Re: [Scottish] The Future of the LUG

[Graeme Thomson]

re: the irc applet, i've had problems getting it to work reliably on my 
apple machines. it seems to quite hapily lock up bot safari 1.1 and 
internet explorer 5.2 for mac.

i was considering some other ways of getting irc access over the web, 
such as CGI scripts, but i think they are resource hungry.  and my irc 
tutorial will be mentioning it as a last resort for if you cant get 
conencted for some reason, to see if anyone can help you in "real time" 
(quotes cos sometime you can wait a while for anyone to be awake :D )

regards

G
On 10 Dec 2003, at 13:50, Ben Thorp wrote:




I dont think we should rename the LUG, just accept that we are the 
defacto

Glasgow LUG and offer as much as possible via the website and IRC to 
our
members who are unfortunate enough to live outwith the dear green 
place.
Just
cos they cant come every month for a meeting or a pint, they arent any
less
important.
We need to keep the SLUG name and all that goes with it (even the
confusion)
and we should encourage and assist our "provincial" members to start 
up
their
own LUGs. I believe a succesful experiment has been carried out in 
that
quaint little village in the east with the castle.
LoL. Agreed. Although perhaps we ought to get our LUG whipped into 
shape
first ;o)

I think we need to restart the meetings in Strathclyde Uni (if that is
cool
wih Kenny). We need (IMHO) to take up Colin's offer to share his
considerable
knowledge with us. There may be a case for some talks aimed 
specifically
at
newbies.
Agreed. We have had a number of offers for talks/slots and I think we
should take them all up. Also, I still think we need to have some 
'other'
ideas, as arranging talks is a little time consuming, and it would be 
good
to have some other non-talk based ideas, like in my original list.

Im concerned that we _may_ have put off some folks who turned up
once or twice and were put off by the "uber-geekiness" of it all. I 
have
no
evidence for this, just a hunch we may have lost some folk that way.
OTOH we are a bunch of geeks so thats kinda hard to avoid. Possibly 
it may

evolve into 2 talks per month, one for beginners and one more 
advanced.
This sounds like a good idea, although arranging 2 talks a month seems 
like
even harder work! However, Tony has offered to do a beginners slot, 
and I
would be happy to do some beginners stuff, now that I am fairly sure 
that
I'm not quite a beginner any more myself.

My early memories of coming to the LUG was exactly what you described -
overawed by the wealth of extremely complex knowledge. However, the 
talks
that I remember are not necessarily the basic ones, but more the ones 
that
were presented with everyone in mind; assuming 0 knowledge. Having said
that, it didn't put me off totally - a group of geeks meeting will 
always
have an attraction for other geeks, but it's the non-geeky users we 
need to
watch out for.

As the list admin (with assistance from Kyle) I/we need to 
investigate why

some folk are getting funny reply-to addresses. The only ongoing prob 
I
was
aware of was the antiroot's DNS is screwed up regularly generates 
bounces.

But I keep thinking he'll sort it out in a day or two so I dont do
anything :-)
If it helps, the bad messages seem to be sent by
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and when you hit reply, it goes 
back to
the sender, not the list.

Possibly we do need a formal structure. I have resisted this in the 
past
due
to previous experiences of commitees in the voluntary sector that 
turned
into
ego-trips, disputes over handling of finances and slagging matches 
and I'd

hate us to go the same way. But thats probably the kind of negative
attitude
that ensures nothing ever gets done. So maybe I am moving closer to 
the
fence
on this one.
I don't think we need a very formal structure to be able to do this. 
But
some kind of structure is needed to make sure things get organised.

I would suggest that we get maybe 6-12 people who are reasonably 
committed
to the LUG, and to being at the meetings, and get them each to take 
charge
of 1 month a year, and they have to arrange some activity for that 
night -
be it a talk, a demo, a quiz, or anything like that. I think that 
there are
plenty of people who would offer to take charge of a month.

Our website is a  greatly underused resource and the offer to write 
some
java
applets to help folk onto IRC should be grabbed with both hands.
Agreed - I think there is still an IRC applet on the website, actually.

It would be nice if we could get a meeting with the Green party to see
what we
can do to assist Robin Harper. I dont always agree with all of what 
the
Green
Party say but thats politics, working with those whom you can agree 
with
on
some points to advance common interests. But I'll probably drive to 
that
meeting :-) ( preferably along the new bit of the M74)
Perhaps we could get the key person to come to the LUG and talk about 
why
they want to move to Linux, what they see as the Pros, and Cons, what 
their
current barriers to moving are, and then see if we can offer 
assistance in
any way?

Ben Thorp



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