. It sure looked promising. If
you come to our next general assembly in February, where you will be
able to become member, I'm sure Joris will be happy to let you
experiment on a Blackberry Playbook yourself.

4. THE IPHONE

 We decided to postpone the iPhone application 2 weeks ago. We had a
pretty intense discussion about whether we should release it or not. The
application, BeTrains for iPhone, is mainly focused on chatting. You can
easily find train schedules, but no realtime data is provided however.

Voting: all 7 attendees said release it. This convinced everyone:

We are just a group of enthusiastic people who want to be creative with
these data and technologies. As we think the iPhone application made by
Hafas is pretty neat, we will not focus on yet another app that does the
same thing yet a little bit differently. If we make it clear to all
journabloggers that this app is focused on being something totally
different and should not be compared with the HAFAS application, we
might end up with good feedback on how to create an awesome social
environment for railwayusers.

5. CHAT/SOCIAL API

The iphone client will come with chat functionality. It's the same
chatserver that is used by BeTrains for Android and thus other
clientdevelopers might want to implement it as well. As we might
implement favourite synchronisation from desktop website to BeTrains
applications we thought that for a longterm plan we will switch to an
open-source framework to do it. The shortterm plan is to use
BeTrains.com/api as the social API. Louis' first task as founding member
is to document his API properly.


6. NEXT MEETING

The next meeting will be at the beginning of February. For now we will
agree on the second.


For at least another 3 years yours,

Pieter Colpaert