Your problem is that membership at the moment is difficult and has no benefits.
If you convert it to so that it's convenient, that's a good start. If you then want to create benefits, you're really going to have to introduce some form of scarcity. But in a way that doesn't lead to information restriction entirely. Now that the videos are flowing again, perhaps a delay? Members only for the first 3-6 months, and then open it up after that perhaps? Adam K On 2 April 2010 22:20, James Polley <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
