[UM-LINUX] Evangelism Activities

[John Demme]

Last night was the discussion meeting on future evangelism.  I'd like to thank the very few people who showed up despite the cold.

Here's what we've decided to do:

We'll be forming two committees- an Evangelism committee and an Education Committee.

The Evangelism committee will be in charge of F/OSS and Linux evangelism.  The initial committee will be active for this semester, all summer, and part of the beginning of the fall 2006 semester.  One of their first acts will be deciding on one or two CDs to be distributing.  We want one to be a CD of F/OSS software for Windows and another to be a Linux boot CD.  The obvious choice for the latter is Knoppix, but they'll be evaluating multiple options.  If both Windows stuff and the Linux boot CD are available on the same CD, so be it- easier for us.  I'm told (by Anthony) that Ubunutu makes a CD like this.  It was also suggested that this committee coordinate with the University Helpdesk to distribute F/OSS software- putting links to applications like Open Office on the applicable Helpdesk pages.  It would also be desirable to get OIT to distribute our official CD en masse to all of the incoming freshmen in the fall.  Lastly, I would like this committee to, in the early fall (when people are buying their books and such), arrange to have some one to be at the campus book store whenever they're open to dissuade people from buying products like MS Office and instead offer them our F/OSS CD.  These are just some ideas to start with, and the committee will be responsible for generating more ideas and implementing them.

Next is the Education committee.  They'll be responsible for educating people about F/OSS and Linux.  Although this overlaps a bit with the Evangelism committee's mission, I feel that it's different enough to warrant a separate committee.  One of my biggest pet peeves is when Professors distribute assignments and necessary material in MS doc format, considering that anything slightly past text doesn't work in OO half the time.  One of the things the education committee would be responsible for is educating the entire University faculty/staff (or whoever will listen) on topics such as this, and alternatives to using the doc format (such as HTML or PDF).  A lecture on closed vs open standards might be in order.

I am (as of now) looking for people to head each committee and staff them.  If you're interested, please send me an email telling me such.

We also spent some time generating ideas for meetings.  The "Evangelism Trifecta" that we used last semester (Revolution OS, then Intro to Linux talk the next week, then the Installfest the week after) will fall under the domain of the Evangelism Committee and we'll probably do it again this semester.  We also thought about running a series of "howto" tutorials on various topics- Samba intro, Linux gaming, Xorg, apache, VPN, AFS, iptables, ect...  These meetings would probably fall under the domain of the Education Committee.  Ajay also suggested that we have sort of a "book swap" meeting and/or website section.  He'd like people to post IT/CS books (on to the website) that they have and are willing to loan out.  Also a meeting where various people talk about what books they've read and would suggest (especially if they're on Orielly Safari- free for University people) is a possible meeting.

I have also felt that we haven't had as many presentations at a more abstract and complex level as of late.  I'd like to have more presentations like Rob's security research talk last semester.  For instance, I'd love to have a talk about how the Linux kernel is structured and how it works.  (Is there anyone here qualified to give that talk?)  Linux as an RTOS and an example of a Linux embedded device might also be a cool talk. (Anybody for that one?)

I'll be scheduling the next meeting soon with Peter as he'll be giving a talk on the Campus VPN, and I'll probably add on to his talk with something on OpenVPN, since it's applicable and I just finished doing an OpenVPN roll-out.

That's all for now- don't forget to let me know if you're interested in heading or staffing a committee.  I apologize for using the term "committee" so many times.  I cringed every time I typed it.

~John Demme
UMLUG President