Hey VAGUErants… Let me recap the meeting last night, at least as much of it as I remember. :)
There was rough agreement that the active VAGUE membership would welcome more, broader, regular content … so long as it is in the orbit and service of VAGUE's core interests: free, open and open-source technologies and policies. There was widespread agreement that re-branding VAGUE is a non-starter. People love the VAGUE identity. Hell, *I* love the VAGUE identity; my raising of "re-branding" was always more practical than to kill "VAGUE". As such, I just purchased the domain name "vaguevt.org", which will become the new web home of VAGUE. After it is roughed in, we'll undertake a coordinated "SEO 101" campaign to get some google juice for a TBD set of terms and phrases related to vermont, unix, open-source, &c. The goal is to make VAGUE readily findable for people coming to or in the vermont area and want to be involved with free/open/web technologies. In support of that goal, we not only need a nice landing page, but also some form of regularly-updated content (over and above meeting notices/summaries/&c.), ie. a blog, twitter updates, &c. (A very welcome contribution would be a design and visual identity for VAGUE and the site. A logo, a color scheme, &c … while there's certainly a sort of hacker aesthetic to the default media wiki style or unadorned html, there's nothing quite like a unique, simple, consistent visual design.) Jonathan and Basil from CCV/FIREHOSE were present. FIREHOSE draws presentations from the technology-focused subset of the CCV student body, in interest-group style, on a weekly basis. There is a very high degree of overlap between FIREHOSE' and VAGUE's interests, and I imagine we'll have coordinated meetings regularly, moving forward. In fact, if I heard correctly, the October meeting will be about Blender (and its UI overhaul), hosted at CCV. Details forthcoming. :) Between that October meeting and Rubin's offer to host and present a November meeting, we have some momentum and headway to plan a forward-looking calendar of content. One way to do this is to look to existing companies/organizations that do user-group outreach. Also, coordinating with regional users groups and staying on top of conference schedules will be important in trying to identify and engage presenters as they travel near and through our region. This is a very parallelizable task, so I hope some of you can step up to track your own areas of interest. This is exactly the place where an expanded range of content can help fill the meeting schedule, and bring in a wider range of attendees, and help grow the group. I can see a future where VAGUE is a vibrant hub for Vermonters interested in the wide range of free and open technologies. I'm encouraged by our recent activity. And I hope those reading this far can commit a fraction of their time to helping make that future a reality. -- ...jsled http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo $...@${b}
