-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 William, thank-you so much for your insight. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome (as are everyone else's). I'm replying to yours first because I agree with most of what you have to say.
On Friday 05 November 2004 12:46 pm, William Astle wrote: > Anyway, I'm speaking as one of the "oldtimers" in CLUG. I still recall > emailing Jeff about CLUG to find out about membership/etc and getting a > response that read, "We have a lot of beurocracy. Just show up and > you're a member." Or words almost exactly like that. (Jeff probably > doesn't remember that.) Back then we were meeting in the "Atrium of the > EH Crandell Building" at SAIT. We had a few rather large crowds in that > room but things quickly dwindled. (IIRC that was around January 1999). I attended a few of these meetings. My reaction as a newb was that things were a little standoffish. Or rather I was. I got braver once I had more experience and decided I wasn't going to get anywhere unless I started talking to people. > Anyway, I digress. We had presentations when we had larger groups and we > met in coffee shops with smaller groups. But a few of us kept things > going through the lean times. We made a few half hearted attempts to get > organized but most of those fizzled as the folks interested in doing so > largely drifted off or disappeared. Thank-you and the others with you for doing this, you are the reason this group still exists. > During all of this time, the meetings, whether there was a presentation > or not, always broke before the end of the time slot and switched to a > general discussion type setting where folks would splinter off into > groups and have discussions about whatever topic was interesting to > them. There was usually upwards of half an hour for just that at the end > of the meetings before everyone got kicked out of the room. This allowed > folks with complex questions to get answers and allowed advanced types > to socialize and so on. I agree, we have lost the social aspect of the meetings. We always leave it till the end and usually get cut way too short. > I think, perhaps, that in our headlong rush to make CLUG newbie > friendly, we have completely forgotten the social aspect of it. I think > it has become TOO structured in the meetings. There is almost never any > time left over at the end of the meeting to simply sit around and BS > with other folks one knows. Note that this discussion time is not > necessarily unfriendly to newbies either. I too have felt that our meetings have become too structured. As a result of my chat with Aaron, I have thought we need more unstructured time. This is one of the many things on the table that we are discussing. > As the group gets larger at a meeting, the proportion of people > interested in a particular question in a general Q&A diminishes greatly. > I think that with a larger group, the general Q&A session should > probably be greatly modified. > For this, or something like it, to work, it requires someone who is > willing to wade in and seize control of the group if it appears to be > degenerating into anarchy. We need everyone to understand that they do > not need to have their say instantly but wait until all the breakout > time occurs. It also requires saying, "Folks, time for questions is up. > Feel free to circulate and ask questions of folks if yours wasn't > answered this time." I would go so far as to say that maybe we need people to submit their questions in some way... maybe write them on the board? <shrug> I don't know. It was posed to me that we need a Q&A period for every level of experience. Our meetings may not be the most conducive environment to getting all the questions answered. I have always put the caveat that you should judge whether your question is answerable within a short period of time at a meeting otherwise you should post it to the mailing list. > I think, perhaps, the strictly formal approach that seems to have been > developing is not quite right for CLUG; it's too structured. Perhaps a > less formal approach would work, where the meeting is broken up with a > statement something like "We'll now have a general social time. If > anyone has any questions, don't be afraid to ask someone; if they don't > know, they may be able to point you at someone who does." Agreed (this is me as a member not the President BTW). We keep coming back to this. I can tell you it is one of the things I would like to see more of. > I would also like to point out that this idea does not prevent the idea > of having presentations or what have you either, as long as the > presentations are kept within a reasonable margin of their scheduled > length. That is, a one hour presentation should not devolve into a two > hour ramble. Once the presentation is finished, I think a fairly short > Q&A session with the group as a whole should occur but any questions > with long answers or which are really beyond the scope of the > presentation should be deferred until after the group breaks for "social > time". Then, the presenter is free to conduct whatever discussion they > desire without boring everyone else. We have had the most problems with Presentations. When we had our last Exec meeting one of the topics discussed was how to do an effective presentation. We would like to help people in this area for the bigger topics that require more time. Ultimately, we have to be more aggressive (IMHO) on keeping people on time with their presentations. > This next idea is more of a blue sky thing rather than something that I > expect is realistic. It would be nice if the 10PM "you must be out of > the room" time could be moved back. Unfortunately, this would require > that someone be in charge until that later time and is probably > unworkable. Even having somewhere else to adjourn to that is NOT a bar > or restaurant or what have you would serve this purpose for folks that > want to have a longer discussion in a relatively quiet setting. I don't think we would be able to stay past 10 at DeVry under any circumstances. I also think that is a good time to quit. I hear you about the bar/restaurant thing. This was never meant to exclude anyone who didn't want to have to pay to enjoy the sometimes heated conversations we have post-meeting. The social-drinking-eating aspect of these post-meetings has meant we usually go to a bar or restaurant but that does not mean that you MUST eat or drink, there are enough of us that that shouldn't matter. There are other issues of course, noise, smoke, what-have-you. Don't know the answer to this one. I think it would be cool if members of the group got together at different points of the month for various things. I'm not just talking SIG's, there could be informal get-togethers to go over whatever. That is more splintering which I think is a bad thing but ultimately people are wont to do what they like. > I think we do need to continue having presentations. I understand that > the problem is getting folks to do presentations and also coming up with > topics. First, on the subject of topics. I think there were great ideas > on how to come up with topcis at the meeting. Having a place to submit > topcis to is a great idea. So is watching the list to see if there's a > topic you want to (or can) present. Similarly, a "social time" > discussion may turn into an idea for a presentation. We are looking at adding something to the website to enable people to make suggestions in various ways on various things. Yes, having a list of topics again would be nice. > On the subject of presenters, I think if we had a list of topics looking > for presentations and someone was more in our face about that list > (where it is, what's on it), we might get more volunteers. Similarly, if > someone knows of an individual that would possibly be able to do a > presentation on such a topic, some sort of one-on-one outreach might > yield a presentation. Having an executive member tasked with this > probably makes a great deal of sense. I agreed to this when Aaron suggested this too. It's who to get a hold of. I don't have a complete grasp of who-knows-what within our community. Maybe we could have a private list of people's skills? <shrug> again, not really sure how to deal with this one. > That's my $2 on the subject. (It seems too much to simply value at $.02.) Well worth my money, thanks William! - -- Jarrod Major GPG Fingerprint: FA4A 1EA3 A0EE A842 07BB 804C 0090 14F6 BE6E DE3D CLUG President Registered Linux User: #224211 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iQCVAwUBQYvjYACQFPa+bt49AQKKvAQAqhCYiB4yEtEjpyRP+ryxm/FEThzTMCtV 0sBwlclBU8s4wiOV4XR99uuYI9tfVZFIVnfM76fjmP7A7NZVkcuAC1pjPkVj8/0d D9X4CFx9FmLj6+6XnCwvt7C/65pgOlP/pSqUSiRji9UOGooQvJtKRc6dibq8fA2q oo5siHry23E= =DU1k -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ 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
