On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Heracles <[email protected]> wrote:
> Also, SLUG should consider producing a magazine for members filled with > articles from members including tutorials, reviews of open source > software and code snippets, updates on what members are working on and > some basics. It could become a benefit of membership. It could be > emailed as a pdf to financial members at their slug.org.au email address. Interesting idea. I see one major problem and one major ideological issue though. The problem is the same one we have with talks: you can't have content without someone taking the time to produce the content. We have enough trouble now just trying to round up two people to give a talk every month; I can't imagine getting written content would be any easier. On the other hand, a short article might be easier to produce than a 45-minute talk - and there's no public speaking required, which no doubt would make it easier for some people to participate. If we could get the content I like this idea - except for the "Emailed as a PDF" bit. I think there are much better ways we could present this: for instance, an area of the SLUG website only accessible by financial members; or even a simple private mailing list. The ideological issue is more serious. SLUG has never (to the best of my knowledge) been about withholding information. We run our mailing lists in public: anyone is free to read the archives, to join the list, to participate, without needing to be a financial member. We don't charge attendance fees for meetings, we don't require that people coming to meetings become members. The idea of having a private member's magazine seems antithetical to everything SLUG has ever done. There are compromises of course; I believe the SAGE-AU mailing list archives used to be members-only for 6 months and then released to the public (although now it seems the archives are completely members-only). We could perhaps investigate something similar. My gut feeling though is that, no matter how much we want to provide value to members, having private content is not the right way to go. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
