On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 19:10 +0530, Soumyanath Chatterjee wrote: <snipped> > Let us discuss How Compass participation is relevant towards these > objectives.Please substantiate your response (both positive and > negative) with action and resource required to meet the objectives of > ILUG-CAL.
Among the informal discussions I participated in at the IndicDevelMeet in Mumbai recently, was a discussion initiated by the Nepalinux people on suggestions to improve the membership and activities of the Nepal LUG. We had a cross section of people all of whom are FOSS activists, and from all over India. The general idea was to organise something on a small scale. Nothing big and flashy. I presented the concept of small user group meetings, like the GNU/Linux Theks once organised by members of iLUG-Cal (Madhyamgram immediately comes to my mind), and everyone present agreed that it was a great idea. I felt proud that an idea germinated by our LUG is agreed upon by a broad cross-section of FOSS activists as the best possible way to spread Linux to the masses, but also a tinge of sadness to note that the idea was dying a slow death in the very LUG which initiated the concept originally. Let's cut the crap on grand LUG meetings, websites and listadmins. Let's get on with the grunt work. Spreading Linux and supporting users is a grunt work, and to do it one has to go down to the grassroots. The BLUG is not successful only because it organises an annual Linux-Bangalore (now FOSS.in) but because it has managed to organise gettogethers on a regular basis at a fixed predetermined place everymonth. I see discussions on having "meetings" with 10-15 people at a venue which may not be available to us the next month. To organise grand meetings on a ragular basis, we need to hire premises. If we have to organise meetings based on someone's largesse, we can't really take that person to task if we don't get the venue the next month. Whereas if we hire a place, I believe we'll be able to take the venue organiser to task if the venue is not available the next month. To do that we need money, and one time contributions won't help. We need to get people to pay admission fee for each meeting. But since Kolkata LUG members have shown a marked disinterest in attending meetings by paying money, I don't think the gatherings of people from all over the city and its suburbs is feasible. But organising meetings in an ad-hoc manner, in somebody's house/office/etc. will work only for meetings of the scale of theks. Instead of organising a thek at the same person's place every month, the venue can be rotated among the participants. And as for buying a stall at Compass, I don't think even Sharmaji, since you have shown a marked unhappiness about the state of things in iLUG-Cal, my offer of hosting an alternative KLUG website still stands. Since I'm a student, with no income (litearally), I'll need people, who are unhappy with the current state of affairs, to step up and take up the work of registering a domain. For mailing lists, we can always rely on Google Groups. We have people who claim they want to be proactive, but who aren't being allowed to by people in authority. When this happens in FOSS projects, the people who are unhappy usually fork the project. There seem to be people who are unhappy. IMHO they should step up and fork iLUG-Cal if required. Incidentally, we've had people rambling about creating a so called map of Kolkata (Q:who do we source it from, why will they agree to use a free license on our request if they do not do so currently, if we do *not* source it, where do we get the map from ?) but no one discusses anything about taking the LUG to the students of schools and colleges, the people who will go on to be the leaders of FOSS activism tomorrow. We mainly seem to get a couple of hopeless nutcases whose only contribution to the mailing lists seem to be attempts at self promotion and aggrandisement. We need to reach out to the students and teach them the philosophy of FOSS, the technicalities of collaborating and contributing back and the enterprising spirit of the FOSS hackers all around the world. But maybe that's asking for too much from a group which does not know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Respectfully -- Soumyadip Modak Program Manager - Enterprise Solutions L2C2 Technologies -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Innovations that make a Difference -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= EMail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone : +91 94330 65971 WWW : http://www.l2c2.org -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
