>I'm not advocating any particular approach; just trying to stir some >discussion.
>One thing PySIG does that may help counter this is to have a block >of time explicitly scheduled for general Q&A, newbies, and "gotchas". >As I recall, they do that at 6:30 and any formal presentation starts >at 7 PM, and this is explicitly advertised, so people can choose what >they want. Once upon a time we: o had "dinner" beforehand o had the formal meeting start o had people introduce themselves, who they worked for or what distro they used, found out if this was their first time, etc. o had the presentation (1/2 hour to an hour depending on topic, how far the speaker came, etc.) o opened the meeting up for "discussions" o retired for more "libations" Over time we added "newbie nights" (we actually had "NUNs"...New User Nights...with floppies that had URLs, notes, etc. on them. Now the floppies are replaced by the website) We had our share of "installation fests", and we even had times where we invited people to talk about their favorite distribution or program...what they liked and why they liked it. That also stirred conversation and even some conversions: "VI"...."EMACS"...."VI"...."EMACS".... We also had "quarterly meetings" where we appeared at a local college (Daniel Webster) when we had a speaker that we felt might attract a larger crowd. There are some in the Boston/New Hampshire area: o Jim Gettys (co-author of a lot of the X Window System) o Michael Stonebraker (Ingres, Postgres, and a bunch of other database stuff) o Keith Bostic (Sleepycat database and the main instigator of creating an AT&T free BSD Unix) o Dan Murphy (creator of TECO, the direct ancestor of emacs) o Doug McIlroy (Director of Labs that hired Thompson and Ritchie, the creators of Unix. Doug is credited with creating macros along with pipes and filters) o Bill McKeeman (compiler guru, one of main developers of Matlab) o Dan Geer (Computer security and risk management) o Doc Searls (Humanist and prolific writer...senior editor of Linux Journal) and many others. There are also lots of people from Red Hat's Westford labs and Novells' headquarters in Waltham that we could tap into. And we should not forget our own talents. There are a lot of good people in our extended family who could do a presentation. I was talking with a young man (high school student) who was using Blender to animate machine parts to see if they would fit together in a robotic project he was helping with. His father (an old friend of mine) and I were trying to encourage him to give a brief talk on it, both to let other people know what Blender can do and to get some experience in presenting. md _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
