October 28, 2010

The meeting's agenda

    * Technical status report and discussion
    * Progression
    * Budget and membership fee
    * The participation in FSCONS 

Participants

Navid, Johan S. Stian, Stefan, Gustav och Jens.

These notices were taken by Gustav.
Technical discussions and conclusions

The goal is to set up a network of five servers: two mail gateways relayed to
one main IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) server, a server for backup,
and one for keeping logs. The main IMAP server will be hosted at some dedicated
hosting service but the others in closets among the members. The servers has to
be set up with high redundancy in storage, RAID 5 or 6 (Redundant Array of
Independent Disks).

With this setup the association can receive e-mails with good reliability, but
sending has to be solved through the members' ISP:s (Internet service Provider).

The status is that a test system is on the way to be set up, and the software
issues are solved one by one. Stefan and Gustav is working on this. All steps
are well documented, and the documentation can be fetched from a git repository
(to be announced). Examples of solved software issues are that SMTP (Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol) though SSH-tunnel (Secure SHell) is better than NFS (Network
File System) for to relaying e-mails, and that a MySQL database is to be used ad
lookup table for what mail addresses we have, which simplifies bouncing.

The server will not provide open relaying and not even user SMTP relaying.

See The Teknik page for details.
Public documentation

There were suggestions about how to get documentation published, and the reasons
are several. Setting up a mail server is not the easiest thing to do, and
support is needed. For the association's idea to be spread, people must be
taught how to do. Suggestions:

  * Virtual machine
  * Virtual packages for debian
  * etc. 

Philosophical background

We refer to the declaration of principles for the philosophical background.

Budget

Some budget suggestions are to be seen on the budget page. The accepted budget
for buying hardware and hire hosting is 15.000 SEK, and the membership fee were
suggested to be 300 SEK. This means that the association needs 50 members to get
started. The figures are finally accepted on the founding meeting (see bellow).
Progression

In a month or two the test system is expected to be set up.

Expectations for FSCONS (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) are that we
will have two concrete offers

    * join now for 300 SEK, and expect a mail system in a couple of months, or
    * a version for the reserved to join when we have enough members. 

Gustav (mainly) and Stefan (as far as time admit) will also work out some
promotion material.

The domain name fripost.org will be reserved, and the possibility to buy
fripost.se will be checked. The name of the association will be Fripost den fria
e-postföreningen (translated Fripost the Free E-mail Association).

An formation meeting, founding meeting, will be held November 4 at 18.00 in
Gnutiken. On this meeting the following will be decided upon

    * statues (by-laws)
    * board
    * approvals
    * nominating committee
    * membership fee
    * budget
    * annual meeting date. 

Suggested date for annual meeting is February. Then also the declaration of
principals will be accepted.  Next meeting November 4

Next meeting, thus, November 4 at 18.00 in Gnutiken.