Just a suggestion, but since we cannot realistically do a presentation which appeals to everyone, (and the reality is, we can't). Lets look at other value adds we can provide.
Personally, I think networking is the largest. That could be networking for the purpose of bouncing ideas off each other, it could be networking for the purpose of finding new clients for a contractor, it could be laying the groundwork for a future job change. To a large degree, this is provided by the mailing lists right now. But mailing lists are both impersonal, and ageographic. Meaning, we have people in Calgary on Vancouver LUG or edmonton LUG, etc. It's easy to subscribe to a LUG mailing list in Australia because I want to benefit from tridge's wisdom, But it's nice to get together with other geeks to laugh and discuss things. It might be sacrilege to say on such a tech oriented site, but email does not, and cannot replace face to face kontact. So personally, I'd propose that rather than continually focusing on "what can we present", we should focus on setting up more of a trade show atmosphere. I'm not suggesting chaos, but if there was a presentation of perhaps 30 mins, followed by 90 mins of socialization, this might make a better forum for networking. I certainly don't mean that we should just end the meeting. But if 5 or 8 people had laptops, there could be a discussion time centered around tech stuff, but not really following an agenda. I'm sure this happens automatically when there are installfests. It certainly happened the year I was in attendance for setting up LTSP for Convergence. Wed was the first day that I've ever had spell checking working in KDE. Heck, I didn't even know it was there. Other people will care about games. Others will care about servers. Others will wonder what is BlackBox. Others will wonder about that Kexi icon on the desktop. Stuff like that. Some people will sit in the middle of the room, and discuss theory, or Dubya, or Gmail...whatever. We are in an extremely isolationist industry. Most people miss human contact. Promoting that would be a good thing. Use computing and Linux as an excuse to get people together. We're all interested in it. OSS will always be a focus there, like it or not. Who we are. Look at us now. Microsoft is always a topic. So then the question becomes what do we do on these machines, and I don't think it matters. I think you request some volunteers to "man" a machine. Rather than drawing names for the "prizes" give them as "payment" to each person at a PC. Those people don't need to know anything about it. I find each new distro different. So from my perspective, I get to play with (say) Xandros for the first time, and in exchange, I get a Linux Magazine. From a total Newbies perspective, they get to see Linux on a PC. They have a point of reference. Maybe they want to know if it'll load their Hotmail site, so they can check their email. At the end of that night, they'll know. And they'll go home with some new reading material. Aaron might sit down at the Red Hat box, and find that Gnome falls apart all over the place. Lots of us would love to see Aaron swearing at his Linux box, lets be honest. Perhaps when Aaron is on that Gentoo box, he'll ask "Why doesn't spell checking work here". And I'd have learnt earlier that it SHOULD spell check. That's just one example. I remember at when we set up LTSP, there were half a dozen people around when we wated to set it to autostart on boot. Some said use ntsysv, some said chkconfig, in the end, I think the script was directly added to /etc/rc.5 (I can't remember, RH sucks, I never use it) which is the outdated version of /etc/runlevels/default Maybe someone brings in their home PC that's giving them grief. Maybe 2 or 3 set up a small Unreal Tournament (can you tell I'm not a gamer) or whatever party, so people can learn HOW to play games on their boxes. I don't know jack about winex, but I'm certainly interested in watching. I don't know. Linux is a never ending series of learning. Usually that comes from either "Hey, that's neat, how did you do it", or it comes from "I wish I could". Neither situation is likely to arise in the current meeting format. Obviously, this is just me spouting off, this idea needs way more thought put into it, but I think we are doomed if we expect that people will continue to learn and be interested simply through the presentations. That helps, and some people won't want anything more. But some certainly will, and setting up situations where intermediates can mentor newbies is good for everyone. Advanced people will feel far more inclined to attend if there's a forum for them too, and they can see the value of attending. That value can be learning from a presentation, but it can also be mentoring people through the intermediate stages. The biggest problem is that as people become more advanced, they specialize. Some want to do admin work, some write code. Some care about desktops. (some Gnome, some KDE). Some focus on security, some focus on small networks. Some email, some networking. Obviously, there's overlap, but this specialization means that Presentations will reach exponentially less people as you shoot higher on the skill level. Plus alienating everyone below. On the other hand, a small group might form to discuss DistCC or icecream. Does everyone need it? of course not. But us gentooers sure benefit from it. Much as a lan party would hit some people, so would a distcc group. These are just some examples. And they're just my thoughts. But there needs to be more than just big formal presentations. Kev. On Thursday 04 November 2004 19:29, Aaron Seigo wrote: > On November 4, 2004 19:11, Tom Weniger wrote: > > I think that the advantage would provide the membership an opportunity > > to attend the meeting that they want to hear a presentation at their > > interest level and that there would be enough time to make a thorough > > presentation. Would this not provide a balance everyone is concerned > > about? > > personally, i was hoping to get a mix of people at each meeting that spans > the knowledge/skill/experience range. the idea being to allow for knowledge > transference and to play a stronger role in supporting the larger local > Free / Open Source Software community. > > > Also, would you provide an outline of your plan to the list so that its > > merits can be discussed? > > the idea i've tossed out there is to have multiple tracks at each meeting. > this could take the form of multiple presentations, where one presentation > may be more entry-level and another more advanced, or one presentation > might be server-centric and another desktop-centric, or one presentation > aimed at the enthusiast (e.g. the ham radio idea) and another at > professional (e.g. programming or high-end server issues) usage. > > it could even be that one track is a lecture-style presentation as i gave > the other night, and the other could be a round-table discussion of a > topic. > > the tracks wouldn't have to be the same every time, but with a bit of > diversity that caters to the natural dichotomies within the group (and that > will only grow if the group continues to be successful!) i see CLUG having > a higher retention rate. > > at the end (and/or beginning?) of each meeting the whole group would get > together and discuss business of the group and hold open Q&A sessions. > > some negatives that have been mentioned are: > > Q. what if you want to attend both tracks one meeting? > A. too bad. ;-) seriously though, this builds desire and that creates > return attendance. and there's no reason popular presentations/events can't > be held more than once. > > Q. it means moving people around a lot. > A. yes, but i think we'll manage. i've been involved with groups that did > similar things at their meetings and it wasn't a problem. > > i'm sure there are others, and i'd be happy to field them. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
