SVOSUG members, help us decide what to do with our user group in Silicon Valley.
I've been running SVOSUG for 3 years and quite honestly I'm getting bored with the same old format...and we've had great presentations at SVOSUG, I've been quite happy with the group over the past few years. However, I don't believe it scales for the future, and I don't think user groups offer the same advantage they used to, with the web, use of video, and online-collaboration. I don't feel we're able to accomplish too much as a user group, and there could be ways to expand and continue to grow the group in the future by changing the format. A couple ideas that I have had are: 1) Shorter presentations so that folks could watch the content at their leisure, even if they're not local. I think of lightning talks in this regard, and could offer folks within the community to get up give a short presentation that is 5 minutes, and scale out our community, not just SVOSUG. The key here would be using the meeting to create content, as we've been doing, but to make the content more usable. I haven't figured out how to leverage it better. 2) Technical Architect Groups (TAGs) where a small group of folks with common intersts can get together and work on something together. This could possibly happen the same day as the meeting, and allow people to get together and discuss something that they could go off and work on over the next month. 3) More community participation from non-Sun folks. How can we get folks to talk about things they're doing. As an example, have you built a nice system that is low power, or small form factor? Have you been tunneling through VMs on your network to allow users to access inside a Virtual Box VM? How about ekiga, do you use it on OpenSolaris? 4) Possibly going around the room and just having people mention briefly what they're working on, what they doing, and if people are interested in such, they could talk after the meeting or in email/opensolaris.org. 5) ? (give a suggestion to something you think would work) I will open my call-in number which is toll-free so that if anyone would like to voice an idea that is not local and/or how we can help you, please do. Toll Free: 866-545-5227 Intnl/pay: 865-673-6950 Conference: 809-64-14 Please feel free to join us, for a drink, a snack, some good open source talk, and a chance to talk to some of the OpenSolaris engineers. Feel free to bring your own bottle, a snack, or something to share if inclined, no entry required so feel free to join us without concern of bringing something. When: Thursday, June 26, 2008 Where: Sun's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium (SCA07, the Mansion) What: Summer Thinktank Time: 7:30pm-10:00pm Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=4070+George+Sellon+Circle,+Santa+Clara, SVOSUG Project Page, for video: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/svosug/ If you haven't been to the Mansion before, as you enter the Sun campus on Palm, from Lafayette, the Mansion is the first building on the left, as I recall. There is parking all around, a small lot in the rear, parking on Palm, and a huge lot on the other side of the Auditorium. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
